By “class system” we mean the basic workplace organizations—the human relationships or “social relations”—that
accomplish the production and distribution of goods and services. Some examples include the master/slave, communal
village, and lord/serf organizations. Another example, the distinctive capitalist class system, entails the
employer/employee organization. In the United States and in much of the world, it is now the dominant class system.
Employers—a tiny minority of the population—direct and control the enterprises and employees that produce and distribute
goods and services. Employers buy the labor power of employees—the population’s vast majority—and set it to work in
their enterprises. Each enterprise’s output belongs to its employer who decides whether to sell it, sets the price, and
receives and distributes the resulting revenue.
In the United States, the employee class is badly split ideologically and politically. Most employees have probably
stayed connected—with declining enthusiasm or commitment—to the Democratic Party. A sizable and growing minority within
the class has some hope in Trump. Many have lost interest and participated less in electoral politics. Perhaps the most
splintered are various “progressive” or “left” employees: some in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, some in
various socialist, Green, independent, and related small parties, and some even drawn hesitatingly to Trump.
Left-leaning employees were perhaps more likely to join and activate social movements (ecological, anti-racist,
anti-sexist, and anti-war) rather than electoral campaigns.
The U.S. employee class broadly feels victimized by the last half-century’s neoliberal globalization. Waves of
manufacturing (and also service) job exports, coupled with waves of automation (computers, robots, and now artificial
intelligence), have mostly brought that class bad news. Loss of jobs, income, and job security, diminished future work
prospects, and reduced social standing are chief among them. In contrast, the extraordinary profits that drove
employers’ export and technology decisions accrued to them. Resulting redistributions of wealth and income likewise
favored employers. Employees increasingly watched and felt a parallel social redistribution of political power and
cultural riches moving beyond their reach.
Employees’ class feelings were well grounded in U.S. history. The post-1945 development of U.S. capitalism smashed the
extraordinary employee class unity that had been formed during the Great Depression of the 1930s. After the 1929
economic crash and the 1932 election, a reform-minded “New Deal” coalition of labor union leaders and strong socialist
and communist parties gathered supportively around the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration that governed until 1945.
That coalition won huge, historically unprecedented gains for the employee class including Social Security, unemployment
compensation, the first federal minimum wage, and a large public jobs program. It built an immense following for the
Democratic Party in the employee class.
As World War II ended in 1945, every other major capitalist economy (the UK, Germany, Japan, France, and Russia) was
badly damaged. In sharp contrast, the war had strengthened U.S. capitalism. It reconstructed global capitalism and
centered it around U.S. exports, capital investments, and the dollar as world currency. A new, distinctly American
empire emerged, stressing informal imperialism, or “neo-colonialism,” against the formal, older imperialisms of Europe
and Japan. The United States secured its new empire with an unprecedented global military program and presence. Private
investment plus government spending on both the military and popular public services marked a transition from the
Depression and war (with its rationing of consumer goods) to a dramatically different relative prosperity from the later
1940s to the 1970s.
Cold War ideology clothed post-1945 policies at home and abroad. Thus the government’s mission globally was to spread
democracy and defeat godless socialism. That mission justified both increasingly heavy military spending and
McCarthyism’s effective destruction of socialist, communist, and labor organizations. The Cold War atmosphere
facilitated undoing and then reversing the Great Depression’s leftward surge of U.S. politics. Purging the left within
unions plus the relentless demonization of left parties and social movements as foreign-based communist projects split
the New Deal coalition. It separated left organizations from social movements and both of them from the employee class
as a whole.
Despite many employees staying loyal to the Democratic Party (even as they disconnected from the persecuted left
components of the New Deal), the Cold War pushed all U.S. politics rightward. The Republican Party cashed in by being
aggressively pro-Cold War and raising funds from employers determined to undo the New Deal. The Democratic Party
leadership reduced its former reliance on weakening unions and the demoralized, deactivated remnants of the New Deal
coalition. Instead that leadership sought funds from the same corporate rich that the Republicans tapped. The
predictable results included the failure of the Democratic Party to reverse the rightward shift of U.S. politics. The
Dems likewise abandoned most efforts to build on the achievements of the New Deal or move further toward social
democracy. They increasingly failed even to protect what the New Deal had achieved. These developments deepened the
alienation of many workers from the Democratic Party or political engagement altogether. A vicious downward cycle, with
occasional temporary upsurge moments, took over “progressive” politics.
