Supply Chain Disruptions… a BS excuse

This is Richard Wolff from Democracy at Work with another Wolf Response. This time my response is to something that gets real close to gibberish. It’s the so-called supply chain disruptions. It’s the go-to explanation every time some embarrassed CEO or government official is asked to explain the horrific inflation that is doing so much damage to the working class of this country. And indeed, of other countries that are experiencing inflations even if many of them are not as bad as that in the United States and their CEOs and their government officials are blabbering about supply chain disruptions as well.

So, let’s get right to the point to understand why this is major fakery. First of all, every supply chain is subject to disruptions all the time. That’s what a supply chain is. There’s always something in every business that can and often does go wrong. Weather interferes, transportation difficulties interfere, communication difficulties interfere, workers may go on strike, resources may run out, wars may erupt. I could go on all day. In many sizable companies they have something called a Purchasing Department usually led by a purchasing manager and the job of that person is to expect, anticipate, plan for, and cope with, you guessed it, supply chain disruptions. You know, how you do that. You have a plan B. If one supplier can’t come through you have an alternative to fall back on. If there aren’t enough alternatives, you make sure there’s an inventory so that you have backup on your own premises. If that isn’t possible, make sure there are stockpiles. If you can’t find it inside your community, go outside. 

This is ridiculous. this is what companies do all the time, every day. We even know it’s done because half of the monopolies, the mergers that we see are undertaken as a way of coping with supply chain disruptions. Instead of going into the market, expecting and hoping to buy an input that you need for your company, you buy the other company that provides those inputs, and you make the whole thing internal. So, you can plan on it and not risk the disruption so, this idea that you’re explaining something by disruptions is gibberish. What’s going on here is really quite different. When you have disruptions on a massive scale, when you see thousands of different producers in all corners of the world, in all parts of the

United States jacking up their prices and mumbling something about supply chain disruptions you’re not watching a supply chain disruption. You’re watching a systematic breakdown. That’s what having supply chain disruptions all over the place translates into. And we’re not seeing in fact a supply chain disruption at all. That’s why it’s so vague, that’s why it’s so gestural. What we’re seeing is a great many companies trying to make up for a lost two years. The pandemic, the economic global crash of capitalism in 2020 and 2021. Those did a real number on all kinds of businesses. They couldn’t make in most cases, there were some exceptions, they couldn’t make the kinds of profits they were used to. They had planned on; they had borrowed money presuming and they’ve got to make that up. And the fastest easiest way to do that now is to jack up prices but as businesses always do when they raise their prices, they tell you it’s somebody else’s fault. 

These days the only folks that can point to one CEO points to the CEO of some other company whose prices he has to pay, or she has to pay. In other words, it isn’t one or two CEOs, it’s mostly all of them, and that’s called a systematic problem. Not solved by and not explained by talking about the disruptions that are always there and always have been. We are facing, especially in the United States a capitalism that is declining and one of the reasons you’re seeing it decline are because or is because there are too many breakdowns. Too many parts of this system don’t work, and you can’t blame it anymore on this or that problem because this or that problem we could solve. It’s the general failure that we can’t solve and that is so terrifying that we can’t admit it and that’s why we don’t understand that we have a system problem. We keep blabbering about this or that detail. The details are no longer the problem. Fixing this one or that one will not solve the problem. We have system failure, and the sooner we face it the better the chance are that we will have enough time left to find a solution.