The Challenge for Socialism

This week on Economic Update, Professor Wolff discusses how the recent upsurge in socialist politicians and interest in socialism raises the question: why did socialism fade after its last surge in the 1930s Great Depression? The New Deal was a kind of socialism that prevailed then and delivered government programs (Social Security, Minimum Wage, Unemployment Insurance, federal jobs programs), but after 1945, the Cold War presided over the New Deal's undoing. The lesson: something must be done about corporate profits, the pool of money untouched by 1930s socialism that corporations used to buy the politicians who undid the New Deal. That something is to convert factories, offices, and stores into worker co-ops democratically owned and operated by their workers. Workers would receive the profit produced by their labor and would thus never use it to undo the victories socialism achieves.

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