By RICHARD D.WOLFF*
European leaders and their parties continue to calculate how best to regain power after they lost it
In the wake of his huge defeat on June 30, 2024, when 80 percent of voters rejected French “centrist” President Emmanuel Macron, he said he understood the anger of the French people. In the United Kingdom, the losing Conservative Rishi Sunak said the same about the anger of the British people; Labour leader Keir Starmer now says he understands why anger is exploding in his country. Of course, such statements from these politicians often mean little or nothing; they do not imply a substantive change of direction.
These European leaders and their parties are still calculating how best to regain power after they have lost it. In this, they are like the American Democrats after Joe Biden’s performance in his debate with Donald Trump in 2024, or like the Republicans in the US after Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020. In both parties, a small group of leaders and donors always makes all the important decisions, but then organizes the political theater to ratify them “democratically”. Even a surprise like that of Kamala Harris, who replaced Joe Biden in the electoral race, is only a small deviation from the usual course of contemporary politics.
However, unlike Donald Trump, this new candidate has already lost the opportunity to identify with and organize a mass base of angry people. Donald Trump has achieved this identification by saying loudly – and crudely – what traditional politicians think but feel they should not say in public, about immigrants, women, NATO and traditional political taboos.
This situation allowed Donald Trump to insist that he had been deceived and that he had won the 2020 election. The massive anger of people who feel victimized in their daily lives found a spokesperson who loudly claimed to have been the victim of a conspiracy by traditional politicians. Donald Trump and his base understood that, together, they could turn their victimizers into victims.
No major leader in the collective West, including Donald Trump, seems to really “get” why voters’ anger can be exploited politically. When they lose, they are often left with no choice but to blame their opponents in the next election. Joe Biden blamed Donald Trump for a “bad” economy in 2020, while Donald Trump pointed the finger at the same blame in 2016; soon he will blame Kamala Harris. Presidential opponents blame each other for the “immigration crisis,” inadequate protection of American industry from Chinese competition, government budget deficits, and job exports.
No mainstream leader “gets” (or dares to suggest) that the mass anger today might be more than a collection of specific grievances and demands (about guns, abortion, taxes, and wars). Even the demagogues who like to talk about “culture wars” dare not ask why such “wars” are raging now. The angry ones who utter the “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) are remarkably vague and misinformed, as their critics point out. Rarely do these critics offer persuasive alternative explanations for the anger expressed through the word MAGA—that is, explanations that are neither vague nor misinformed.
One wonders, in particular, whether the anger that the MAGA movement expresses is about genuine, mass suffering that has yet to understand its own cause? That cause could be nothing less than the decline of Western capitalism and everything it stands for. If ideological taboos and blinders prevent us from acknowledging it, can the results of that decline—anxiety, despair, and anger—be scapegoated in suitable ways? Are Trump and Biden, Macron and Sunak, and so many others choosing alternative scapegoats to mobilize an anger they do not understand and dare not investigate?
After all, Western capitalism is no longer the colonial master of the world. The American empire, which succeeded the European empires, is now also in decline. The next empire will be Chinese or, alternatively, the age of empires will end and give way to genuine global multipolarity. Western capitalism is also no longer the center of dynamic growth in the world; it has moved to Asia.
Western capitalism is clearly losing its position as the supreme, unified and self-confident power that usually operates behind the World Bank, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and the US dollar as the world currency.
In terms of global economic power, as measured by national GDPs, the United States and its main allies (G7) are falling behind; they have an aggregate total GDP that is already significantly smaller than the aggregate GDPs of China and its main allies (BRICS). The size of the two global economic power blocs was roughly equal in 2020. However, the gap between them has been widening since then and will certainly continue to widen in the coming years.
China and its BRICS allies are increasingly presenting themselves as the richest bloc in the world economy. Nothing has prepared the populations of Western capitalism for this new reality and its effects. In particular, parts of these populations are being forced to bear the heavy burdens of the decline of Western capitalism; they feel betrayed, abandoned and angry. Elections are just one channel through which they express these feelings.
