2 October 2025
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Hi everybody. Today is Thursday, October 2nd, 2025, and our friends, Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson, join us today. Welcome, Richard and Michael.
MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s good to be back.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Michael, let’s start with you. You were talking about that urgent meeting that Pete Hegseth had with generals and admirals. And they were talking about many issues, you know, foreign policy, domestic policy.
But the main issue right now is the way that the United States sees the conflicts in Ukraine and in the Middle East. Donald Trump — two times he said that Russia is a paper tiger. Then he came out and said: No, I didn’t mean that. And again, you know, repeating the same sort of rhetoric, that Russia is a paper tiger.
Do you think that we are getting closer to a nuclear war with this sort of attitude, because these countries don’t know what is in the mind of Donald Trump?
MICHAEL HUDSON: I think Trump and the deep state have already decided on nuclear war, because last week we described all the economic reasons why Trump is desperate. He’s desperate to maintain the U.S. and NATO control of the world — and it’s all backfiring. Just in the last day or two, you’ve had Korea saying: We’re not going to even begin to talk about investing in the United States. We can’t afford it. It would mean destruction of the Korean economy. The Japanese said: Alright. We can’t talk about that either. In Europe, even, they’re refusing to go along with it. So, I think that Trump, and the U.S., is saying: How are we going to lock in our control?
Well, you mentioned Ukraine. I think that Europe, and Ukraine — now that they’re bombing Russian refineries and bombing Russian energy generation, just like Russia had been bombing that of Ukraine — they’re going to say: We’re going to keep upping the scale, upping the scale, upping the scale, until finally you won’t have any choice but to resist.
Your guests, and commentators all over the internet, say that the Russian population, and what’s called the right wing — meaning the nationalistic wing — are saying: We’ve got to respond because, at some point, we’re going to have to respond. And we might as well respond earlier, instead of later, after they’ve blown up more of our refineries, and more of our energy production.
So, I think the point is coming very near, especially now that Estonia has seized the Russian oil tanker: this means essentially one escalation after another. And I think they’ve decided: We’re going to keep upping the rate, the destabilization, until there’s war — especially because the army believes, and Trump believes, that if they can tie up Russia in Ukraine, then Russia will be unable to help Iran defend it against, what is a week or two away, Israel’s attack, America’s attack on Iran — which is going to result in just the conflagration of the Near East.
And I made a list, that we talked about earlier of, you know, what America is trying to do to lock in its position: oil and the dollar. But it occurs to me that Trump and his advisors must know that none of these are going to work.
And I think that Trump has his own agenda, and you and I talked about that earlier: his narcissistic drive to make himself famous. I think he’s seen there’s one way in which he can be the most famous person in history: He can be the man who blew up civilization! That’s more important than Jesus, more important than Moses. All he has to do is start an atomic war, and when the dust settles, and evolution starts all over again, the surviving humanity — wherever it is — is going to write a history and say: How did all this begin? How did the world blow up? And they’ll say, somebody named “Donald Trump.”
That’s his dream. A narcissist cannot resist the temptation to be the most important famous person in all of history. And who’s to stop him? Historians are going to marvel at how he’s been able to rule with such an iron hand.
Before we get into the economics, I want to say a lot of people have mentioned Trump’s desire to be a Roman [emperor], like Caligula. Caligula got famous for having such control over the Senate, that he nominated his horse, Incitatus, to be a senator. The word “incitatus” [Latin adjective meaning “swift, at full gallop”] — the English word means: incite, to goad on. Today, you could say that what Trump has done is appoint more than a horse. He’s appointed a whole stable of cabinet ministers, and the people who are running the country, that are the human equivalent of Caligula’s horse.
You’ve seen Hegseth’s speech before the army yesterday, and what that did. You could go right down the line to the beauty-contest winners and Fox news broadcasters, appointed administrators. It’s the embodiment of total “yes-men,” people totally under his control. Nobody can stop him. And he’ll have people — the military advisors, such as Keith Kellogg, Netanyahu’s advisors — you can go right down the line — the neocons. It’s the whole — whatever we’re going to talk about for the rest of this hour is going to be. There’s nothing that the United States can do to reverse the loss, the fact that the U.S. century — let’s say, 1925 to 2025 — is over, and the West’s dominance is over. The reaction of Trump is not only chaos, but ‘just bring the whole thing down.’
