In the midst of his great battle on June 30, 2024, when 80 % of voters rejected European “centrist” President Emmanuel Macron, he said he understood the French person’s anger.
As Labor head Starmer has said as the rage explodes, Traditional fool Rishi Sunak said the same thing about the British women’s rage in the UK. Of course, like expressions from politicians typically mean little or nothing and achieve much.
When they lose power, for leaders and their events really keep making decisions about how best to retake control. In that way, they are similar to the US Republicans after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election and the US Democrats after Biden’s achievement in his conversation with Trump.
A small group of senior leaders and top donors in both parties organized the political theatre to accept those decisions after making all the crucial decisions. Yet unexpected things like replacing Trump, such as Harris ‘ replacement, are temporary departures from resumed politics as usual.
The people, in contrast to Trump, missed opportunities to speak out against an now organized crowd of angry people. Trump made a loud and crude statement about immigrants, women, NATO, and traditional social taboos that conventional politicians have deemed to be offensive.
That set the tone for Trump before doubling down and claiming he had won the 2020 election but had been defrauded. A spokesperson violently claiming opposite victimizations was the result of the widespread anger of communities who felt victimized in their day-to-day lives. Trump and basic both realized that they could victimize their victims at the same time.
Whether or not they can socially abuse voters ‘ anger, no popular president in the social West, including Trump, seems really to “understand” it. In the future, they typically just see as far as what they can reasonably attribute to their rivals in the poll.
Trump reversed the same mistake over the previous year and will soon begin to chastise Harris for the “bad” business that he led in 2020. Political opponents blame the other for the “immigration crisis”, for poorly protecting US business from Chinese rivals, government finances deficits, and job exports.
No mainstream leader “understands” ( or dares to hint or suggest ) that mass anger these days might be something more and different from any collection of specific complaints and demands ( about guns, abortion, taxes, and wars ).
Even the demagogues who enjoy talking about” tradition war” refuse to inquire why these “wars” are currently popular. Angry” Make America Great Again” ( MAGA ) folks are notably vague and poorly informed as their critics enjoy exposing. These critics rarely offer compelling other explanations of Do anger ( explanations that are neither hazy nor insufficiently researched ).
We ask in certain whether the anger that the MAGA movement participates express a real, global suffering that has not yet been fully comprehended its root cause. Could the result of that event be nothing less than the collapse of American capitalism and all that it represents?
If intellectual taboos and blinders prevent admitting it, may that decline’s results – stress, despair and anger – focus instead on ideal scapegoats? Are Trump, Biden, Macron, Sunak, and so many others choosing to use as scapegoats in a conflict they do n’t want to explore?
After all, American socialism is no longer the country’s imperial master. The German dynasty that established them presently regresses in place of the American kingdom. Chinese rule will be the next empire, or else a true world multipolarity will emerge.
American capitalism has also moved eastward, making it no longer the world’s active growth center. American capitalism is evidently losing its previous position as the self-confident, unified, supreme power behind the World Bank, United Nations, International Monetary Fund, and the US dollar as world money.  ,
The United States and its major allies ( G7 ) now have a total, aggregated GDP that is already significantly lower than China’s and its major allies ‘ comparable aggregate GDPs ( BRICS).
The footprints of the two major international financial power organizations were almost identical in 2020. Since then and continues to do so, the gap between the two footsteps has grown wider. China and its BRICS friends are increasingly , the earth market’s richest union.
Nothing could have prepared the populations of Eastern socialism for this altered real or its effects. Especially the sections of those populations now forced to absorb the exorbitant burdens of American mankind’s decline feel betrayed, abandoned, and unhappy. Elections are only one manner for some of them to express those emotions.
American capitalism’s rich, powerful, and little majority practices a combination of rejection and adjustment to its decline. Prevailing politicians, major media, and academics continue to orate, read, and act as if the social West were still worldwide strong.
