A Politics of Denial

Glenn Diesen: The cost of maintaining global dominance has always collided with domestic demands for security, prosperity and democratic control. When an imperial power declines, the contradictions that could once be managed begin to surface: intensifying inequality, political polarization, social unrest and a crisis of political legitimacy in both the United States and Europe. The empire has come home. I’m watching protests and riots in France, and similar problems are worsening across Europe, while the United States is on the verge of an economic crisis. How do you interpret what is happening?

Richard Wolff: The largest picture, as I see it, is the end of three centuries of colonialism — the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th — and of the unified world market that Marx himself celebrated as one of capitalism’s achievements. The Europeans created a world economy and, not surprisingly but not admirably, made themselves its wealthy center. They used the rest of the world as a resource: for food, for raw materials, for workers themselves in large numbers.

That spectacular ability to practice colonialism now has the rest of the world thinking about solving its problems by moving to where the wealth was taken. And this is held against them as outrageous behavior, as if they wanted to get their piece of our wealth. The disgusting leaders of Europe did not miss the chance, in the earliest days of these upheavals, to blame it on immigrants.

I thought the pushback would come first in Europe, because the Europeans had lost their empires and didn’t have the accumulated wealth to offset the decline. In the end, the focus will be on the United States, because it is the unipolar representation of all of this. But I’m seeing it in Europe now, above all in France.

You’re right that this has nothing to do with aggressive masses of people. The aggression is coming from governments. They are aggressively confronting Russia in Ukraine, and they are aggressively cutting domestic spending to fund a rearmament that is justified by an aggressive posture toward Russia. There is very little sign from Russia that this is on its agenda at all. It’s a made-for-Western-television hysteria.

And now we have the result. The masses have figured it out. The teachers who began the strike in France were protesting rats in the classroom and teaching positions that weren’t being replaced when people left, died or retired. Very classic problems of underfunded education. It always blows first in France. Make the French wait, and they will wait, maddeningly. And then they’re right in the streets.

There’s a famous remark attributed to a variety of political leaders, but I learned it as Lenin’s. His associates complained that nothing was happening, and Lenin is said to have replied: ​“For decades, nothing happens. And then in a few weeks, decades happen.” I think that’s what we’re seeing. This is not going to go away.

The police in France have been brutal, as they usually are directed to be. The government’s only response has been empty rhetoric from Mr. Macron and a prime minister who talks about curfews — what a wonderful response to demands about education and the upcoming 2027 budget. The majority of people arrested, according to the police, are minors. They are children, in effect. So the government is beating the children, blaming the immigrants and refusing to respond. That is a definition of a bankrupt government.

Here, the head of the United Auto Workers, Shawn Fain, has proposed a general strike — for May 1, 2028. The proposed general strike in France is Nov. 5. That says so much about how you understand political action. No one can predict the future, but what happens will be determined by the reaction of the French people, watching the teachers and students on the one hand and the flics, French slang for cops, on the other.

GD: Do the politicians understand what they’re in the middle of — that this era of exceptionalism has come to an end? Or is there denial about where we are in history?

RW: I’m on the side of those who think it is overwhelmingly a politics of denial, of forging ahead and taking clues from the past. As an American — and I am not alone, nor is this particularly a left perspective — I see a wide perception that Europe has a hysterical attitude toward Russia. It’s as though Russia now is the Soviet Union, only more aggressive than the Soviet Union ever was.

Mr. Trump strikes many of us as living in a caricature of 1980, when the United States had a dominance in the world that it has since lost. And the Democratic Party partakes of this nostalgic dreaminess. I recently heard a very well-known Democratic politician say, in a small meeting, that if they win the midterms, one thing they have to do is take that brilliant slogan and make it theirs. When he was asked what slogan, it was ​“Make America Great Again.” The Democratic leadership is as hysterical about Russia as the Europeans. Hillary Clinton chastised Trump the other day for not having gone in and finished the job in Iran. The party is more focused on holding back the left wing than on fighting the Republicans.

GD: What do you expect from the midterms? Could they change America’s current course?

RW: There are two contesting images. The midterms are almost here, and the first image comes out of American history. The Cold War is thought of as a contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. But you will never understand what it was about if you don’t grasp that it was also a war inside the United States, and much more important to all the combatants. It was a war by the right wing, led by the business community and championed by the Republican Party, to undo Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Enormous social programs had been enacted in the 1930s and ​’40s, and the business community was heavily taxed to pay for them.

With Roosevelt dead in 1945, the business community goes to work. They attacked the Soviet Union as the ultimate evil, and they attacked the New Deal as the work of people connected to the Soviet Union — communists, socialists — always suggesting they were spies and traitors. They never proved anything remotely like it, but they executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to weld together a great crusade: We are fighting abroad against the evil communists, and we are fighting at home against the evil communists. And if we didn’t have very many communists, well, we called the socialists communists.