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Go ahead, Richard.
RICHARD WOLFF: Okay, well, maybe this time Michael and I can disagree a little bit, and see how that evolves as a program. I understand what Michael is saying. Is that a possible place where we are? Is that a possible direction that we could take? Absolutely. I’m not going to argue that it isn’t.
But I am going to argue that when societies find themselves in the kind of dead-end that I think we are now in, and pretty much the same reasoning gets me to that, that Michael has, and that we’ve discussed on this program for quite a while now. Another trajectory out of it, besides the one that Michael just outlined, is a recognition that the game is over and that what has to happen now is a sane negotiation for the least difficult accommodation of what is happening, and is going to happen, no matter what we do. Precisely because the alternative is what Michael just laid out. And that alternative is so horrible, and so self-destructive, that we’ll avoid it.
And I take a certain comfort from knowing that whatever was in the mind of Adolf Hitler, or Benito Mussolini or Francesco Franco, that didn’t come to pass either: those projects collapsed. And they mostly collapsed because they overreached what they thought they could achieve and, thereby, produced the backlash that eventually overwhelmed them, and erased them, at least for a while, from history.
Okay, so let me spell out very briefly what I think. The contradictions of Mr. Trump’s economic policy are now reaching a level of absurdity — not that they weren’t there already before, but they are now coming to the foreground of people’s awareness. Even the media that support Trump are reporting, what?
Well, let’s see. The fundamental rationale economically of Mr. Trump’s every economic policy has been the idea that he’s going to make America great again by bringing back jobs. And he’s made it quite clear that he’s going, you know — the tariff, right? Because you have to pay a fee to access selling into the U.S. market. We hope to see companies coming back inside the United States because that will be a way for them to escape the tariff. They won’t have to pay a tariff. If they sell in Chicago what they make in New Jersey, there’s no tariff. If they sell in Chicago what they make in China, there is a tariff. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So we’re going to make America great again by reindustrialization. They even have a word they like, those people, “reshoring:” bringing back to our shore what was taken to the other shore. Okay.
Now let’s take a look at that, how that’s working. Here we go. Number one: Is there a flood of jobs coming back? Absolutely not. There’s no such statistic. Are there some companies coming back? Yes, of course, but most of them have to do with high-tech. They’re going to California, Silicon Valley, and the one thing they don’t have is a lot of jobs because they are capital intensive: they’re full of computers, they’re full of all of that material that they need. And the number of people are highly educated, highly trained, and few in number. That’s not a solution to the unemployment problem. And how do we know that? Because if you look at the last year, all of the original numbers of jobs have been adjusted, in subsequent months, downward, culminating in the latest numbers, which indicate no growth at all — in fact, a decline of 32,000 jobs in the latest reporting period. So, no jobs.
Okay. Why? Well, here come the contradictions. Because almost everything else Mr. Trump is doing is an encouragement for CEOs around the world not to come here. I mean, let’s go. The government is shut down. Hello? That’s a clue. Don’t go there. If you’re a business person, you don’t locate, you don’t spend millions of dollars moving a factory or an office, lose a year in the whole adjustment, in order to go to a place where the two major parties can’t keep the government functioning. Their divisions and their hostilities are so deep.
As if that weren’t enough. The military are discussing invading their own country. The vice-president looks forward to all the major cities being occupied. Well, why would you move to a country contemplating that? That’s eight hundred ways you could make a big, big mistake. You’re not going to do that. You’re not going to be the vice-president in charge of location who will go down in history as having been moronic enough, in the face of what I just said, to move into the United States.
But I’m not done. According to the financial press, we’re on the precipice of a stagflationary period: a mixture of low-level economics, which the unemployment numbers I just mentioned reinforce, and an untamed inflation. The current inflation rate is 3%. If we’re in a great struggle with China — let me let everyone know, the official inflation rate in China now is minus 0.4%. They don’t have any inflation. They have a deflation. The United States has an inflation of 3% — that alone will enable the Chinese to outcompete the United States, each year that it continues. Forget tariffs, forget even exchange rates. Before you even look at those, look at the disparity.
