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Michael Hudson [Intro/Music]: America cannot re-industrialize without reversing this whole philosophy of post-industrial society as a class war against labor. You can’t have both. You can’t have a class war against labor and reindustrialization with the labor unxization that goes with it.
Countries who let an oligarchy develop end up pushing their own economies into obsolescence and a kind of dark age. It’s policy, and most of all, it’s the policy of the Democratic Party’s administration here.
[00:01:35] Geoff Ginter [Intro/Music]: Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

迈克尔·哈德森[引言/音乐]:
如果不转变整个后工业社会哲学的反劳工的阶级战争，美国就无法实现再工业化。你不能两者兼得。你不可能有一场反劳工的阶级斗争的同时，还有一场伴随着工会化而来的再工业化。
任由寡头政治发展的国家最终会把自己的经济推向过时和黑暗时代。这是政策，最重要的是，这是民主党政府的政策。
杰夫·金特[引言/音乐]:
现在，让我们看看我们是否能完全避免世界末日。这是另一集由主持人史蒂夫·格拉宾主持的Macro N Cheese节目。

Steven Grumbine: All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today’s guest is none other than Michael Hudson. Michael Hudson’s the president of the Institute for Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street financial analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and he is the author of many, many books you’ve probably read, including Superimperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, Forgive Them Their Debts, J is for Junk Economics, Killing The Host, The Bubble And Beyond: Trade, Development and Foreign Debt, amongst others. Without further ado, I want to bring on my guest, Michael Hudson. Michael, thank you so much for joining me today, sir.
[00:02:26] Michael Hudson: Good to be back.

史蒂夫·格拉宾：
好的。我是Macro N Cheese的史蒂夫。今天的嘉宾不是别人正是迈克尔·哈德森。迈克尔·哈德森是长期经济趋势研究所(ISLET)的主席，华尔街金融分析师，堪萨斯城密苏里大学杰出经济学研究教授。他写了很多很多书，你可能读过，包括《超级帝国主义:美国的帝国经济战略》、《免除他们的债务》、《垃圾经济学》、《杀死宿主》、《泡沫及以后:贸易、发展和外债》等等。话不多说，我想请到我的嘉宾，迈克尔·哈德森。迈克尔，非常感谢你今天能来，先生。
迈克尔·哈德森:
很高兴回来。
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Grumbine: Absolutely. So one of the things that’s stressing me out, as far as being an economic podcast and reviewing the dialogue that is going on in the ecosphere and lefties trying to make heads or tails of the world around them, is watching the fallout of decisions that the United States have made in regards to Ukraine, China, Russia, and this divergence into a multipolar world. The steps that the United States have taken appear to be shooting themselves in the foot.
An empire that has lost its grip on much of what it once had, and it’s doing things that I think most people would say are really horrible, from war, to austerity, to using the IMF and NATO as tools of aggression. There’s so many aspects to the United States approach to geopolitical relationships, that I think most people are trying to get a grip on.

格拉宾：
当然。作为一名经济播客，回顾生态圈中正在进行的对话，以及试图对周围世界做出正面或反面判断的左翼人士，让我感到压力的一件事是，观察美国在乌克兰、中国、俄罗斯等问题上做出的决定的后果，以及这种向多极世界分化的趋势。美国采取的措施似乎是搬起石头砸自己的脚。
一个帝国已经失去了对它曾经拥有的大部分东西的控制，而且它正在做的事情我想大多数人会说真的很可怕，从战争到紧缩，到利用国际货币基金组织和北约作为侵略工具。美国处理地缘政治关系的方式有很多方面，我认为大多数人都在试图掌握这些方面。

What does this mean to them? In discussing this, before we started this podcast, you gave us some notes, and it was quite clear that the United States is a failed state. I don’t fully understand what that means, but I’m hoping that maybe you can help us understand why is the US a failed state and what is it about its recent behavior?
What does it indicate to us about where it’s headed, and what we can expect in the future?

这对他们意味着什么?在讨论这个问题时，在我们开始这期播客之前，你给了我们一些笔记——很明显，美国是一个失败的国家。但我不完全明白这是什么意思，我希望你能帮助我们理解为什么美国是一个失败的国家，以及它最近的行为是什么?
它向我们表明了它的走向，以及我们对未来的期望是什么?