To this day, when I teach — I’ve been a professor here all my life — my students think of the following words as synonyms: communist, socialist, Marxist, terrorist, anarchist. When I first began teaching, I thought my students were ignorant. It’s not ignorance. They were trained. These are all the bad ones against whom we good ones are fighting.

They will do that again. If the progressives win, you’re going to see a much more intense effort to link the American Left either to Russia, if that stays the big bugaboo in Europe, or, equally likely, to China. And remember, we have a very large population of Chinese origin here. We can do to them what was done to the Japanese during World War II, when many tens of thousands were put in concentration camps in California. That’s where that will go.

Here’s the alternative scenario: The progressives do so well that they make all of that impossible. The Left here is trying to make sense of Gallup polls that show a steadily growing majority of people 34 and younger who say they prefer socialism to capitalism. Given the anti-left propaganda woven into the curriculum, this is astonishing, because most Americans don’t know what socialism is. So what is the poll telling us? The dissatisfaction with the status quo is expressed as ​“capitalism stinks.” Up until five or 10 years ago, no one except leftists even used the word capitalism. Now it’s almost chic to refer to it, negatively, when you’re talking about almost anything.

If that is reflected in a big win — if [Abdul] El-Sayed can win in Michigan, if [Susan] Collins is defeated in Maine — then you’ll have a proliferation of Mamdanis across the United States. [Zohran] Mamdani was elected a year ago, and from everything I can tell — I live in his district — he’s more popular now than when he was elected. He’s had no scandals and he’s had popular programs. That is why the Democratic leaders, [Chuck] Schumer and others, are terrified above all of those progressives. They are working harder in this election against the progressives than to defeat the Republicans.

GD: How does all of this political instability translate into conflicts abroad? European leaders need the Russian bogeyman to explain why everything is going to hell in a handbasket at home. And with elections coming up in the United States and Israel, people are openly discussing how that will affect the wars. Trump might need some success in the war against Iran. Netanyahu will also need some escalation ahead of the Israeli election. How do you see this connection?

RW: For me, it is a spectacle. Here’s a metaphor. You’re sitting on a chair in a meadow, and in front of you is a railroad track, and on the track is a locomotive pulling a train, gathering speed, heading straight for a stone wall. You’re shouting to the engineer, but you’re too far away, and it’s too loud on the locomotive. Nobody can hear you. You’re watching the people head into the stone wall.

We are watching the two leading symbols, and real actors, of what remains of colonialism or imperialism: Israel and the United States. Israel is actively creating a greater Israel that encompasses Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon and who knows how much else, thinking of itself as the military vanguard. It’s a population of [more than 9 million] people, surrounded by the Arab world and, even more, the Muslim world, all of whom hate them. We all recognize this is an impossible scenario. The United States can keep this charade going only so long as it can afford to, and it is now caught up, effectively, in three wars: Ukraine, Iran and support of Israel.

Iran is the exemplar of the anti-colonial demand. Muslims, Hindus and Chinese are together in BRICS. That should be the nightmare of all European leaders, and I believe it’s behind their hysteria toward Russia. Russia is the one you hate the most because it’s a turncoat. Putin gets up and says, ​“I’m not European anymore. I’m looking east.” He’s therefore betraying Europe.

It’s not just Iran you’re fighting. It’s Iran allied to Russia and China. You’re not going to defeat Iran, because to do so you’d have to defeat Russia and China, and that’s not going to happen. We’re all going to be incinerated, or it’s not going to happen. Either way, it’s not going to happen.

You take your hat off to the determination of Macron and [Friedrich] Merz and [Andy] Burnham and [Giorgia] Meloni and Schumer and Trump. They live in the world of their magnificence, the world Europe did create. But Marx understood that the thesis provokes the antithesis, and the antithesis, created right alongside the thesis for three centuries, is now driving events. China is able to be the éminence grise, as the French would say, behind everything, with no military bases other than Djibouti in Africa, collecting all the dividends from this turmoil in all directions.

I am somewhat overwhelmed by the stark failure of the Old West to understand its situation with any kind of realism. You’re going to attack Iran again? You failed last year in June. You failed again this year, starting in February. You don’t even have enough munitions of your own. To please whom? Mr. Netanyahu, who, whatever happens in the upcoming election, is only going to be there a little while longer. You are betting on horses that are completely exhausted. You think you’re in the situation you once had, but it’s gone.

Unless I’m wrong — and correct me if I am — where is the leader in the West willing to finally stand up and say, ​“This is crazy, what you are doing”? And I don’t mean a leader like [Jean-Luc] Mélenchon. I mean a leader who sits at the top, who is unquestionably of the European ruling class, but who says, ​“My goodness, people, this has to stop.”