A patron of Economic Update asks: "I have a relative that that teaches labor studies at a local college, and he and I have gotten into debates about the role of communists and socialists within the labor movement in the US. He claims that those two groups merely "co-opted" the labor movement and failed and that neither of those two groups had any affect on the New Deal programs enacted by FDR. I for the life of me cannot convince him otherwise. But, unfortunately I am a young undergraduate student, so my understanding and in-depth knowledge of these groups and their contributions to the labor movement I don't fully know about. So I was hoping you could point me in the right direction. Second, this same relative proclaims that in all socialist countries there is no union representation of the workers, or that the unions that do exist are state owned and not privately owned, which means they don't really represent the workers. So I was curious if you could point to any unions that did represent workers in socialist countries and their successes/failures."
AskProfWolff is a @Democracy At Work production. We are committed to providing these videos to you free of ads. Please consider supporting us on Patreon.com/economicupdate. Become a part of the growing Patreon community and gain access to exclusive patron-only content, along with the ability to ask Prof. Wolff questions like this one! Your support also helps keep this content free to the public. Spreading Prof. Wolff's message is more important than ever. Help us continue to make this possible.
Learn more about Prof Wolff's new book, "The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself", that comes out mid-September on our books page:
www.democracyatwork.info/books
"Richard Wolff in his new book examines frightening and anti-democratic configurations of corporate power, offering not only a blueprint for how we got here, but a plan for how we will rescue ourselves and create new models of economic and political justice.” - Chris Hedges
Want to help us translate and transcribe our videos?
Learn about joining our translation team: http://bit.ly/2J2uIHH
Jump right in: http://bit.ly/2J3bEZR