That vicious cycle entrapped especially older, white males. Among employees, they had gained the most from the 1945-1975
prosperity. However, after the 1970s, employers’ profit-driven automation and their decisions to relocate production
abroad seriously undermined their employees’ jobs and incomes, especially in manufacturing. This part of the employee
class eventually turned against “the system”—against the prevailing economic tide. They mourned a disappearing
prosperity. At first, they turned right politically. The Cold War had isolated and undermined the left-wing institutions
and culture that might otherwise have attracted anti-system employees. Left-leaning mobilizations against the system as a whole were rare (unlike more single-issue mobilizations around issues like gender, race, and ecology). Neither unions nor
other organizations had the social support needed to organize them. Or they simply feared to try. Even more recently the
rising labor and union militancy has so far only secondarily and marginally raised themes of systematic anti-capitalism.
Republican politicians and media personalities seized the opportunity to transform the disappearing post-1970s
prosperity into an idealized American past. They carefully avoided blaming that disappearance on profit-driven
capitalism. They blamed Democrats and “liberals” whose social welfare programs cost too much. Excessive taxes were
wasted, they insisted, on ineffective social programs for “others” (the non-white and non-male). If only those others
worked as hard and as productively as white males did, Republicans repeated, they would have enjoyed the same prosperity
instead of seeking a “free ride from the government.” Portions of the employee class persuaded by such reasoning
switched from Democrat to Republican and then often responded to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) mantra. Their
switch stimulated Republican politicians to imagine a possible new mass base much broader than their existing mix of
religious fundamentalists, gun lovers, and white supremacists. Leading Republicans glimpsed political possibilities
unavailable since the Great Depression of the 1930s had turned U.S. politics leftward toward social democracy.
Emerging from within or around the Republican Party, the new 21st-century far Right revived classic U.S. isolationist
patriotism around America First slogans. They combined that with a loosely libertarian blaming of all social ills on the
inherent evil of government. By carefully directing neither criticism nor blame toward the capitalist economic system,
Republicans secured the usual support (financial, political, journalistic) from the employer class. That included
employers who had never prospered much from the neoliberal globalization turn, those who saw bigger, better
opportunities from an economic nationalist/protectionist turn, and all those long focused on the employer-driven project
of undoing the New Deal politically, culturally, and economically. These various elements increasingly gathered around
Trump.
They opposed immigration, often via hysterical statements and mobilizations against “invasions” fantasized as
threatening America. They defined government spending on immigrants (using native and “hard-working” Americans’ taxes)
as wasted on unmeritorious “others.” Trump championed their views and reinforced parallel scapegoating of Black and
Brown citizens and women as unworthy beneficiaries of government supports exchanged for their voting Democratic. Some
Republicans increasingly embraced conspiracy theories (QAnon and others) to explain diverse plots aimed at dethroning
white Christianity from dominating American society. MAGA and America First are slogans that articulate resentment,
bitterness, and protest at perceived victimization. Repurposing Cold War imagery, Trumpers synonymously targeted
liberals, Democrats, Marxists, socialists, labor unions, and others seen as close allies plotting to “replace” white
Christians. Trump referred to them publicly as “vermin” that he would defeat/destroy once he became President again.
The larger part of the U.S. employee class has not (yet) been won over by the Republicans. It has stayed, so far, with
the Democrats. Yet aggravated social divisiveness has settled everywhere into U.S. culture and politics. It frightens
many who stay within the Democratic Party, seeing it as the lesser evil despite its “centrist” leaders and their
corporate donors. The latter include especially the financial and hi-tech megacorporations that profitably led the
post-1975 neoliberal globalization period. The centrist leadership studiously avoided offending its corporate patrons
while using a modified Keynesian fiscal policy to achieve two objectives. The first was support for government programs
that helped solidify an electoral base increasingly among women, and Black and brown citizens. The second was support
for aggressively projecting U.S. military and political power around the world.
The U.S. empire protected by that policy proved especially profitable for the financial and hi-tech circles of the
United States’ biggest businesses. At the same time, another part of the U.S. employee class also began to turn against
the system, but it found the new Right unacceptable and “centrism” only slightly less so. The Democratic party has so
far retained most of these people although many have increasingly moved toward “progressive” champions such as Bernie
Sanders, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and Cori Bush. Cornel West and Jill Stein carry similar banners into this year’s
election but they insist on doing that from outside the Democratic Party.
Hostility has intensified between the two major parties as their opposition has become more extreme. This keeps
happening because neither found nor implemented any solutions to the deepening problems besetting the United States.
Ever more extreme wealth and income inequalities undermine what remains of a sense of community binding Americans.
