Richard Wolff argues Europe's desperation over Russia stems from its unrecovered loss of colonial empire
Glenn Diesen interviews economist Richard Wolff on the economic dimensions of the NATO-Russia conflict.
Summary
Economist and Marxist scholar Richard Wolff joins Glenn Diesen's channel to argue that Europe's aggressive posture toward Russia is rooted not in Russian behavior but in a historically accumulated crisis of post-colonial capitalism. Wolff argues that Europe's aggressive posture toward Russia is not primarily a reaction to Russian behavior but rather the product of a historically accumulated crisis: Western European capitalism was built on colonial empire, and since losing those empires in the 20th century, European powers have found no viable substitute. Wolff contends that the destruction and dismemberment of Russia represents the only remaining path by which Europe could recapture a dominant global role, making the current war in Ukraine an expression of European desperation rather than rational strategic calculation. He also argues that the United States has effectively written Europe off as irrelevant to its own struggle to slow its imperial decline, and that Europe's attempts to remain useful to Washington — through military spending, energy purchases, and trade concessions — are only accelerating European economic collapse.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction: Sanctions, Russian resilience, and the economic war
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. Professor Richard Wolff joins us today to discuss the economic component of the proxy war between NATO and Russia. Thank you for coming back on the program. The efforts to exhaust the other side, as we know, are not only seen in the military sphere of this conflict — which, by the way, has been building up for decades — but also has a very strong economic component. The NATO countries have not shied away from their objective of collapsing the Russian economy, and as we know, Russia today is the most sanctioned country in the world. The West has done everything: cut Russia's access to its markets, banks, even stolen Russian sovereign funds. Yet it doesn't seem to work. I was wondering how you explain this, because after all, we were told by our rulers that Russia is merely a gas station masquerading as a country. How do you see Russia having adjusted to these sanctions? Because I think very few people in the West expected the Russians to adapt so well and indeed grow, even as its European counterparts are in very deep trouble.
Richard Wolff: I would like to give you an answer based exactly on what you just said at the very end of your opening. The way I see this, I look at it through the lens of a class analysis. As I mentioned to you earlier, I admire and have learned a great deal from listening to your guest John Mearsheimer on many occasions, particularly on your program, and I appreciate what he has to say. He analyzes the struggle among great powers in a very honest, direct, careful, analytical way. It is exemplary in the way he does that. But for me it begs one huge question, which is: why do the particular global powers do what they do when they do it? To answer that question as if it's all a chess maneuver among the players leaves out all of the social pressures that operate on any government, on each government, pushing it and pulling it this way or that way. And they are not free to engage in any strategy against other great powers, because some of those strategies are blocked off by their own domestic constraints and others are not. So a proper analysis has to ask the question: why is this happening? Why is one power threatening another? And to answer that only by reference to what the others are doing leaves open the basic question of why all of them are doing what they are doing.
I would like to answer that question by focusing on Europe, because it is my judgment — looking at the history of capitalism in Europe — that the active player here is above all Europe. Secondarily also Russia, but secondarily. I am very mindful that Russia has been repeatedly invaded. Napoleon tried that. World War I tried that. Hitler's Operation Barbarossa tried it. They all tried it. They all were defeated by a Russia which reacted to the invasion by pushing back once attacked.
Europe's colonial history and the roots of the current crisis
So I would like to argue the following. I think from everything I can tell that the major European countries — and by that I mean France, Britain, Germany, Italy, maybe a couple more — were all in the 18th century, some even earlier, and all in the 19th century, huge colonial powers. These were fundamentally small units of national capitalism built up in their own way in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th century, varying with each country. And then they became colonial powers at one point or another, with populations overseas much larger than what they had at home. Compare the Netherlands with Indonesia, or compare the British Isles with the British Empire, and on and on. The colonialism is what sustained their capitalist growth. They developed a massive hinterland once they had run out of as much as they could take from their own hinterland — France, Germany, Italy. They then went further afield, as capitalism makes its profits and plows them back in as part of its competition.