[00:03:58] Hudson: Well, I think it’s a failed state because its economy is paralyzed and we’re in a debt deflation, an economic polarization, that is just transferring all wealth and income away from labor, away from industry, into really the financial sector and what I call the finance, insurance, and real estate sector.
And what’s failed is, right now, President Biden says that he wants the future to re-industrialize. He realizes that ever since the Clinton administration, the Democratic Party has been solidly behind de-industrializing the United States, and that’s actually going back to the 1960s and early 70s when economists were celebrating what they called, a post-industrial society.
Well, what does a post-industrial society mean? It meant a society without blue collar labor, really, service labor, which happened to be a society without labor unxs. And the promise was that a post-industrial society was going to make everybody richer, and you’d have easier working conditions, and shorter working days, and productivity would rise, and everybody would have an easier, more prosperous life.

哈德森:
我认为这是一个失败的国家，因为它的经济瘫痪了，我们处于债务通缩，经济两极分化，这只是把所有的财富和收入从劳动力、工业转移到金融部门，我称之为金融、保险和房地产部门（FIRE，后文统称FIRE）。
如今，失败的地方在于——拜登总统说他希望未来重新工业化。他意识到，自克林顿政府以来，民主党一直坚定地支持美国去工业化，这实际上可以追溯到20世纪60年代和70年代初，当时经济学家正在庆祝他们所谓的后工业社会。
后工业社会意味着什么?这意味着一个没有蓝领工人的社会，也就是没有服务性劳工的社会，而这恰好是一个没有工会的社会。他们承诺后工业社会会让每个人都更富有，工作环境会更轻松，工作时间会更短，生产力会提高，每个人的生活都会更轻松，更繁荣。

Well, that hasn’t happened, so the question is: Why did the United States decide to de-industrialize? And I think it was done as a combination between two parties. You had the Democrats with a pro-financial anti-labor policy, and the Republicans with a pro-financial, pro-landlord, pro-1% policy, wanting tax cuts; and the real obxtive of de-industrialization from Clinton on, was an anti-labor policy, because de-industrialization meant essentially lowering employment, and thereby lowering the demand for labor, and lowering the wages. And the question that everyone was asking from 1980 on was, why were wages having to be reduced, and why are wages lower right now? Well, for years, American dominance, as an industrial power in the late 19th century, was a result of low wages, as a result of low housing costs, low debt, free education, public services, and this had created a very prosperous US economy, from right after the Civil War, down through Roosevelt’s New Deal.
But all of this began to come under attack. Really beginning with the Carter administration, when he was promoting immigration as a means of cutting wages in the southwest. It was Carter that began to realize that, well, there’s a lot of labor that’s making too much money in the southwest, we’ll spur immigration.

但这并没有发生，所以问题是：为什么美国决定去工业化?
我认为这是两党合作的结果。民主党人奉行亲金融的反劳工政策，共和党人奉行亲金融、亲地主、亲1%（精英）的政策，想要减税。从克林顿开始，去工业化的真正目标是反劳工政策，因为去工业化本质上意味着降低就业，从而降低对劳动力的需求，降低工资。从1980年开始，每个人都在问的问题是，为什么工资必须降低，为什么现在的工资更低?
多年来，美国作为一个工业大国在19世纪后期的主导地位，是低工资，低住房成本，低债务，免费教育，公共服务的结果，这创造了一个非常繁荣的美国经济，从内战后一直到罗斯福新政。
但这一切都开始受到攻击。从卡特政府开始，当时他在推动移民作为削减美国西南部工资的一种手段。是卡特开始意识到，好吧，有很多劳动力在西南部赚了太多的钱，我们将刺激移民。

Well, when Clinton came in later, he wanted to deregulate the economy and he wanted free trade, for basically, corporations to de-invest from the United States, and invest abroad, and hire low wage labor. He pressed to accept China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, and that’s basically the Democratic Party program today, to fight against labor, and reduce its wages, and favor Wall Street. Obama typified this. He promised a card-check to support unxization, and then just refused to do it. And instead of introducing card check, he devoted his time to hoping to work with the Republicans, to cut back Social Security, on the grounds that you had to balance the budget. And by balancing the budget, that would force the economy to rely on private banks lending money at interest, instead of the government creating money to spend into the economy by running budget deficits.