By the way, this is not new. The Chinese have not — in case you’re not familiar with the statistics — it’s not recent, that they’ve had no inflation. They’ve kept inflation under control in a remarkable way. That’s why you haven’t heard about inflation in China — because it’s not a bad number that the media can talk about. Keep that in mind when you read that Russia is on its knees, its economy —
If you cherry-pick statistics in any country, including the United States — if I want to make a case, the United States is in good shape, I can pick six statistics that make that happen. If I want to show the United States is in trouble, I can pick six different statistics and make that case. Any analyst who has a brain knows that the trick of analysis is not the cherry-picking, which an infant can do, it’s the balancing: How do you reach a judgment that takes into account the different statistics, some of which are always pointing up, and others of which are pointing down? Really, it’s like a doctor measuring your body, and all of its functions as well.
Alright, the Chinese are — what? They’re not just winning the economic race. It isn’t enough anymore to simply say, look at the GDP. China and the BRICS now are a much larger economic unit than the United States and the G7. And that’s a real issue.
But we’re now beginning to see the chickens coming home: We’re seeing the effects, the consequences. Over the last twenty years, twenty-five years, the Chinese have made a series of very important investments in — Venezuela. They are not in a position, neither in Venezuela, nor in any of the other countries that they have invested, to permit the United States to willy-nilly overthrow a government in order then to — what? Wipe out the Chinese? No, no, that isn’t going to happen anymore. That’s what used to happen in the old colonial world, yes. But not now.
So when the United States, in violation of everything I understand to be the law, wantonly kills, I don’t know, twenty-five people — by now — in several boats on the outskirts of Venezuela — no arrest, no investigation, no trial, no jury, no judge, no appeal, murder on the spot, with statements about Venezuela being punished for its drug activities. Everyone who knows anything about the drug trade knows that the bulk of the drug trade happens on the Pacific Ocean side of the Western Hemisphere, not on the Atlantic side. What comes from the Atlantic through the Caribbean is small potatoes. If you’re interested in inhibiting drugs, Venezuela isn’t your target.
And so, the Chinese — here we go now — the Chinese Navy is big time in Venezuela. What does that mean? It means exactly what you think it means. You’re not going to do there. You can bravado all you want. You can assemble your generals in a sweaty room. Doesn’t change. Is the United States — if Michael is right —is it about to work with Israel to attack Iran — and Venezuela — while the Gaza thing is unresolved? And the Ukraine war is being won by Russia? Really? You know what that would be? Overreach. It would be exactly what brought to an end Hitler, Mussolini, and Francisco Franco.
And I bet you, despite their clownishness, among Mr. Trump’s advisors, there are those who may tell him that as well. And if not, well, we can do it.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Go ahead, Michael.
MICHAEL HUDSON: I think that, to Trump, the drive for U.S. unipolar control can’t be over in his mind. He can’t acknowledge it because that would mean he’s a loser. And that is what makes him so desperate. He’s desperately lashing out, in a strategy that, both Richard and I have described in the last few weeks, can’t work, for reasons that we’ve described. Richard used the word overreach. His tariffs were an overreach. His military expansion on a multifront war is overreach. Richard started by saying he hopes that this is going to frame Trump’s creating of a more realistic resolution of how America can accept its lost place in the world, now that the American century is over, and how he can, realistically, act in a way that is not going to self-destructively just drive other countries further away and consolidate America’s self-isolation economically.
Well, we discussed before how Trump can’t reshore industry because his tariffs have prevented that. The tariffs have made America too high-cost — on steel and aluminum, on so many things that America has been importing. So, what is Trump going to do to try to compensate for the fact that other countries have already, in the last few days, rejected the idea of relocating their industry in the United States? They can’t afford it. And Trump is insisting that the United States gets to keep the profits on this industry. It means any foreign investment in the U.S. industry is in danger of being lost.
So, what’s the problem? Well, I’ve emphasized before: Oil and the U.S. dollar are the key to the U.S. hegemony. And oil is, I think, absolutely key. Trump’s attack on Venezuela is to grab its oil and — not only grab its oil to make money for the American companies that would take over, but to be able to prevent other countries from importing oil from Venezuela, or refining Venezuelan oil to sell.