Their world supremacy in the second half of the twentieth century continued for them and their ways of thinking. The expensive strategic errors it produces are demonstrated by the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, which also demonstrate this rejection.  ,
While remaining neutral about the new reality, the corporate rich and powerful in American capitalism are shifting their preferred economic policies apart from neoliberalism to economic nationalism.
The main rationale for that revision is that it serves “national protection” because it may at least sluggish” China’s assertiveness”. Domestically, the rich and powerful in each state use their opportunities and resources to change the costs of European mankind’s drop onto the bulk of their middle-income and poorer fellow citizens.
They worsen income and wealth inequalities, cut governmental social services, and harden police behaviors and prison conditions.
The decline of Western capitalism is facilitated by denial. Too little is done too late to address issues that have n’t yet been addressed. Deteriorating social conditions flowing from that decline, especially for the middle-income and the poor, provide opportunities for the usual right-wing demagogues.
They proceed to blame the decline on immigrants, foreigners, excessive state power, the Democrats,  , China, secularism, abortion, and culture war enemies, hoping thereby to assemble a winning electoral constituency. Sadly, left-wing commentary focuses on refuting the right’s claims about its chosen scapegoats.
While its refutations are often well-documented and effective in media combat against right-wing Republicans, the left too rarely invokes explicit, sustained arguments about mass anger’s links to declining capitalism. The left fails sufficiently to stress that government regulators, however well-intentioned, have been captured by and subordinated to specifically private capitalist profiteers.
Therefore, the general public began to doubt whether or not the government could help to fix or fix private capitalism’s failings. People grasp, often just intuitively, that today’s problem is the merger of capitalists and government. Left and right increasingly feel betrayed by all the promises of center-left and center-right politicians.
The trajectory of contemporary capitalism has not been significantly altered by more or less government intervention. Politicians of the center-left and center-right appear to be equally docile servants of the capitalist-government merger that makes up modern capitalism with all its flaws and failures to growing numbers.
Thus today’s right succeeds if, when and where it can portray itself as not centrist, its candidates explicitly anti-centrist. The left is weaker because too many of its initiatives still appear to be connected to the idea that government interventions will fix or fix capitalism’s flaws.
In short, mass anger is disconnected from declining capitalism in part because left, right and center deny, avoid, or neglect their link. Because too few organized political movements have such a strong lead, mass anger does not translate into or yet move to explicit anti-capitalist politics.  ,
Thus, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain’s new Labour Party government – its top financial officer – blithely announces,” There is not a lot of money there”. She prepares the public and preemptively denounces the new government for how little it will actually try to do.
She goes further and calls her main objective “unlocking private investment.” Even the words she chooses resemble what the traditional Conservatives would and would say. Electional changes can and frequently do help in declining capitalisms avoid, or at least delay, real change.
According to Chancellor Reeves, Starmer’s Labour Party will not heavily tax the 1 % of the major corporations they support. This is important because” a lot of money” is located precisely in major corporations and the wealthy.
The top 1 %’s wealth could genuinely finance a democratic reconstruction of a severely underdeveloped post-2008 UK economy. In stark contrast, the typical Conservative programs that prioritize private investment are what led to the UK’s current depressed state. They were the problem, they are not the solution.  ,
The Labour Party was once socialist. A thorough examination of the capitalist system and support for something entirely different were once synonymous with socioalism. Socialists used their electoral victories to bolster the government and aid in the transition of society to a post-capitalist order.
But today’s Labour Party has thrown that history away. It aims to govern contemporary British capitalism a little less harshly than the Conservatives do. It succeeds in persuading the British working class that “less harsh” is the best outcome they can anticipate and support.
And British Conservatives are indeed capable of applauding or disagreeing with a Labour Party because of how harsh modern capitalism “needs.”
Macron, also once a socialist, plays a similar role in France.  , Indeed, so do Biden and Trump in the United States, Justin Trudeau in Canada, and Olaf Scholz in Germany. All provide administrations with their contemporary capitalisms. None have programs aimed at solving modern capitalism’s basic, accumulated and persistently unsolved problems.