当克林顿后来上台时，他想要放松对经济的管制，他想要自由贸易。简而言之，公司从美国撤出投资，到国外投资，雇佣低工资的劳动力。2001年，他敦促中国加入世界贸易组织，这本质上是民主党今天的计划——反对劳工，降低工资，支持华尔街。奥巴马代表了这一点。他承诺用卡片支票来支持工会，随后又拒绝这样做。
他没有引入卡片支票制度，而是把时间花在希望与共和党人合作上，削减社会保障，理由是必须平衡预算。通过平衡预算，迫使经济依赖于私人银行的利息贷款，而不是政府通过预算赤字来创造货币投入经济。

Well, Biden has topped it all off by not supporting labor unxs, as you saw during the railroad strike, and by the Democrats having a trick that they pull. They have some postgraduate lady – maybe she does have a degree, as the Parliamentarian, who, just in case the Democrats and Congress would pass a law that people want, the parliamentarian said, you can’t pass that because that’s pro-labor. And being pro-labor is against the Constitution. Because that’s against what the original leaders of the Constitution meant. And you can’t pass a law favoring blacks or hispanics, as you saw with the Harvard case, because after all, the original authors of the Constitution were mostly slave owners, and they wouldn’t have wanted any such favoritism to the blacks.So if you’re an originalist, of course you’re going to have the Parliamentarian lady say, well, that’s not really what the Supreme Court will agree with. And of course, when it finally did get to the Supreme Court, they said: you can’t do this, this is not what the original founders of the Constitution wanted and believed.

拜登最糟糕的是，他不支持工会，就像你在铁路罢工期间看到的那样。而且民主党人也在玩他们的把戏，他们有一些研究生女士，也许她确实有一个学位。作为国会议员，一旦民主党和国会通过了一项人们想要的法律，这些国会议员会说，你不能通过，因为那是亲劳工的。支持劳工是违反宪法的。因为这违背了宪法最初的领袖们的意思。你不能通过一项偏袒黑人或西班牙裔的法律，就像你在哈佛案例中看到的那样，因为毕竟，宪法的起草者大多是奴隶主，他们不希望黑人受到这样的偏袒。
所以如果你是原旨主义者——国会女士会说，好吧，这不是最高法院会同意的。显然，当它最终到达最高法院时，他们说：你不能这样做，这不是宪法最初的创始人想要和相信的。

They wanted to enslave the blacks, not get them into Harvard for heaven’s sakes. Well, I don’t want to leave the Republicans out of this, because they’ve had a kind of complementary pro-rentier policy, favoring real estate under Reagan, with his accelerated depreciation. He basically made absentee ownership and commercial real estate tax exempt, and he slashed the taxes on wealth, and moved away from progressive taxation to regressive taxation. As did Donald Trump, and of course the Democrats have accepted all of this. There was no attempt by the Democrats to fight back against the Republicans regressive taxation, and the difference is that the Republicans have a kind of libertarian, anti-government policy, which is their euphemism for a government strong enough to control the economy, and the interests of the 1%, who are their campaign donors.

他们想奴役黑人，而不是让他们进哈佛。
我不想把共和党人排除在外，因为他们有一种互补的亲食利者政策，在里根的加速贬值政策下，有利于房地产。他基本上免除了所有权和商业房地产税，他削减了财富税，从累进税转向累退税。
唐纳德·特朗普也是如此。当然，民主党人已经接受了这一切。民主党人没有试图反击共和党的累退税收，不同的是，共和党人有一种自由主义的反政府政策，这是他们对一个强大到足以控制经济和1%利益的政府的委婉说法，1%是他们的竞选捐助者。
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And the Democrats are pro-government. Namely, they want a pro-government strong enough to defend the 1% against the rest of the economy, but they use a different rhetoric for all of this. So the problem is that both US political parties are committed to de-industrialization for the reasons that the head of the Federal reserve has explained over the last few months: if you have more industrialization, you’ll have more employment, and if you have more employment, you’ll raise wages. And our philosophy, Democrats and Republicans alike, is to keep wages down so that corporate profits can be higher. And it’s worth it to the employing class, it’s worth it to the corporate monopolies to impose a depression on the United States, as long as that will reduce wages and strengthen the power of the 1% over the 99%. So the 1% is willing to lose sales, to lose profits, as the economy falls into what they call a recession, as long as their power over the 99% increases.

而民主党是亲政府的。也就是说，他们想要一个足够强大的亲政府来保护1%的人不受其他经济群体的影响，但他们使用了不同的修辞来表达这一切。所以问题是，美国两党都致力于去工业化，原因就像美联储主席在过去几个月里解释的那样:
工业化程度越高，就业就会越多，就业越多，工资就会提高。我们的理念，无论是民主党人还是共和党人，都是压低工资，这样企业利润才能更高。只要能降低工资，加强1%凌驾于99%之上的权力，对雇主阶级和垄断企业来说，让美国陷入萧条是值得的。所以1%的人愿意失去销售，失去利润，因为经济陷入了他们所谓的衰退，只要他们对99%的权力增加。
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That’s the basic key to understanding where American politics is going. And this is why the Davos gang says the world is overpopulated. Who needs labor, when it really can’t afford to pay interest. For the financial sector and the FIRE sector, the 1% or the 10%, the role of labor is to make enough earnings so that it can pay interest to the banks, pay rents or interest to the mortgage lenders, and can basically pay money to the FIRE sector. And if labor’s wages really are forced down to break-even subsistence levels, then who needs labor? Time for population control. And basically the US problem is not only low wages, but it’s tax favoritism for the FIRE sector. And this cannot be reversed without causing a bank crisis. Because if you were to tax real estate and home ownership, for instance, and commercial real estate with a land tax, which is what the whole 19th century’s classical economics is all about, then the banks couldn’t get paid. So we’re stuck. America cannot re-industrialize without reversing this whole philosophy of post-industrial society as a class war against labor.