Same thing with Argentina. Why did Trump make the $20 billion loan to Argentina (that there is zero chance of Argentina being able to repay, for reasons that I’ll get into)? America wants two things in Argentina. Number one: control of its still state-owned oil industry — same thing as Venezuela — take over its oil industry; and to make a military base in Tierra del Fuego, the south tip of South America, that controls not only the route around South America from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back, but control over Antarctica.
And the [Javier] Milei government yesterday gave America permission to start the military bases there, bypassing all congressional approval in Argentina, and that’s created a crisis.
So, you can see what’s happened. Yesterday, the Financial Times had a very clear article on the fact that, how will America ever get this $20 billion back? The only way that it can do it is if the IMF makes yet another loan to Argentina — a losing loan, because the $20 billion is going to be spent right away by Milei to support the Argentine peso, so that the wealthiest classes in Argentina can move their money out of Argentine pesos into the dollar, or gold, or something else, without the current price ratio, not a devaluation price that they’d have to get less dollars or less gold for.
So this money is going to be spent right away. And when Milei loses the elections in the next week or two, then Argentina is going to have this $20 billion additional debt. I think Trump knows that the debt can’t be repaid. And like many creditors throughout history, he doesn’t want the debt to be repaid. He said: You don’t have the money to repay? Give us your oil industry. Give us your land in the south. Give us that. Finance is, in Trump’s idea, still a hope for the new colonialism.
You’re also having Trump break with the whole rest of the world on global warming. What is he trying to do? Well, much as he’s trying to prevent other countries from meeting their energy needs from oil that the U.S. doesn’t control, he’s trying to prevent other countries from meeting their energy needs by solar power, not to mention wind power, or atomic power. He’s insisting that other countries rely entirely on oil.
And yesterday, Trump increased subsidies for, and the sell-off of, huge coal lands, saying not only is oil the fuel of America’s future, but coal is the fuel of America’s future. This increases the greatest threat to all the rest of the world’s economy, in the form of global warming that, along with the military threat, is an existential threat. And other countries, I think, have to realize that, you know, why is Trump refusing to acknowledge global warming? It’s because global warming is a threat to America’s ability to turn off their energy, turn off their electricity, to deny them power, just for the same reason that it blew up Russia’s North Sea pipeline to Europe.
So, all this comes down to the support for the dollar. And that’s why Trump has also announced in the last week or so, he wants to increase cryptocurrency, especially the stablecoin, that all of the stablecoin proceeds — crypto, stablecoin — are going to be invested in U.S. Treasury securities. So, this is somehow going to — he believes that this fad for stablecoins is going to — be able to finance the Treasury’s deficit caused by his tax cuts for the wealthy classes — his donor class — and for the shrinking economy, that’s continuing to shrink.
So, all of these policies that Trump is trying to do, to say, yes, we can live with the existing world situation, and we can still maintain our unipolar control by reshoring our industry, by controlling oil, controlling agricultural exports, the food supply — well, that hasn’t worked, as you see with the soybean market. All of the ideas of how to somehow hold on to America’s ability to make other countries pay tribute to the United States — by investing here and reshoring their own industry out of their countries into the United States; by depending on U.S. liquefied natural gas, instead of oil; by not obtaining oil from Venezuela, Argentina, Russia, or Iran — all of these are absolutely destined to fail.
And the only way that I can see him ultimately responding is by war, to say that, if I can’t have it my way — it’s my way, or no way. That’s my worry of the mindset of Trump, and the neocons behind him.
RICHARD WOLFF: Again, I understand the direction Michael is pointing to. I understand the logic. It’s a compelling logic. It’s clear. Let me only comment by talking about an alternative direction these same developments might lead to. And here’s what I focus on. I’m noticing, and I’m sure you guys have too, but I’m noticing something very interesting happening pretty much at the same time in the United States as in Central and Western Europe. And here’s what I notice: an emphasis on cutting back government social programs, a recognition that whatever the 20th century required in the way of providing education, and medical care, and old-age pensions, and social infrastructure — all of that — is a luxury we can — “We,” the royal “We” — can no longer afford. Why? Well, the bullshit is, ‘we’re threatened by Russia.’ That’s one part of the story. Or, now, ‘we’re threatened by China.’ Okay, that’s very useful. We are in danger. And so this is something endangering all of us, and therefore we must all of us sacrifice. And you know that when the people who run these societies talk about all of us sacrificing, they always exempt — from the “all of us” — the rich and the powerful, who will not be hurt.