Long story short, by 1914 they had run out of territory. For those who know their history, at the 1884 Conference of Berlin, they literally sat around the table and carved up Africa — who gets what. But there was no more place to go. And over the years between the Berlin Conference of 1884 and the outbreak of World War I, they built up a level of conflict, clashes, and little mini-wars that we can all now see were the prelude to the Great World War.
I'm going to lump together the first and the second world wars, because they only happened a few years apart and they were the working out of what? The mutual destruction of all the colonizing countries — with one exception: the United States. All the rest, Japan now included, blew each other out of the water, bombed each other to smithereens, destroyed their economies, killed huge numbers of their people — Russia included. Only the United States, because of its distance and because air war had not yet been developed in the way it is now, was able to emerge intact. In case people don't know: Russia loses 25 million people in World War II and the United States loses 400,000. You could not have a starker rendition.
The postwar American hegemony and the European bargain
The war is now over, and the United States stands. Its economy has not declined — not at all. The opposite. The war brought the United States out of the Great Depression the way nothing else had. The United States was in better shape at the end of the war economically than it had been ever since 1929, when it crashed totally in the worst collapse it had ever seen. And so the United States emerges, as we all now know, as the hegemon, the inheritor of the empires — not running them the way the Europeans did through actual colonies, but letting them all be independent. They knew how to do that. They had been doing it with Latin America for many, many years. Let them be independent. We will create economic chains as powerful or stronger than the political control that the Europeans had once been able to operate.
So the United States moves in, takes over, the dollar replaces the pound. The American military cut that famous deal with Europe, saying to them: here's a division of labor. You're going to take care of fighting your own communist and socialist movements, which were dangerous after World War II because they had been the heroes of the resistance and had a popularity that nothing like that happened in the United States — a very important difference. So you Europeans are going to fight there. You're going to be our allies as a bulwark against the evil Soviet Union, and we're going to be your defense umbrella. You don't have to spend money. You can let your army and navy go to pot, which they did. And we'll take care of you. That was fine with the US because it allowed a military Keynesianism at home that they could not have gotten away with absent the great global crusade against the evil empire.
A very nice division of labor. Europe is subordinated. Europe is told: you can now spend money on social welfare. That's how you're going to defeat the communists and the socialists. You can have your social welfare programs. We will fund it because we'll take the defense expenditure away from you.
That's now a crisis for Europe because the reverse has happened. Trump has pulled away the military umbrella. You're going to have to spend European money. And where's it going to come from? You're going to have to take it from social welfare. Maybe borrow some money — that'll make you even more subordinate. That's very dangerous.
Zbigniew Brzezinski's grand strategy and Europe's desperate gamble
So now here comes the biggest punch of all. I would argue — and here I take a clue from Zbigniew Brzezinski, a person from whom I could not be further removed in my analysis — that the Europeans have never recovered from the loss of their empires, and they know it. They hooked themselves up to the United States because otherwise, between their own socialists and communists and Russia next door and the Americans with a who-knows-what mentality, the risks were too great. So they went with the United States, the lesser evil for them. But that didn't solve their problem. It postponed it for a while. They could focus on recovery the first ten or twenty years. Then when the Soviet Union collapsed, they could focus on the recapture of an empire — a little bit — by absorbing Eastern Europe, by moving investments into Poland and Romania. But they're doing all of that, and the great hope — and I would argue the only hope that the Europeans ever had to recapture their place in history, the dominant place they had for the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, even the 20th century — was not going to come from competing with China. That's over. They weren't going to compete with the United States — too hard.
One outlet remained. They could recapture a great European empire if they could destroy and dismember Russia. Carve it up into half a dozen or a dozen little countries. Make it all lots of Latvias and Estonias and all of that, and then divide them up. The French can get these four, the Germans can get those six, and the Japanese in the Far East could get maybe a little bit too. And these players, effectively marginalized as the world becomes US versus China, with Europe becoming an ever more distant, subordinate junior partner — the only hope to evade all that implies for Europe is this war with Russia. And it is a war.
Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote this in the 1990s. The grand strategy would be, and has to be: destroy Russia. Not because it's communist — that had nothing to do with it. Communism was just a convenience made possible by the Soviet revolution of 1917. As soon as it's gone, it's over. We're closer to war now than we arguably ever were during the Cold War. Why? Because this is the issue that's at play. The Europeans are desperate.
Their demonization of Russia, which is quasi-hysterical — I mean, I'm an American, I sit here on the other side of the ocean, but as you know my roots are European, and I see a kind of craziness in the Western European response and a much more measured Mr. Putin. I have nothing for him — I don't support him or anything like that — but it's pretty obvious who's overshooting the mark, who's going up the escalation ladder, to quote John Mearsheimer, and the Russians then retaliate. It's a little bit like the Chinese with the American tariffs. But I think that's what we're watching. We are watching the desperate — and I want to underscore that word — the desperate effort of the European leaders: the Starmers, the Merzs, the Macrons. This is their only way not just to salvage their personal careers — they're really in trouble there. They hooked their wagon personally to the United States, and Mr. Trump has thrown them under the bus. So they have to turn to their people and say: we're the great leaders who came up with the United States, which has now disrespected you on 27 levels. They can't do that. They have to come up with something else to hold on to support. They have to support their capitalists because they're not going to get the support they used to get. And they can do it through a defense program and the demonization of Russia, with its utopian goal of recreating the empire they lost in the 20th century and have found no substitute for since.
Glenn Diesen: That's an interesting perspective. Europe destroyed itself in these two world wars, but what happened after World War II is kind of interesting — it got an extension of life through the partnership with the United States, because the United States essentially provided for the security of the Europeans and also offered quite generous trade deals to make sure the capitalist frontline states would be more prosperous than communist ones. The Western Europeans did well — surprisingly well, given what had happened in two world wars. Afterwards we created all these narratives that we discovered peace and cooperation, that that's better than war, but this didn't come out of nowhere.
After the Cold War, something obviously began to change. After World War II the main argument in the West was that the European project was about seeking security with each other and not against non-members. Well, it didn't really fit within the Cold War format, but after the Cold War one began to again look at who we would seek security against. And furthermore, this whole idea that Eastern Europe would gravitate towards Western Europe was quite interesting. Even in the military aspect — I know Soros, George Soros, wrote an article in the '90s making the point that we can begin to fight again, and we saw what NATO became. He was arguing that NATO could be successful if it partnered with some Eastern European countries, because the Eastern Europeans could absorb a lot of deaths, whereas the Western Europeans cared less for high casualties and didn't want their men coming home in body bags. So this was essentially what they were looking for — find some Eastern European country which can provide the cannon fodder. I thought that was quite fitting to where we are today.
Anyway, my point was: there's no more economic model now that, as you said, the US has pulled the rug beneath the feet of the Europeans. What are they supposed to do? Kaja Kallas, the EU foreign policy chief, made a comment similar to what you did — that it would be so much better and easier if Russia were just divided into many smaller states, how much easier it would be to manage — and of course she didn't mention how resource-rich those weaker regions would be. But do you think this is part of the problem, why the Europeans are so desperate now to break Russia? Because Ukraine is now completely captured by the US and the Europeans. They give all this aid to Zelensky, but that just means his corrupt government can stay in power and he will continue to send men to their deaths. But the project of Ukraine hasn't really paid off a return on investment yet. That return on investment implies that they first defeat Russia. This is the main problem for the Europeans — the lack of an economic model. They don't have the technology, they don't have the industries. Is this at the heart of the problem?
Class analysis, domestic economic pressures, and the limits of great power strategy
Richard Wolff: I think so. Let me tell you what I pick up, because I went to all the elite universities in this country, so I know a good number of the people involved. I disagree with them — I come from the left wing, as you surely know — but I know about what the policies are and who's doing them.
