WCP: Noam Chomsky and The Trump Presidency and Dr. Wolff

The Divide says the current inequality problem began with the election of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Do you agree? It escalated sharply under Reagan and Thatcher, who gave it a kind of ideological framework, but I think you really have to date the turn to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system about 10 years earlier, when the US terminated the convertibility of dollars to gold. This shifted the global economy pretty radically towards financialisation, and rapidly increased speculation.

In the film, you describe people’s belief in the benefits of capitalism as a kind of “religion”, adding that what we have is only an illusion of capitalism in any case.