En tiempos donde la discusión gira en torno a si salimos o no de la crisis económica, es importante no perder la perspectiva histórica de los acontecimientos que contribuyeron a la presente coyuntura. Son muchos los análisis que prefieren referirse a burócratas ineptos, individuos irresponsables o funcionarios corruptos como los causantes de la catástrofe que atraviesa el sistema capitalista global.

To celebrate their 100th issue, the Heterodox Economics Newsletter editors asked about 100 heterodox economists, representing their school of thought, institution, association, country, or region, about the current state and future of heterodox economics. Richard Wolff was one of the individuals they asked and here is his repsonse:  

Orthodoxy, like heterodoxy, lies largely in its beholders’ eyes. Across the nineteenth century, Marxian economics contested the orthodoxy of classical political economy much as socialism contested capitalism.

卡尔·马克思的《资本论》在美国的新解读 [美]理查德·沃尔夫*   [内容提要]从1975年到2008年，理查德·沃尔夫（Richard Wolff）参与到一项旨在反思和发展马克思主义经济学的集体研究中。在马萨诸塞大学阿默赫斯特分校，这项研究工作取得了一些成果，产生了许多博士学位论文、学术专著和学术论文，催生了一个新的学术期刊《反思马克思主义》及其出版机构“经济与社会分析协会”。该集体研究的中心内容之一，就是对马克思的《资本论》进行新的解读。本文将简要概述这种新的解读方式，以揭示马克思如何依据剩余价值的生产、占有和分配关系来诠释其独特的社会阶级理论。我们认为，马克思的理论并不是机械还原论，而是多元决定论。艾伦·奥克利（Allen Oakley）在《澳大利亚的马克思主义理论家纪念文集》上运用这种解读方式发表了研究成果。后来有关成果被收入到沃尔夫等人编辑的论文集并以德文发表。 [关键词]马克思《资本论》美国新解读   一、引言 艾伦·奥克利对政治经济学史的首要贡献，是其对卡尔·马克思（1818-1883）剩余价值理论演进和发展过程的独到理解。

Professor Wolff's course on the Economic Crisis from the Socialist Perspective

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Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

After teaching both graduate and undergraduate economics since 1969 at Yale, at the City University of New York, and, since 1973, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, I retired at the end of 2008. The economic crisis that exploded across the second half of 2008 had suddenly created exciting new opportunities for Marxian critiques of capitalism to reach large audiences. As usual, the economics profession was far behind the flow of events; most economists continued to celebrate the private enterprises and markets that were so spectacularly imploding all around them.

  Efforts to ally religion (and especially Christianity) with Marxism (and other sorts of socialism) built on their converging social criticisms as capitalism achieved global hegemony over the last two centuries. The specific objects of those criticisms included inequalities of wealth, inequalities of income, the fetishism of commodities, the idolatrous worship of material objects (and their accumulation) at the expense of spiritual values, and the calculating treatment of human beings as mere means to economic goals.

  Like most capitalist crises, today’s challenges economists, journalists, and politicians to explain and to overcome it. The post-1930s struggles between neoclassical and Keynesian economics are rejoined. We show that both proved inadequate to preventing crises and served rather to enable and justify (as ‘‘solutions’’ for crises) what were merely oscillations between two forms of capitalism differentiated according to greater or lesser state economic interventions. Our Marxian economic analysis here proceeds differently.

Marxian analyses are now resurfacing in public dialogues about economy and society. A generation of marginalization is fading as a new generation discovers the diverse richness of the Marxian tradition’s insights. Just as an economic crisisin 1848 helped to provoke and shape Marx’s original insights, today’s crisis helps to renew interest in Marxism.

In the century before the 1970s, the victims of capitalism’s recurring crises and its critics increasingly turned toward Marx’s and other Marxists’ works.

 The transition out of feudalism to capitalism in Europe, mostly from the 17th to the 19th centuries, took multiple forms.  It was uneven as well, happening in different ways at different rates in different places.  Marx studied that transition's various dimensions because they offered valuable lessons for the different transition he was interested in: out of capitalism to socialism and communism.  One such lesson needs restatement now.