Europe’s Rearmament is Fuelling Revolt on its Streets, Says Richard Wolff

Noted American economist and public intellectual Richard D. Wolff argues that there is a strong connection between the economic crisis and popular protests across Europe amid high defence spending and austerity measures in these countries to fight an unwinnable war against Russia.

“Yes. There is every connection,” asserts Wolff, founder of the media platform Democracy at Work, who is also Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School. He had earlier taught economics at Yale University and City University of New York and is an alumnus of Harvard College, Stanford University, and Yale University.

“European leaders imposed austerity on public services to shift funds over to rearmament. Hysterical Russophobia justifies this. Its actual purpose is a fiscal subsidy for big business in Europe now that the US’s problems led Trump to stop financial support to Europe as the junior partner of the US since 1945. After decades of suffering from these austerity policies, ultimately caused by the loss of empire for European countries, the masses are rising up to protect their hard-won social democratic benefits in terms of government public services,” he tells Open in an interview. Born to emigrants who fled to the US from Nazi Germany during World War II, Wolff is well-versed in German and French.

Wolff, whose best-known books include Capitalism Hits the Fan; Democracy at Work; Economics of Colonialism; The Sickness is the System and so on, had said that Europe, whose big corporations have lost their monopoly in various sectors in their various former colonies in Africa, now wants a new colony which, he said, was the motivation for its illogical policies towards Russia. In one of his podcasts, the renowned scholar had said that European leaders were demonisng Russia to distract from their own failures and to justify a fantastical war that would carve up Russia. He had predicted that Europe’s rearmament would lead to internal tensions and potential political upheaval, possibly opening the door for new leaders who might seek a deal with Russia.

In an earlier interview, Wolff had told Open, “The middle of politics -- responsible for the 80 years since 1945 devoted to administering the global US empire (that it inherited from the mutual destruction of all the old empires in World Wars 1 and 2) -- is now being rejected by all those, at home and abroad, who suffered in and from that empire. The masses everywhere -- first in the colonies and now also in the home of the colonising countries -- are rejecting the 80 years’ rule, the last gasp of capitalist imperialism as it declines in the face of the dominance of today’s post- and anti-colonialist era,” he had said.