The wealthy, powerful but small minority that dominates Western capitalism practices a combination of denialism and adjustment in the face of its own decline. The mainstream politicians, mainstream media and academics continue to pray, write and act as if the West were still globally dominant. For them, self-absorbed in their ways of thinking, the global dominance gained in the second half of the last century has not ended and will not end. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza bear witness to this denialism, exemplifying the strategic, certainly costly, mistakes it produces.
When they are not denying the new reality, significant portions of the rich and powerful who govern the corporations of Western capitalism are making adjustments to their preferred economic policies; they are maintaining neoliberalism but introducing doses of economic nationalism. The main justification for this type of adjustment is that it serves “national security,” that is, it can at least slow down “China’s aggressiveness.” Internally, the rich and powerful in each country are using their positions and resources to transfer the costs of the decline of Western capitalism to the mass of their middle-income and poorer fellow citizens. They are worsening income and wealth inequalities, cutting government social services, and tightening police behavior and prison conditions.
This denialism facilitates the continued decline of Western capitalism. Too little is done—and too late—because the problems have not yet been addressed as such. The deterioration of social conditions resulting from this decline, especially for middle-income people and the poor, provides opportunities for right-wing demagogues. They continue to blame the decline on foreign immigrants, excessive state power, Democrats, China, secularism, abortion, and the enemies they fight through the culture war; in doing so, they hope to gather a large constituency that will make them winners in the everyday political contest.
Unfortunately, left-wing critics focus only on trying to refute right-wing claims about such scapegoating. While the rebuttals they present are often well-documented and effective in media combat, especially against right-wing media, the left rarely makes explicit and well-supported arguments about the links between mass anger and the decline of capitalism.
The Left fails to emphasize that government regulators, however well-intentioned, have been subjected to or captured by private-sector capitalist speculators.
Thus, the masses of people have become increasingly skeptical about the government’s ability to correct or compensate for the failings of capitalism. People understand, often only intuitively, that the problem today is the fusion of capitalists with negligent governments. The popular left and right feel increasingly betrayed by the promises of politicians from the center-left to the center-right spectrum.
Government intervention has changed very little in the trajectory of modern capitalism. To a growing number of people, politicians of the center-left and the center-right seem like equal docile servants of this fusion of capitalists and powerless governments. Yet this fusion constitutes modern capitalism with all its failings and flaws. Thus today’s right successfully portrays itself as non-centrist; it runs explicitly polar candidates. The left is weaker because many of its programs still seem tied to the idea that good government interventions can correct or compensate for capitalism’s shortcomings.
In short, mass anger is not connected to the decline of capitalism, partly because the left, right and center deny, avoid or neglect that this connection exists. Mass anger does not translate into or is not yet driven by an explicit anti-capitalist politics, partly because few organized political movements have shown themselves capable of showing another way.
Thus Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain’s new Labour government, blithely announces that “there’s not much money here.” In this way, she prepares the public—and preemptively excuses the new government—for how little it can do. She goes further and defines her main goal as “unlocking private investment.” Even the words she chooses sound good to old Tories; they say what they themselves would say if they were in government. In declining capitalism, electoral changes can and often do prevent or at least postpone real change.
Rachel Reeves’s words assure big corporations and the top 1% that the Labour Party, now led by Keir Starmer, will not tax them heavily. This is music to their ears, since it is precisely in big corporations and the pockets of the rich and very rich that there is “big money”. The wealth of this top 1% could easily fund a genuinely democratic reconstruction of a British economy seriously depleted after the 2008 crisis. In contrast, typical Conservative programmes prioritising private investment are what got the UK into its current sorry state. They were the problem; they are not the solution.
The Labour Party was once socialist. Socialism once meant a thoroughgoing critique of the capitalist system and the advocacy of something quite different. In the past, socialists sought electoral victories to gain government power in order to transition to a post-capitalist order. But today’s Labour Party has thrown away that history. It wants to manage contemporary British capitalism a little less harshly than the Conservatives.
It works to persuade the British working class that something “less harsh” is the best they can hope for. And British Conservatives may indeed smile and condescendingly approve of such a Labour Party, or even go on to argue with it about how much harshness today’s capitalism “needs.”
Emmanuel Macron, who was also a socialist, now plays a similar role in France. Indeed, so do Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the United States, Justin Trudeau in Canada, and Olaf Scholz in Germany. All offer administrative recipes for moving capitalism forward in decline. None of them has programs designed to solve the basic, accumulated and persistently unresolved problems of capitalism in its current phase.