这是理解美国政治走向的基本关键。这就是达沃斯那帮人说世界人口过剩的原因。当工资连利息都付不起的时候，谁还需要劳动。对于金融部门和FIRE部门，以及1%或10%，劳动力的作用是赚取足够的收入，以便向银行支付利息，或者向抵押贷款机构支付租金或利息。
如果劳动力的工资真的被迫降至勉强维持生计的水平，那么谁还需要劳动力?是时候控制人口了。基本上，美国的问题不仅仅是低工资，还有对消防部门的税收偏袒。这种情况不可能在不引发银行危机的情况下逆转。
因为如果你对房地产和房屋所有权征税，比如，对商业房地产征收土地税（这就是整个19世纪古典经济学的全部内容），那么银行就拿不到钱了。所以我们被困住了。美国要实现再工业化，就必须扭转整个后工业社会的哲学，将其定性为一场针对劳工的阶级战争。

You can’t have both. You can’t have a class war against labor and reindustrialization, with the labor unxization that goes with it. That’s the conundrum. So when Biden talks about, we at the Democratic party want to re-industrialize, there’s no way that his policies can possibly permit any real re-industrialization to occur. And that’s why America’s stuck. That’s why it’s become a failed state, because it can’t compete with other countries in today’s world with this right wing libertarian, anti-labor, neoliberal philosophy.

你不能两者兼得。你不可能有一场反对劳工和再工业化的阶级斗争，以及随之而来的工会化。这是一个难题。所以当拜登说，我们民主党想要再工业化时，他的政策不可能允许任何真正的再工业化发生。这就是美国陷入困境的原因。这就是为什么它成为了一个失败的国家，因为它无法与当今世界上的其他国家竞争，就因为它的右翼自由主义、反劳工和新自由主义哲学。

[00:13:29] Grumbine: Every time I think about this, I get enraged. We’ve been speaking with some abolitionists for police abolition. When we talk to them, they explain, you’ve got it all backwards. The police aren’t there after the fact. They’re not there as a result of crime. They’re there to keep order for capital, to make sure that capital runs smoothly. And to extend this out to NATO, and it does the same thing around the world, it’s there to create chaos, and it’s there to institute order to facilitate these things. The US is losing its grip on its empire, yet has the largest military ever amassed in the history of the world. What about that military maintains hegemony? And what about that military is costing it it’s hegemony. Cuz right now something’s outta whack. I’m all about ripping the empire down, but that has a whole lot of downstream dominoes that come with it. I’m interested in your thoughts on the role of the military industrial complex on this failed state.

格拉宾:
每次想到这个，我就生气。我们一直在和一些废奴主义者讨论废除警察。当我们和他们交谈时，他们解释说，你完全理解错了。事后警察并不在场。他们不是因为犯罪才在那里的。他们的存在是为了维护资本秩序，确保资本顺利运行。
延伸到北约，它在世界各地做同样的事情，它在那里制造混乱，它在那里建立秩序以促进这些事情。美国正在失去对其帝国的控制，但却拥有世界历史上最庞大的军队。那维持霸权军队怎么办?
军事上的损失怎么办?因为现在有些事情不正常。我很想把这个帝国拆了，但这会带来很多多米诺骨牌效应。我很想知道你对军工联合体在这个失败国家中所扮演的角色的看法。

[00:14:32] Hudson: Well, you’re using a trick word: ‘military.’ Military, for the United States, is different from what the word ‘military’ meant in every other society from the beginning of time. When you say military, you think of an army fighting. You cannot conquer a country without invading it, and to invade it, you obviously need an army, you need troops. But the Americans can’t mount an army, of enough size, to occupy anybody except Grenada, or Panama, because the Vietnam War stopped the military draft. What America does have, what it calls military, is what you quite rightly lixed it to: the military industrial complex. It makes arms. And weapons.