There is a deep perception in the United States, and the Europeans surely know this: it's not just Mr. Trump. The Europeans have to understand there has been almost no basic disagreement with Mr. Trump's rejection of the Europeans. Yes, there might be a few voices here that wouldn't go quite so far and wouldn't say the things he says — he's out of control, his mouth runs anyway — but there's no support here to go back to the way things were. There's a very clear understanding here that the United States is itself a declining empire and that it has to spend all of its time, energy, and focus on holding back its decline.
And my guess is that the most powerful lesson on that score is having been defeated by the Iranians. The humiliation of that — the first war had to end after 12 days because of the miscalculations, and then these two clowns did it again. That's why there's a falling out between the United States and Israel right now that no one knows quite how it's going to work out. But that's a falling out among the two who completely messed everything up in terms of both long and short-term strategies for the Middle East.
The perception here is that Europe is done. I can't tell you how often I hear that. It is just: we should not worry about it, it doesn't matter. When Trump says he's not sure what he'll do if the Russians attack you, they mean that literally. I think the Europeans have convinced themselves that they don't really mean that. Oh, yes, they do. For them, the number one priority is to fix this declining empire — slow the decline, reverse it if possible. The number two priority: reverse or slow China. Number three, if that doesn't work, sit down with China and work something out. Europe isn't in the conversation. Europe is irrelevant. Europe is out of the picture. Europe is a divided mess and will go its own way.
And if, on the other hand, the Europeans could have a big war and destroy Russia, then the United States would be interested. Because with China, what is now almost as though that would reverse Putin — Russia would no longer be shifting to be an Asian country, but would bring all of that Asia into a European focus. But you know what that is? That's the recapturing of the lost empire. Only it's not in Asia, Africa, or Latin America — it's in Eastern Europe and the land mass into Asia. That is what the Americans do not think the Europeans are capable of, not at all.
But if that were by some magic to happen, then Europe — and I think somewhere the European leaders are aware of that. But here's a disagreement with Professor Mearsheimer. I think these class issues — how does capitalism in Western Europe, where modern capitalism was born after all, in Holland, in England, and all that — how do the capitalists there recover their ability to make the kind of profits that they can then use to do the research and development to catch up to the Americans and the Chinese, who get further and further ahead of them literally every day? And where are they going to get those profits from?
What we're watching are headlines about Volkswagen laying off 100,000 workers. Yanis Varoufakis and his friends teach us correctly that the German economy is an automobile-focused phenomenon. Varoufakis says their industry is not just shrinking — he says the auto industry will disappear. And I understand the argument, because here in the United States it's disappearing too. Our auto industry now is a shadow. The auto industry used to be Detroit. In 1970 and 1980, Detroit had two million people. Today it has 600,000. For a modern city in a capitalist country, what you're seeing there is a level of collapse that is very stark and very profound. It's tearing this country apart politically. And it's doing that in Europe too.
All of those things are not in Professor Mearsheimer's story. He's got the great powers maneuvering, and he handles that beautifully. We learn a lot from him. This is not in any way disrespectful of the scholarship and the intellect he brings. But there's an absence of a conversation about how the domestic economic realities shape what these strategies are that the different powers try to pursue as they then bump up against each other. You've got to explain that, otherwise the bumping becomes a chess game rather than the urgent economic survival struggle that it actually is.
Glenn Diesen: Yeah, that's fascinating. In political realism, states are perceived to behave more or less the same — it all depends on the international distribution of power, which creates systemic incentives for how states should act. But of course how they pursue their power is interesting, because as you said, Europe has always had a bit of a colonial model, and even after World War II and after the Cold War this kind of continues. You see this with whatever benign rhetoric there is — the human rights arguments — whenever you have new institutions coming up like the ICC, it's always one side being the civilizational teacher and the rest of the world being the student, and this always translates into sovereign inequality: sovereignty for us but not for you. We don't say that countries aren't civilized anymore, but you don't have the liberal democratic credentials, and that's why you don't qualify for sovereignty.