Well, if you’re going to rearm, if you’re going to spend a fortune — and let’s remember, if you look at the American budget, everything is being cut back, except the military and the new army called ICE. Alright. Now let’s take a look at Europe. Same thing. The leaders — [Emmanuel] Macron, [Keir] Starmer, [Friedrich] Merz — are all telling their people — Mr. Merz — remarkable, if you read his speeches — he simply says: We are in danger. The Russians are threatening. We are going to build up our military, and other things will no longer be available. So, no mystery, for Mr. Merz — by the way, his popularity is dropping like a stone, and I’m going to come back to that. Mr. Starmer and Mr. Macron, their popularity isn’t dropping like a stone because it’s already at the bottom of the barrel, because of what they’ve said. And they haven’t hardly gotten going.
So, last piece of evidence. You’ll notice bizarre recognition by these leaders — given what their plan is — that there’s going to be popular resistance. They see it in their polling numbers, which are awful. They see it in the collapse of the political middle in their countries, as left-wing and right-wing extremes become relatively stronger. And then we have Mr. Starmer, who’s literally circling the bowl — and you know which bowl I speak of — in his political career, which has been a descent from unbelievable heights, the last election, to a spectacular crash. You know what his new idea is? He wants to run on identification cards for all British citizens, so that the government can keep better track of — in the middle of this turmoil, he’s going to spend a fortune of money to be able to control, and supervise, and surveil his own people. The French already have had, for many years, a carte d’identité [ID card], which functions that way in France. And Germany is, you know, busily banning the extreme political right as a preface to trying to pull the same stunt, if the left gets going in Germany the way it already has in France — if the Germans copy the French in the unification of their left parties and in their street actions.
So, what are we seeing? We’re seeing this system aware of the very conversations in their language, parallel to what we’re doing here, getting ready to have the fight, getting ready to squash what is the real danger. Because they don’t want that war that Michael is talking about. They understand what it might cost them. So, they would hope that maybe they can finesse this crisis moment in the way that a capitalist society would be expected to try to do it — by squashing its own working class, by taking away enough wealth that they can accommodate the rising Chinese. What option do they have, other than nuclear war? They could accommodate the Chinese because they could save their own privilege and their own wealth, by ripping off their own people. Knowing them, knowing the courage they don’t have, I think there’s a good bet that that’s what they’re going to try to do.
And then the issue is — which is always the issue, right? Will the working class of this country, and of Europe, permit this to be done? Will they permit their standard of living to be eroded, as is happening here? Will they admit the army of their own country — that their taxes pay for — be used to occupy the cities that provide most of the taxes to pay for it?
Or will the absurdity of this enable a different politics?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Richard, what you’re describing, by the U.S and Europe — the class war — it’s really taking the shape of a fight against civilization, at least the fight against where all of us have defined the trajectory that we thought civilization was moving in: rising productivity that would be more widely spread to uplift living standards and, in the process, productivity in overall growth. And all of that is being sacrificed with the precise class war that you’ve just mentioned.
When this morning’s newspapers reported where Trump’s budget cuts were, the largest budget cuts were going to be in education, followed by medical care. Well, these are the two things that civilization was supposed to provide, by the state — by a state that was created by taking it out of the hands of a hereditary landlord and aristocracy, and putting it in the hands of an economy — presumably democratic, or, at least, administered socialist state — that would increase education, productivity, health care, and have rising growth.
All of that is being countered by Starmer — with his new Inquisition, is what you’ve described — Merz and Macron. And the result is that, I think, you’re having two things that are going together right now. And that’s very suggestive, what you’ve said. Tomorrow, President Putin of Russia is going to address the Valdai Club, and that’s where he outlines: What is Russia going to do with all of this confrontation that’s taking place?
Well, at last year’s meeting, he called NATO a blatant anachronism. Well, that’s true. But the United States, at least under Trump and the neocons, are trying to say, well, it may be an anachronism, but we’re going to restore the past to make the anachronism great again, perpetual, permanent, never-ending. And so this has created two crises.
