Click the links below to listen Professor Richard Wolff discuss his book Democracy at Work on The Dietrich and Brookz Show on WTFE.

Part 1 of the Interview.

Part 2 of the Interview.

  Everyone from the candidates to the parties to observers and voters are making their respective senses of what the election results mean. Here we offer a psychological and economic analysis of an election dominated by what people were voting against and how they reacted to remarkably divisive claims made especially by the Romney and Republican forces.

More important than pathologizing the individual who killed is the task of evaluating the social and psychological conditions - changeable by collective action - that can explain why his frustrations and failures should take such a violent turn against others. In other words, why does the US have more such violent, gun-using explosions of extreme personal upset than most other advanced countries combined?

  Secure, stable jobs gave way to precarious employment over recent decades - and especially during the crisis that started in 2007. Precarious work has dubious benefits for employers and imposes huge economic costs on society and huge human costs on most working people. Precarity exposes capitalism's irrationality and shows the importance of non-capitalist alternatives like the workers' cooperatives organized in Spain's Mondragon Corporation.

This article originally appeared on the Guernica website.

  Over 50 % of today's adults in the US live singly, what a 2012 book by Eric Klinenberg calls Going Solo. We discuss why that happened, the deep loneliness involved, its relationship to modern capitalism, and why basic social change is crucial to overcoming today's isolations.

  Around facts of unemployment, people living alone, children and the elderly, we discuss how differently the 1% and the 99% experience capitalism’s crisis. The 1% and their government have ignored widespread suffering and social costs that react back upon capitalism negatively. Yet massive government support goes mostly to the top banks and other corporations that threaten that they are “too big to fail.” Capitalism has proven to be an unjust, inefficient, and self-destructive system.

We discuss how the tiny top and the increased bottom of the US economic system have very differently experienced economic crisis since 2007. We suggest some specific programs urgently needed and also draw some lessons about what basically has to change.

Charles Murray's new book, Coming Apart,is criticized as a "blame-the-victim" argument applied to the white working class just as Patrick Moynihan applied it to the African-American working class in the 1960s. Murray excludes and thereby exonerates the economic system from responsibility for working class suffering and dysfunction; he blames instead character flaws somehow newly developed in that class.We develop a counterargument that locates the behaviors of both the 1% and the 99% in their logical responses to a dysfunctional economic system.

Recent mass fascination with an alleged rape by then-IMF Chairman Dominique Strauss-Kahn and an admitted extra-marital relationship and child by former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger stress almost exclusively these events' sexual,personal and moral dimensions. Yet such events are also fostered and reproduced by our society's  economy and psychology. Hence our interest in examining them.