Solutions would require first acknowledging what these problems are: cyclically recurring instability, increasingly unequal distributions of income and wealth, monetary corruption of politics, mass media and culture, and increasingly oppressive foreign policies that fail to compensate for a declining Western capitalism. The collective denialism that thrives throughout the West prevents these problems from being seen; it also prevents new solutions from being thought of and presented in programs that aim to achieve real change. Current alternative governments only administer; they dare not lead. Would a regime led by Kamala Harris and Tim Walz break this pattern?
If he comes to power, his administration will certainly vacillate between free trade and protectionist policies – just as previous capitalist governments have done. In the United States, the recent moves by the Republican Party, as well as the Democratic Party, toward economic nationalism are exceptions to the widespread commitments to neoliberal globalization; they are exceptions that aim and strive to win votes.
Western megacorporations, including many based in the United States, welcome China’s new role as a global champion of free trade (even if it is being retaliated against moderately through tariffs and trade wars initiated by the West). Support remains strong for negotiations to shape generally acceptable global divisions of trade and investment flows. The latter are seen as profitable, as well as a means of avoiding dangerous wars.
In the upcoming elections, the clash between free trade and protectionist tendencies will continue to play out. But the most fundamental factor in this year’s US elections is the widespread anger that has been aroused in the collective West by its historic decline; the effects of this decline are affecting the mass of ordinary citizens without their being able to understand it. How will this anger shape the elections?
The far right acknowledges and rides on the deepest anger without, of course, clarifying its intimate relationship with the state of capitalism. Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage and Donald Trump are examples. They all mock and ridicule the centre-left and centre-right governments that are merely managing what they describe as a sinking ship in need of new and different leadership. But their donor base (capitalist) and their long-standing ideology (pro-capitalist) prevent them from going beyond finding a scapegoat (immigrants, ethnic minorities, heterodox sexualities and foreign demons).
The mainstream media also fails to understand the connection between mass anger and capitalism. So they dismiss the anger as irrational, claiming it was caused by inappropriate “messaging” from influencers seeking prestige and money. For many months, leading economic experts have been bemoaning the “strange” coexistence of a “strong economy” – polls show – with mass disappointment about a “bad economy.” By “strange” they mean “stupid” or “ignorant” or “politically motivated/dishonest”: word combinations often condensed into the term “populist.”
The left is jealous of the far right’s significant mass base, which, as we know, has now penetrated large sections of the working class. In most countries, the left movement has spent the last decades trying to maintain its working-class base; however, the center-left movement, which was dominant in this political current, did everything it could to undermine this base. This has led even communists and anarchists to embrace increasingly “moderate” socialist and liberal-democratic theses.
This shift included downplaying the quest for a post-capitalism, vastly different from those of the past, in favor of the immediate goal of fighting for a softer, more humane capitalism that would be promoted by the state; in such a capitalism, wages and benefits would be higher, taxes would be more progressive, cycles would be better regulated, and minorities would be less oppressed. For this left, the mass anger it was able to recognize stemmed from failures to achieve a softer, more state-promoted capitalism, not from the decline of Western capitalism.
As the dynamic center of capitalism shifted to Asia and elsewhere in the global South, decline set in among its old centers, which were more or less abandoned. Capitalists in the old center participated and profited greatly as the system relocated its dynamic center. Capitalists, both state and private, in the new centers profited even more. In the old centers, the rich and powerful transferred the burden of decline to the masses.
In the new centers, the rich and powerful gathered the new capitalist wealth mainly in their own hands, leaving only what was needed to satisfy large sections of the working classes. This is how capitalism works and has always worked. To the mass of employees, the upward movement of the dynamic center of capitalism, in which they worked and lived, seemed pleasant and hopeful.
But this gradually disappeared as decline took hold in society. Now, this decline in prosperity causes depression and trauma. The decline without awareness, without admission and without discussion, turns into anger.
*Richard D. Wolff is an economist. He founded the Democracy at Work portal. Author, among other books, of Capitalism's Crisis Deepens (Haymarket).
Translation: Eleutério FS Prado.
Originally published on the portal counter punch.
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