But I want to get back to what you said about European relevance to the United States, because I agree. I've heard many comments from European leaders where they almost say that we have to make ourselves relevant to the United States. I think it was a Polish president who made the point that if Russia wins, the US will prefer to work with the Russians instead of us. But again, if they could defeat the Russians, that would be very different. Now, however, if there's a failure to defeat the Russians, what is the utility of Europe for a declining US? Will it just cannibalize the industries? Will it try to set Europe aside as an exclusive economic zone, cut off from the Chinese and other rivals? Or will they just demand the Europeans militarize and use them as another Ukraine? What is the purpose of Europe in the future?
Europe's irrelevance to US strategic priorities and the tributary relationship
Richard Wolff: My guess is that the presumption of the leadership here — maybe wrong, but the presumption — is that the Europeans cannot defeat the Russians. That's not available unless we're talking ten or twenty years from now, after an immense military buildup across Europe paid for by austerity politics. And even as they start talking about it, they are fully aware that between the right-wing opposition to that kind of thing and the left-wing opposition, this is unlikely to be achieved in any reasonable time frame.
Their suspicion is that we're going to see what is, for them, dangerous. We're going to see either a right-wing emergence — new governments of the far right, Le Pen, or the AfD in Germany — or a left-wing version. Everyone here knows who Jean-Luc Mélenchon is, and they know that the left is the dominant faction in La France Insoumise. Things could get very bad in that country. The blame of the French family for the Macron government having not prepared them for the heat wave — it's very serious stuff. And it wouldn't be if you had a normal situation, but you don't. You have the country splitting more and more, and Macron has no support at all. Nobody likes Mr. Macron. How he's going to survive is a mystery to me.
So my answer to your question is: the presumption is that all Europe can do is help the United States navigate and, if possible, offset, slow, or reverse its own decline. Look, when Von der Leyen agreed with Trump that in exchange for lower tariffs there would be a purchase of six or seven hundred billion dollars' worth of liquefied natural gas, plus an investment of an equal amount of European money in the United States over the next ten years — granted, it's just words — but what are you saying? You are becoming a tributary. Your job is to deliver value to the United States. It will continue, maybe, to provide you with some military support. It will berate you for not providing them with the support. Look at how they're using that now in terms of what didn't happen in the Gulf.
I don't think they have much planned for you. I think they assume Europe is going to fade away. And if I were to be in a mean mood, I would say there are even fairly strong rumors that Europe might be the way that the United States and China could learn to live with a carved-up world — the United States gets the Western Hemisphere and China gets Europe. I know that this is frightening to Europeans, at least a few that I've told it to. But if you want to know where people's thoughts are going, the assumption is that Europe is over.
And those who know — and I know how you do it on your program, so I know you know — yes, it is wonderful for the Ukrainians that they can shoot missiles and drones into the heart of Russia. I get it. It's wonderful public relations. It allows the narrative that was in deep trouble to continue. But they just took another couple of Donbas cities. There aren't many left. We all kind of really know what's happening there. And if the Europeans keep escalating, then the Russians will escalate, and then where will we be? Mr. Trump cannot go to war against Russia. He can't do it. I don't think so. I think he knows it. They all know it. They can't do it. So if the Europeans push it and the Russians respond — even if it's not nuclear, even if it's conventional — but they go after the places in the Baltics or in Germany or wherever else they are that are providing this material to Ukraine, Ukraine is over. There won't be much of Ukraine left.
