What are your views on Universal Basic Income?
January 01, 2017
Finland, Canada, The Netherlands and Scotland are all seriously making strides towards the introduction of a Universal Basic Income (the idea that everyone gets an income from the state as a basis upon which to build their lives earning, learning or stating a business). Europe's biggest political party, the Labour Party, their Chancellor has indicated that UBI will form part of their next election manifesto, along with laws to bring about worker co-ops. Could this be another way to organise our economies away from Capitalism?
Richard Wolff posted an official response
To answer your question directly: it could be. But that depends on how UBI is understood and then used. As other commentators have pointed out, in capitalism there are basically two sources of income: labor and property. Labor incomes include wages, salaries, fees for services rendered etc. Property incomes include rentals, profits, dividends, interest, capital gains and so on. The key point here is that capitalism already dispenses income to people unconnected with their work. So UBI would NOT be a new ideas in the sense of disconnecting income from work. What UBI does is make that disconnect universal, for everyone rather than just for owners of income-earning property (usually a small minority of the population). If we do not believe that providing income without requiring work to property owners has not dampened their incentives to be socially productive, I see little reason to worry about that in regard to universalizing such a basic income distribution so everyone gets it. The way to do this is also simple: tax property income and distribute it equally to all persons. Framed in that way, yes, UBI could be a step toward the next system, toward doing better than capitalism.
New School Spring '17 Course
December 31, 2016
Prof. Wolff, If at all possible, please do get someone to record your lectures (as you've done in the past for the Marxian Econ classes) for the Contending Theories class you're teaching in Spring 2017! We would all love to have that resource preserved. Let us know what you need from us.
Richard Wolff posted an official response
Please get in touch with me via email to pursue this plan/idea. Most important at this point is that enough GPIA students at The New School enroll officially to be surfe the course is formally offered. I am ready to teach it as I have done before.
Do you believe in government by the free will of the people
December 31, 2016
Do you believe in government by the free will of the people The future hinges on humanity's ability to make choices, it is time, we must crowd source government! I would like you to Open your mind and leave any preconceived notions of what post representative democracy may look like. I hope that you would agree that in the natural process, when a small group of people are trying to find consensus, suggestions and ideas are put forward by any one or more individuals in the group. Informal voting takes place. Based on that information, more suggestions may emerge. This process is repeated until the highest level of satisfaction is achieved. Only then is the vote official. The free flow of unofficial voting is essential. We would like to add that various voting reforms are attempts to supplement for our inability to provide, the free flow of unofficial voting. we can recreate this on the worldwide scale. WHY US, WHY NOW? The opinion market. There are three main forms of the growing opinion market. Growing because the average Internet user age is passing approximately 40 these markets are: (1) polling for news organizations. (2) The commercial product & entertainment market. (3) And then we have the political upheaval pushing for change. This is the one that is forcing Twitter to act as a petition. This is also the market that thousands of organizations are competing for at this very moment. Within the next 2 to 5 years, someone will fill this void. It is easily predictable that there will be several entities that will emerge victorious, each in slightly different ways. The voice of humanity will be louder, but it will not be speaking with one voice. Right now there is an opportunity to monopolize all of these markets, and expand on it by accepting all opinions of every conceivable type. Everything in life can be political, and everyone in the world has an opinion on something. We are here because no one else is aware of this opportunity, and we cannot just sit here and watch it go by. Here is our plan, http://www.yourupinion.com/ We are asking if you could take a moment to give us your perspective, and let us know if you would like to be involved. Thank you from our 68 members, and myself, Brian Charlebois.
Richard Wolff posted an official response
Our short answer is definitely yes, we believe in democratic decision-making. Our focus is on the democratization of the workplace as it strikes us that the flaws and limits of political democracy have a great deal to do with the absence of an economic democracy upon which to ground and with which to ally political democracy.
We should keep in touch via our respective websites and allied activities.
Are you concerned that the "Alt-Right" has included you on it's "Professor Watch List"?
December 30, 2016
http://www.professorwatchlist.org/index.php/watch-list-directory/search-by-name/181-richard-d-wolff
Richard Wolff posted an official response
The Trump phenomenon brings out of the woodwork all sorts of characters newly emboldened to vent their frustrations and hostilities. This list is another in a long history of such ventings. The information on me is factually in error. I have not discerned any effect of being on the list; I do regret that The New York Times saw fit to give huge publicity to such an obscure, inaccurate list. Indeed, I find that more important than the list itself.
Venezuelan Co-ops and what can we learn from their economic revolution?
December 30, 2016
Professor Wolff, I would like to know your thoughts on the Venezuelan socialist movement and in particular the cooperatives and communes. It appears the cooperatives are struggling to replace the entrenched capitalist system. There are many critiques from outside influence (US clandestine ops), to lack of diversified industries, trade deficits, black markets, hoarding by the elites and chronic inflation. I would like to know, why are cooperatives struggling to replace capitalist enterprise in Venezuela? I ask this because I believe the situation in Venezuela may give us some useful insight into our own efforts to replace the capitalist enterprise here at home in the United States. http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/30/venezuelas-communal-movement/
Richard Wolff posted an official response
The situation in Venezuela has a number of special circumstances that make it hard to judge worker coops without reference to them. Such special circumstances include internal political turmoil, the depressed global oil price that hurst an oil-dependent exporter like Venezuela, unremitting hostility from the US, economic problems in Europe hampering its ability to interact with Venezuela in mutually beneficial ways. If you want good scholarly attention to worker coops in Latin America, here is a place to start: Peter Ranis, Cooperatives Confront Capitalism: Challenging Liberal Capitalism, London: Zed Books, 2016.