Politics ever more controlled by the employer class and especially the super-rich produce widespread debilitating anger,
resignation, and rage. The relatively shrinking power of the United States abroad drives home a sense of impending doom.
The rise of the first real economic superpower competitor (China) raises the specter of the U.S. global unipolar moment
being replaced, and soon.
Each major party blames the other for everything going wrong. Both also respond to the declining empire by moving
rightward toward alternative versions of economic nationalism—“America First”—in place of the cheerleading for
neoliberal globalization that both parties indulged in before. Republicans carefully refuse to blame capitalism or
capitalists for anything. Instead, they blame bad government, the Democrats, the liberals, and China. Democrats likewise
carefully refuse to blame capitalism or capitalists for anything (except the “progressives,” who do that moderately).
Democrats mostly blame Republicans who have “gone crazy” and “threaten democracy.” They erect new versions of their old
demons. Russia and Putin stand in for the USSR and Stalin as chief awful foreigners with Chinese “communists” a close
second. Trying to hold on to the political middle, the Democrats denounce Republicans and especially the Trump/MAGA
people for challenging the last 70 years of political consensus. In that Democratic Party version of the “good old
days,” reasonable Republicans and Democrats then alternated in power dutifully. The result was that the U.S. empire and
U.S. capitalism prospered first by helping to end the exhausted European empires and then by profiting from the United
States’ unipolar global hegemony.
Biden’s plans pretend the U.S. empire is not in decline. In 2024, he offers more of the old establishment politics.
Trump basically pretends the same about the U.S. empire but carefully selects problem areas (e.g., immigration, Chinese
competition, and Ukraine) that he can represent as failures of Democratic leadership. Nothing fundamental is amiss with
the U.S. empire and its prospects in his eyes. All that is necessary is to reject Biden and his politics as incapable of
reviving it. Trump’s plans thus call for a much more extreme economic nationalism run by a leaner, meaner government.
Each side deepens the split between Republicans and Democrats. Neither dares admit the basic, long-term declining empire
and the key problems (income and wealth inequality, politics corrupted by that inequality, worsening business cycles,
and mammoth debts) accumulated by its capitalist foundation. The parties’ jousting turns on substitute issues that offer
temporary electoral advantages. It also reinforces the public’s incapacity for systemic critique and change. Both
parties endlessly appeal to a population whose alienation deepens as relentless systemic decline worms its way into
everyone’s daily life and troubles. Both parties increasingly expose their growing irrelevance.
Neither party’s campaign offers solutions to systemic decline. Gross miscalculations of a changed world economy and
shrinking U.S. political power abroad underlay both parties’ failed policies in relation to Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine,
and Gaza. The turn toward economic nationalism and protectionism will not stop the decline. Something bigger and deeper
than either Party dares consider is underway. Capitalism has moved its dynamic centers yet again over the last
generation. This time the move went from western Europe, North America, and Japan to China, India, and beyond, from the
G7 to BRICS. Wealth and power are correspondingly shifting.
The places capitalism leaves behind descend into mass depression, overdose deaths, and sharpening social divisions.
These social crises keep worsening alongside deepening inequalities of wealth, income, and education. Steadily if also
maddeningly slowly, the rightward shift of U.S. politics after 1945 has finally arrived at social exhaustion and
ineffectuality. Perhaps thereby the United States prepares another possible New Deal with or without another 1929-style
crash.
Hopefully, then, one crucial lesson of the New Deal will have been learned and applied. Leaving the capitalist class
structure of production unchanged—a minority of employers dominating a majority of employees—enables that minority to
undo whatever reforms any New Deal might achieve. That is what the U.S. employer class did after 1945. The solution now
must include moving beyond the employer-employee organization of the workplace. Replacing that with a democratic
community organization—what we elsewhere call worker cooperatives—is the missing element that can make progressive
reforms stick. When employees and employers are the same people, no longer will a separate employer class have the
incentive and resources to undo what the employee majority wants. Replacing employer/employee-organized workplaces with
worker coops is the very different “great replacement” we need. On the basis of reforms secured in that way, we can
build a future. We can avoid repeating the last half-century’s failure even to preserve the reforms imposed on a
capitalism that crashed and burned in the 1930s.
By Richard D. Wolff
Author Bio: Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting
professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff’s weekly
show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to 55 million TV receivers via Free
Speech TV. His three recent books with Democracy at Work are The Sickness Is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us From Pandemics or Itself, Understanding Socialism, and Understanding Marxism, the latter of which is now available in a newly released 2021 hardcover edition with a new introduction by the author.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.