哈德森:
你用了一个词:“军事”。从一开始，美国的“军事”一词就不同于其他任何社会的“军事”一词。当你说到军事，你会想到战斗中的军队。不入侵就无法征服一个国家，而要入侵，你显然需要一支军队，你需要军队。但美国人无法组建一支足够规模的军队，占领格林纳达或巴拿马以外的任何国家，因为越南战争停止了征兵。美国所拥有的，它所谓的军事，正是你所说的:军事工业综合体——它制造武器和装备。

But again, these are a funny kind of weapons. Suppose you had a winery that made wine that was so good, that really wasn’t for drinking. It was for wealthy people to buy, and to trade. And as the years go by, the wine would turn to vinegar. It’s not wine for drinking. It’s wine for making a profit, a capital gain. Well, you can say the same thing about America’s military arms, as we’re seeing in Ukraine right now — or as President Biden calls it, Iraq. The arms, basically, are there to create a huge profit for Raytheon, and the other companies in the military industrial complex. They’re for buying, and they’re for giving to the Ukrainians, to let Russia blow them up.

但是，这是一种有趣的武器。假设你有一个酿酒厂，它酿造的葡萄酒非常好，但不是用来喝的。它是有钱人购买和交易的。随着岁月的流逝，酒变成了醋。这酒不是用来喝的。它是用来盈利的酒，资本收益。
你也可以对美国的军事武器说同样的话，就像我们现在在乌克兰看到的那样，或者像拜登总统所说的那样——伊拉克。这些武器基本上是为雷神公司和其他军工企业创造巨额利润而制造的。他们支持购买，支持给乌克兰人，让俄罗斯把他们炸了。
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But they’re not for fighting. They’re not for winning a war. They’re for being used up, so you have to replace them now, with yet new buying. And so the United States State Department has asked Germany and other European countries, well, you’d promised to pay 2% of your GDP on military arms to enrich our military industrial complex. But now that we’ve given all these tanks and missiles away – Russia just blew up 12% of all the tanks in just one week – so we only have a few weeks left to go before they’re all wiped out. Because they really don’t work on the battlefield. They’re not for fighting, they’re for being blown up. Now we want you to actually increase your spending to 4%, to replenish all of the stocks, you’ve just depleted, 10 years, maybe 20 years, of your arms stocks. And you have to now replenish them very rapidly, in order to meet the NATO targets, that we and the State Department, have set. So military today isn’t really how you control other countries. America’s found it much easier to do this by financial mechanisms.

但它们不是用来战斗的，它们不是为了赢得战争。它们是为消耗掉而准备的，所以你现在必须用新的购买来替换它们。因此，美国国务院要求德国和其他欧洲国家，你们承诺将国内生产总值的2%用于军事武器，以充实我们的军事工业综合体。
但是现在我们已经把所有的坦克和导弹都送走了——俄罗斯在一周内炸毁了所有坦克的12%——所以在这些武器被消耗殆尽之前我们只剩下几周的时间。因为它们在战场上真的不起作用。它们不是用来战斗的，而是用来被炸飞的。现在我们想让你把开支增加到4%，以补充所有的库存，你刚刚耗尽了10年，也许20年的武器库存。你现在必须非常迅速地补充它们，以达到我们和国务院设定的北约目标。所以今天的军事并不是你控制其他国家的真正方式。美国发现通过金融机制来做到这一点要容易得多。

You conquer a country financially, you conquer a country by getting it to submit to austerity programs by the International Monetary Fund, again, to impose austerity, to keep its local wages down. So you use finance as a means of imposing post-industrialization and depression, in order to prevent democracy from developing. So any country that is seeking to promote a democracy by public spending on basic infrastructure, or banking, like China is doing, is called an autocracy. And every autocracy that has imposed a client oligarchy, to fight against labor, and to prevent these policies that would help enrich and industrialize the economy, is called a democracy, not an autocracy. So we’re back in the Orwellian logic to describe a situation, that probably even the cynical George Orwell, would not have thought could go quite this far.

你在财政上征服一个国家，你通过让它服从国际货币基金组织的紧缩计划来征服一个国家，再一次，实施紧缩政策，以降低当地的工资。所以你用金融作为强加后工业化和萧条的手段，来阻止民主的发展。
因此，任何一个国家，如果像中国那样，通过在基础设施或银行业上的公共支出来寻求促进民主，就被称为专制国家。每一个专制国家，如果被强加了寡头政治的附庸，与劳工斗争，阻止这些有助于富裕和工业化经济的政策，就被称为民主，而不是专制。
所以我们回到奥威尔的逻辑来描述一种情况。即使是愤世嫉俗的乔治·奥威尔，也不会想到会走到今天这个地步。
（未完待续）

（见末篇）