We’ve been talking so far about the geopolitical isolation of the West — the United States and Europe — from the rest of the world that is not engaging in this militarist, financialized, replacing industrial socialism and industrial capitalism with finance capitalism. It’s breaking away from colonialism, but also from the residue of colonialism: foreign debt, and client oligarchies that the Western rent-extraction governments have installed.
But all of this is a crisis of finance capitalism, and capitalism itself is a distortion of what people thought would be industrial capitalism evolving into socialism, and just what you described as what we’re all for — so that America and Europe could be just as successful as China, for instance. And you have a rentier economy here that is using a kind of Ponzi financial scheme, led by the Federal Reserve: Let’s just give banks enough money to give the population an ability to buy real estate on credit, buy stocks and bonds and credit. We’re going to continue to enrich the stockholders, the bondholders — and this is the 10% of the population — against the rest of the population, and then somehow we’ll be able to move all our money somewhere.
Well, this is part of the libertarian attack on government, and whatever authority government loses under this attack [winds up in the control of Wall Street] — not only has Trump dismantled social spending, he’s dismantled the departments of the government that are regulating and protecting consumers, abolishing the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency. All of the checks and balances that were put in place to prevent a predatory corporate industry from impoverishing society are being dismantled.
And so this breakaway from the Western way of doing things is not only a breakaway from this neoliberal financialization and rentier capitalism, it also has to involve a breakaway from the class war that’s the residue of an anti-labor oligarchy — in Argentina, for instance, and the places that we’re describing throughout the world, just as the United States. This is why it’s a civilizational crisis that we’re going through right now. Not only a military crisis — will there be a world war? Not only an environmental crisis of global warming — but, really, what is going to be the structure of government? Is it going to rule for the 1%, or for the economy as a whole? The 1% wants to get rich by indebting and impoverishing the economy with austerity — paid to itself. That’s the U.S. and European alternative to what used to be the definition of civilization. And the question is: Will the BRICS countries be able to recognize this class war, class relationship aspect to the international break that’s occurring?
RICHARD WOLFF: Well, again, I think the contradiction is becoming very painful for libertarians — not that I care. In other words, what you’re watching is a consolidation of government power used in the civil society on a scale that must make a good number of them quit. I mean, are you kidding? You champion Mr. Trump, and he is consolidating a destructive government power, the likes of which you imagined, as some of them are saying, only existed in your caricature of socialism.
I mean, let’s be really clear. In the recent speech Mr. Trump gave to the U.N., I believe it was there, or if not to some other audience, he equated three things as being the three goals he has: to defeat those that are anti-American, anti-capitalist, and anti-Christian. Those are the enemies within, that he then asked the military to go deal with. Okay. For a libertarian, that’s not an appropriate thing for a government to be doing — any of those things — because that requires — if you mean it — it requires things like sending troops into cities, not typically a big item on libertarian agendas. I never saw it there. You’d have to attribute it to them as either unconscious, or that they are all, you know, congenital liars.
So, it turns out that for Mr. Trump to try to do what we’re talking about here, he has to violate the libertarian commitments. Okay, that is called an internal contradiction to what he’s trying to do. Look: You can use the government that way, but you’re going to lose a lot of libertarians. Now, that may not matter, but there’s other people you’re going to lose. To attack the cities that they keep mentioning, is to attack Democrats, and that wasn’t the libertarian idea either — that the way you do the Republican versus Democrat is you send troops, if you have the presidency, into the cities controlled by the other party — a precedent which, in the event of a Democratic president, is going to come home to roost in very painful ways in this society.
I don’t think they have a clue in the world. When Mr. Trump says, I won’t let [Zohran] Mamdani run New York City, in the event that Mamdani wins, he [Trump] is, in his usual way — with bluster — recognizing half of the contradiction: Mamdani’s victory depends on Mr. Trump. It is an effect of Mr. Trump.
I don’t want to take away in any way from the really brilliant campaign that Mamdani has run, to his credit — very smart, very careful, very effective — but I’m sure, if he were sitting here, he would admit — and whether he does or not, I’m going to assert — that his campaign is running against Trump, as I would advise him to do.