That's a whole other issue. The initial plan, which was just to take the four oblasts on the eastern end — those are now ancient history. They keep moving. They need what the Europeans used to call a cordon sanitaire, and it keeps moving west. So I think there's not much of a role for Europe, which somewhere the Europeans, I think, have a glimmer of. They get it. And that's why they're desperate. If Russia wins, the war in Ukraine comes to an end, and Russia takes a quarter of it or whatever the amount is, and Ukraine is rendered much poorer, much weaker, in debt forever — this is a terrible outcome. Not only have they not gotten their great new colonial territory, but what they had is diminished. And now you're going to see in the rest of Eastern Europe a rethinking of who their allies are, the way you're seeing it in the Gulf States, who are realizing that an American military base is not a protection — it makes you a target. A target of an Iran that can hit you. And everybody's rethinking. Look at Saudi Arabia. The shifting that's going on is amazing.
Glenn Diesen: Yes, this is a fascinating thing in Europe though — that they're doubling down on this gamble. I see Mark Rutte, the NATO Secretary General, keeps telling the Americans: listen, in the efforts of elevating the relevance of Europe to the Americans, we're doing this military Keynesianism, we're becoming a force amplifier, a valuable partner, and also we're buying your weapons, so it's good for the economy, we employ Americans. But this only digs a deeper grave for the European economies. And then of course they also say: listen, we cut ourselves off from Russian energy, we're going to show our loyalty to the US, we're buying American energy which is many times more expensive. And they hope that this will also win the affection of the United States to show that they are an important partner. As you said before, Von der Leyen signs these trade deals with the Americans which everyone says openly is a horrible deal, but again it shows that, as you said, we're paying tribute to the United States. Why would you leave a continent that is willing to sacrifice its own economic interest to please the US? But again, all of these tributes to the US only make the Europeans weaker and weaker, and it's not sustainable. I think it also draws some contempt — not just from Trump but in Washington in general — this kind of subservience. It's not going to be sustainable.
China's manufacturing advantage and the Volkswagen moment
Richard Wolff: Let me take it a little bit further. It's well understood here that over the last eight or nine years before the Russians invaded, there was a tremendous program to build up the Ukrainian military. So at the time the Russians invaded, the Ukrainians had a bigger army than most of the countries of Europe, and they can't do it against the Russians. So now add the Europeans and you don't add very much — it's just not enough. And Americans are very aware now, in a way they weren't as little as five years ago, that behind Russia is China. And China has a bigger manufacturing base to produce missiles and drones than the rest of Europe combined. So the Russians have, and the Iranians — thanks to the Caspian Sea — can get everything they need from the Russians, who because they have a long border with China can get everything they need from the Chinese. What are you undertaking if you challenge what they have now produced?
Are you aware — I only learned about it a few weeks ago — that the Volkswagen management had meetings in Washington earlier this year discussing with the Trump administration moving the headquarters of Volkswagen to the United States? What greater statement is that — not just to the Americans, but to all of Europe? Now they've followed up: that deal fell through, that's not going to happen, or at least for the moment. Instead, they're going to lay off 100,000. This is deindustrialization. You're going to make Europe a tourist mecca that produces wine and cheese, and that's fine, but everything else will come from somewhere else.
I was in Paris a few months ago. I stepped into a taxi cab and I noticed a BYD. I speak French, so I talked with the cab driver, and he told me why he's driving a BYD — because it's the cheapest, best car. That's why. It wasn't complicated. He would have preferred to get a Peugeot, but a BYD is what he has to do. And he told me all the other cab drivers are putting pressure on the Macron government to let in more BYDs because they want to buy fleets of them. It's over. And the only reason we don't have BYD here — if you come to New York, you can have a cab, but it can't be a BYD because there's a 100% tariff against BYD. And by the way, the tariff was originally put in by Biden and then raised by Trump, but if the Democrats win the elections in November, none of what we're discussing will change.
Russia's economic resilience and its partnership with China
Glenn Diesen: Let me ask a last question on the Russian economy. How do you see this being different from the other Europeans? Because it's holding up against all of these sanctions — it's even growing, it's diversifying. Do you see the Russians being less dependent on empire than the Europeans? What is it about the Russian economy that makes it capable of thriving even as the Europeans are seemingly dying off?
