Richard Wolff: The End of US Empire and a Unipolar World

Richard Mellor

 

Richard Wolf is a useful source of information. He is a Marxist economist as far as I know. He has a show Democracy at Work which I haven’t seen in a while but it explains Marxist economic analysis in a way that most workers interested in exploring the issue will understand and benefit from. I am not familiar enough with his work to say much more except he has promoted worker cooperatives as a step toward or perhaps the step toward, workers control of the means of production, I am not exactly sure. 

 

But workers’ cooperatives as I understand it and I am thinking of the Mondragon Corporation or before it, the Rochdale cooperative for example or the Utopian Socialists Fourier, Saint Simon and Robert Owen whose socialism was taken up by Engels in his short book Socialism Utopian and Scientific are a form of idealism, hence utopian as opposed to scientific socialism of Marxism.

 

The issue Wolff raises here I think is basically correct. The end of the domination of US imperialism on a world scale is on the way. Gone is the period of the Best and the Brightest as Halbertam’s book was titled. Look at the decisions the US ruling class has made including and since the Vietnam War; Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and perhaps the most destructive of all, arming and supporting a genocide as the Apartheid state of Israel attempts to destroy an entire culture in real time as the whole world watches.  And only possible because the heavily armed US rogue regime supports it.

 

The calls from Christian Zionists, white nationalists and other neo fascistic members of the US body politic to openly violate international law and the decisions of international institutions and threatening to punish, meaning to attack the economy or in some cases invade, even allies that hold international law to a degree of legitimacy is another reflection of the rot that infects the US ruling class and its body politic.

 

For working people of the US and the world, potential disaster looms as the world’s hegemon is losing its number one spot in the pecking order and is a very dangerous animal indeed, armed to the teeth with nuclear and hi-tech weaponry. As the British Empire declined and was driven from its colonial possessions by the resistance, its response was more violent than ever. The same with the Apartheid regime in South Africa. A wounded major power will not retreat from the world stage easily and in this epoch, has the ability and is crazed enough to take us all with it.