I live here in New York City. I can assure you, the City of New York is overwhelmingly hostile to Mr. Trump. And one of the reasons Eric Adams had to drop out — the sitting mayor comes in fourth in every poll, out of four — he doesn’t do as well as the Republican Mr. [Curtis] Sliwa, and he has the same chance of becoming mayor that Michael and I do — that is to say, none. So what do we have? We have Mr. [Andrew] Cuomo as the Trump stand-in. And things are going so badly that Cuomo, who wanted to run against Trump, is now half-running with him because it’s so hopeless for him.
Look: He [Trump] could try, in the first few months. It’s all inherited. Now? That’s over. The horrible employment number? That’s Mr. Trump. Your great program to bring jobs back is an enormous failure. Of course, he’ll blame everything he can think of on somebody else. But we have the easy game. It’s his fault. Mamdani is his fault. The growing socialist presence in many cities across the country? That’s his fault. The extreme right wing? That’s his fault. He’s enabling all of that. He is producing civil conflict, which may explode, and if it does, I am very confident that an enormous number of voters in the United States — if it comes to that in the next six months — will blame him. And if he doesn’t understand that? Oh boy, is he going to be in trouble!
MICHAEL HUDSON: Richard, my definition, my understanding, of libertarianism is the diametric opposite of yours.
Libertarianism was created as a centralized police state, basically, a centralized power. It began with the Austrian School of individualism, as an attack on classical economics, and essentially on socialism. and the fights going on — armed fights — in Vienna. Libertarianism wants to get rid of government. It has created a narrative of economic history, of how all of economic civilization could have existed without any role for government, regulatory agencies, without any ability of the government to interfere with private enterprise.
And if you dismantle the power of government, who is going to be doing the planning and resource allocation of the economy? Wall Street. Libertarianism has always been a defense of Wall Street, not the government. Control of wealth and the rich, not government. Absolute blockage of any attempts by government to interfere with the market, by taxing the rich more, interfering by providing free medical care and education and not leaving this to the free market to make people go into a lifetime of debt to get an education or medical care.
Libertarianism is, in a word, fascism. From the very outset, that was what it is, and that requires a police state to enforce. Libertarianism is the doctrine of the police state to free the market from the socialists. And I’m glad you mentioned Mamdani in New York. Yesterday again (maybe the day before), Trump says, now that there’s a government shutdown that occurred yesterday to begin with, he said: We’re going to begin firing government employees, and I’m going to concentrate on states that have voted Democratic. We’re going to fire Democratic state employees in New York, Massachusetts, California, Illinois. He’s singled out where he’s going to dismantle government.
Well, you can imagine what this is going to do. This is going to increase poverty, crime, distress, foreclosures, ICE. So that’s why he’s moving, not only ICE, but as you were pointing out, the army into these cities — an army, not to engage in police work to prevent crime, but an army to fight it in the ways that armies do.
And the first point you made was mentioning Christianity. And I’m glad you mentioned it because we haven’t been discussing it before, but it’s very important to President Putin. For President Putin, and for much of the world, their idea of Christianity is what’s left of the original Christianity: Eastern Orthodoxy, the Greek and Russian Orthodox Church. Putin and the Russian speakers continually talk about the attack by Roman Catholicism, starting in the 11th century, to create the Crusades to destroy Byzantium — the Byzantine Empire — to destroy the Eastern Orthodox Church; to mount the Crusades, to fight and weaken and loot Constantinople, and prevent it from having the resources to defend itself against the Turkish invasions that have followed.
All of this history of the Crusades, and the intolerance of the Roman Catholic religion in comparison to the tolerance of Eastern Orthodox religion at the time, all of this is a living history to Russia, and the rest. And it’s that the Crusades and the fight of the Western Christian Church to destroy what’s left of the original Christianity and the Orthodox Church is the dress rehearsal for all of the current, and the narrative context for all of the fight between the Western decadence — to Putin — and the survival of a more, I won’t say socialist society, but his idea of a Christian society of mutual aid, of support, of tolerance. You could call it a unipolar domestic society as well as a unipolar international society.
All of that has a religious foundation in Russia — very similar to China’s foundation in socialism and, before that, in Confucianism. We’re really dealing with, not only a predatory economic mentality of the West — these are the global majority — but a religious and ethical and social mentality that’s at stake here. And America is not going to talk about the Crusades, and intolerance, and the characteristics of this cultural shift.