Solutions would require first admitting what those problems are: cyclically recurring instability, increasingly unequal distributions of income and wealth, monied corruption of politics, mass media, and culture, and increasingly oppressive foreign policies that fail to offset declining Western capitalism.
Consistent denial in the West as a whole prevents accepting those issues, let alone developing solutions to them woven into programs for real change. Alternative governments administer, they dare not lead.  , Would a Kamala Harris-Tim Walz regime break with this pattern?
Their governments will experiment with and possibly choose between free-trade and protectionist policies, as previous capitalist governments did frequently. Recent GOP and Democrat initiatives to promote economic nationalism in the United States are still popular as exceptions to persistent neoliberal globalization commitments.
Western megacorporations, many of which are based in the United States, welcome China’s new role as the global champion of free trade ( even though it moderately retaliates against tariffs and trade wars that the collective West has started ). For negotiations to shape generally acceptable global divisions of trade and investment flows, support is still strong.
The latter are seen as both profitable and a way to prevent risky wars. Elections will continue to include clashes between capitalism’s free-trade and protectionist tendencies.
The more pressing issue with the 2024 elections is mass outcry in the West as a result of its historic decline and the effects that have had on the general population. How will that anger shape the elections?
The more extreme right wing recognizes and rides the deeper anger without, of course, grasping its relationship to capitalism. Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, and Trump are all examples.
They all make fun of and disparage center-left and center-right governments, which only serve as a sinking ship that requires new, different leadership. But their donor base ( capitalist ) and long-standing ideology ( pro-capitalist ) block them from going beyond extreme scapegoating ( of immigrants, ethnic minorities, heterodox sexualities, and foreign demons ).  ,
The mainstream media, on the other hand, cannot comprehend how capitalism and mass anger relate. Thus they dismiss the anger as irrational or caused by inadequate “messaging” from mainstream influencers.
For many months, mainstream economic pundits have bemoaned the” strange” coexistence of a “great economy” and polls showing mass disappointment at the “bad” economy. By” strange” they mean” stupid” or “ignorant” or “politically-motivated/dishonest”: sets of words often condensed into “populist” . ,
The left is jealous of the extreme right’s significant mass base now in working-class areas. In most countries, the left has spent the last many decades trying to hold on to its working-class base as the mainstream’s center-left movement pulled it away. That resulted in a greater or fewer shift from communist and anarchist ideologies to ever more “moderate” socialist and democratic affiliations.
That shift included downplaying the goal of a comprehensively different post-capitalism in favor of the immediate goal of a state-fostered softer, humane capitalism where wages and benefits were greater, taxes more progressive, cycles more regulated, and minorities less oppressed. For that left, what mass anger it could recognize flowed from failures to achieve such a state-fostered softer capitalism, not from Western capitalism’s decline.
As capitalism’s dynamic center moved to Asia and elsewhere in the Global South, decline set in among its old, more-or-less abandoned centers. Old center capitalists took part in the system’s shift to its dynamic center and made a sizable profit from it. Capitalists, both state and private, in the new centers profited even more. The rich and powerful distributed the burdens of decline onto the populace in the old centers.
The wealthy and powerful gathered the new capitalist wealth there mostly into their hands, with enough trickling down to satisfy a large portion of their working classes. That’s how capitalism works and always has.
For the mass of employees, however, the ride upwards when capitalism’s dynamic center is where they work and live is far more pleasant and hopeful than when decline sets in. The descent causes trauma and depression. When they fester without admission or discussion, they often morph into anger.
Richard D. Wolff is visiting professor in the New School University’s Graduate Program in International Affairs and professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update”, is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to millions via several TV networks and YouTube. Understanding Capitalism ( 2024 ), his most recent book, is Democracy at Work, which responds to inquiries from readers of his earlier books, Understanding Socialism and Understanding Marxism.
The Independent Media Institute’s Economy for All project produced this article. It is republished with kind permission.