Richard Wolff: I think that the Russians have come to terms with the fact that they are going to be junior partners of the Chinese. The truth of it is that the Chinese economy is four to five times larger than the Russian. These are not equals, they haven't been, and they become less so with each passing year, because the rate of growth of Russia — which is impressive, especially during a war — is nonetheless significantly less than the Chinese. So the reality is, I think, that the Russians are going to work out a deal with the Chinese to develop Russian Asia. Maybe a little bit they'll continue in the Asian republics that were below — Kazakhstan and all of that — they'll keep working to try to make those allies. But they're going to do what the Europeans coveted: they want to develop the immensity of Asian Russia, its resources, its cities, its forests, its land.
Here in the United States, a place like New York is a problem because Manhattan is an island and you can't grow outward, so you have to grow up. The Russians can grow horizontally. They have an outlet for their need to grow. They have some of the same pressures that the Western Europeans do, but they also have a partner who is very eager to be in good shape with them, because they have the military that China needs still some years to catch up with.
And one last point: if I understand the German deal, they're going to spend $800 billion over the next ten years on the military. Well, the American budget — just to give people a sense of the size — is currently $900 billion per year. Not over ten years — per year. And it is scheduled in 2027 to go from $900 billion to $1.5 trillion. That's an addiction. Europe cannot catch up. Those are numbers so disproportional that unless Europe comes up with some mammoth new source of funding across all the countries, they can't keep up. And at the current point, if a good part of that is buying from America, then it's just a joke — they'll never catch up.
So in short, the Europeans' efforts to make themselves relevant to the US and thus have a place in this multipolar world are not looking good.
The hysteria of European demonization and the Marxist question of enterprise organization
Richard Wolff: And I tell you, Glenn, it frightens me, because it suggests to me that the hysteria, the demonization of Russia and Putin, and all this childish stuff is driven by a historically accumulated sense of having no other option. They're not prepared to talk about changing their society to come to terms with it.
I live in the United States, where people like me — and we're not very many — are trying to get the country to realize the empire we have is declining and we'd be better off working out deals with China and so on than this aggressive, slow-you-down, punish-you approach. It's no longer working. It's bouncing back here. The strongest voice for opening up relations with China in this country now are the leading American technology companies that have to sell to China. Otherwise the Chinese will win. In other words, they'll win unless we open up — which will help them win. But if we don't help them win, they'll win anyway. And this gets people very depressed as they figure out that's what it means when your empire is declining, and that's what it means for the Europeans that theirs isn't, and that makes for a very dangerous situation.
Glenn Diesen: No, it's an interesting view, because I always make the point that Europeans could have a future if they changed the model completely — that is, if we wouldn't have a divided continent, if we would recognize that the largest country in Europe, Russia, is also part of the continent. We could have become less dependent on external security providers, we would have more prosperity, Europe could have a pretty good future. But it's not even on the menu. They can't live next to Russia as an equal. This is the problem — no inclusive security architecture, no deals. It's either sovereign inequality or they will go down with the ship, it seems.
Richard Wolff: Yeah, and boy are they going down. They made a terrible, terrible mistake. They also ought to ask — if you allow me — the old Marxist question: what about the organization of your enterprises? The capitalist and the worker, the employer and the employee — that's a driver. To maximize profit is to maximize the revenue stream of a very small number of people. Maybe you ought to think of running an enterprise not to maximize the profit for a small number of people, but to maximize the wages and salaries, because that's the majority. A democratic enterprise cannot run the way capitalism is organized. You would have a completely different dynamic — you wouldn't have the profit drive that leads to so much of this trouble. And I don't say that as an ideologue. I say it because Marx's insight here is becoming urgent, because it might offer a way out of the dead end that otherwise confronts us.
Glenn Diesen: Well, thank you as always — very much appreciated. It's worth looking into what kind or type of actor it is as well, besides just looking at the distribution of power. So thanks again.
Richard Wolff: My pleasure, Glenn, and thanks for your programs, which I learn from and appreciate very much.