But, believe me, in Russia and China, that’s what they’re talking about.
RICHARD WOLFF: I want to — if I could, if there’s time, Nima — say a few words about the libertarianism. Think of it this way, with the irony: The libertarians have been so frustrated for most of the last century, particularly with the rise of Keynesian economics, when they had to confront a social movement — largely successful — that said that if you leave capitalism to the private enterprise, you get the Great Depression. And so you need government intervention. The government needs to have a fiscal policy. The government needs to have a monetary policy. It has to make up for the demand that is insufficient in the private economy by spending deficits. If it needs to, it has to manipulate the monetary system — quantity of money, interest rate, and so on — in order to manage a capitalism, which, if you don’t manage it, will destroy itself.
The great fear of the Great Depression is that the working class rises up, and says: We’ve had it with this system. It’s too unstable. The crises are increasing. Screw it! Keynes saves the system, but at the price of the government having a major role. The libertarians are horrified. They represent that part of capitalism that hated the government, remembering the absolute monarchies of feudalism, out of which capitalism came, and against which it coined the phrase, ‘leave us alone,’ i.e. Laissez-faire: let us do on our own.
So, they have this deep commitment to not having a government. How ironic, how painful, that they have to bring the government in to save their system! So they then indulge a fantasy. That’s what libertarianism means to me: the fantasy that they ever could, or ever would, be able to function without the government. And so they become — in the bad sense of the term — religious: They indulge a fantasy utopianism about no government. And then, here, now they’re confronted, again, with the same frustration, because the only way to move towards no government is to have a massive government power move against all of the accumulated institutions. And then, of course, the poor libertarian will notice that that power of the government grows, and grows, and grows. They’re having the same spectacle unleashed by Mr. Trump that they used to hate in Franklin Roosevelt.
There is no escape, you poor, poor, misled folks. The government is part of a society, unless, of course, you take the Marxist approach and see the government as the expression of a class-divided society. If you think like that, then you might have the idea: If we can develop an economy without opposing classes, we remove the need for a government as a mediator. Aha! Oh, but for people who want to keep away from Marxism, don’t think for one minute about what I just said: Stay pure, stay clean, avoid that Marxist tradition, and just go to church on Sunday.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Richard, of course, you’re right, that libertarianism, and much Christianity, is a fantasy. I prefer to think of it as a cover story. It’s always been a cover story saying: We’re ethical, we’re for freedom, we’re for prosperity. But what are they really for?
The church, once it was romanized in the Roman Empire, and taken out of the hands of the early Christians, it was always, religion was a tool for — the opium of the people, you could say. It’s a fantasy, it’s opium of the people. It’s to claim to be progressive, and caring about people, and protecting the poor. It hates the poor! Rather, it loves the rich. It doesn’t love the poor. It loves the rich, and that includes, loving them includes, sharing their antagonism, antipathy towards the poor, and their class hatred of labor, in fact.
So, that’s really the problem. Christianity and libertarianism go together. I think it’s hypocritical. It’s a fantasy by most of the followers. It’s designed to be a fantasy by a small core at the top — the bishops (in Christianity), the cardinals, the leadership. And the followers: the sheep at the bottom. The shepherd and the sheep.
That’s not the socialist idea of the kind of reform that we’re talking about. So, I’m more politically critical and suspicious of just how are we going to enlighten these would-be Christians, these would-be libertarians? How do we say: If you want your ideals — they’re just what you’ve been talking about, Richard.
RICHARD WOLFF: Let me just end by reminding everyone of [Karl] Marx’s teacher [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel. Marx writes, yes, religion is the opiate of the masses. But he also writes, right there, it’s also a haven in a heartless world. He understood why people embrace religion, what it is they’re searching for, and the need — for those of us who are critics — never to forget the real function it serves, the real needs it responds to. Even if we don’t like how that response works, we better understand what it is the response to, so that we understand our task as, partly, to create the alternative response — which is in a sense, if you allow me, what these conversations every week are about.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah, exactly. Thank you so much, Richard and Michael. Great pleasure, as always.
RICHARD WOLFF: Take care. Thank you.
NIMA ALKHORSHID: Take care. See you. Bye-bye.
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