Federal and Fractional Reserve Banking
December 30, 2016
It seems to me that the current fractional reserve banking system facilitates transfers from poor to rich. Is this right? Do you believe there are preferable alternatives? Thanks.
no democracy in government employment, then what?
December 30, 2016
As a government employee I don't have the ability to change my employment into a democratically ran place, what does that say about government itself as a non democratic establishment of employment and what can government line staff employees do to improve such conditions? Line staff (direct public servants) are the ones doing the brunt of the labor and our benefits and pay are slashed in the same manner as employees in private sector.
Richard Wolff posted an official response
No rule, law, or precedent dictates where the transition from top-down, hierarchical workplace organizations to democratic, cooperative organizations will occur or prevail historically. In some places, the private sector will be where transition occurs most or most quickly; in other places it will be the public sector. Public employees - e.g. in schools, welfare offices, firefighters, hospitals, etc. - can change and sometimes have changed the organization of their work to democratic cooperation. They encounter opposition from higher level officials, sometimes from the public, etc. In much the same way, private sector workers seeking such transitions encounter oppositions from boards of directors, investors, shareholders etc. Specific of time and place and strength of impulse to transition will determine how, when and where transitions occur. But there is no reason to believe that public transitions are less achievable than private transitions.
thoughts on australian capitalism
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/opinion/help-for-australias-coal-workers.html
Transformation to a worker coop from an existing establishment
December 30, 2016
I live and work in Sweden for the largest car company in the country. I am under the assumption that the workers unions are stronger and larger in Sweden than in the US because of their strong presence and because most of my colleagues are members, including myself. Do you think it is possible to transform a large corporation from a capitalist to a communist enterprise, or a workers coop? What would you say is the best way to achieve this goal? Our company is owned by a larger, foreign company; how can this affect the situation?
Richard Wolff posted an official response
I have no doubt that it is possible to transform a large capitalist corporation into a large worker coop. Moreover, the chief means to do that is an organized and mobilized workforce allied to a working class social movement. The issue of enterprise size - whether coops can manage to be big as well as small and medium sized enterprises - has been settled by the effective transition from small to huge achieved over the last 50 years by the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in Spain. It now has 100,000 employees while it started in 1956 with 6. Being owned by a foreign company can actually be helpful to a program of transition to worker coop. That is because such a transition can be intertwined with an assertion of independence from foreign control, a blending of nationalistic aspirations with democratic workplace aspirations.
Thoughts on Housing Cooperatives?
December 29, 2016
Professor Wolff, I thought you'd be interested to hear about or read this NPR story about a Mobile Home Community which, in order to prevent their land from being sold off, created a cooperative and bought ownership of the land. By running the community democratically, the residents have improved their standard of living. Part One is about the poor management and conditions faced by many Mobile Home Communities. http://www.npr.org/2016/12/26/502590161/mobile-home-park-owners-can-spoil-an-affordable-american-dream Part Two is about the community in Minnesota which created the co-op discussed earlier. http://www.npr.org/2016/12/27/503052538/when-residents-take-ownership-a-mobile-home-community-thrives
RBE | Technological Unemployment and Worker Co-cops
December 29, 2016
Dear Professor Wolff, I very much appreciate your videos. I have watched many hours of your presentations since The Zeitgeist Movement shared your October 2016 Update via Facebook. Forgive me if this question has been asked before. How can Worker Co-ops mitigate the problems arising from the growing trend of Technological Unemployment? What are your thoughts on a Resource-based Economy (RBE)? Description of RBE linked here: https://youtu.be/K9FDIne7M9o?t=1h11m < This link will take you to the 1hr 11min mark of an almost three-hour-long presentation by Peter Joseph. This is the part of the presentation where Peter describes the economic calculation of an RBE. To elaborate on the second question, do you agree with the logic presented in the video? Happy new year! Andrew
Richard Wolff posted an official response
For hundreds of years, capitalism has been a system that rapidly transforms technology in the interest of higher profits. Across that time, almost every technological change has been celebrated and justified on the grounds that it freed human beings from difficult, dirty, arduous labor. Yet the reality today is that most capitalist employees work harder - and often longer - than they ever did. The problem is not that the technology was bad; technology is not the problem, Rather, the problem is the subordination of technical change to capitalist profitability. An example can show this: imagine a technical innovation that enables workers to produce the same output with the same inputs in half the time. A capitalist enterprise takes advantage of the innovation to fire half its employees and use the savings in wages to boost profits. A worker coop takes advantage quite differently: it cuts all employees' labor time in half thereby producing the same output with the same inputs (hence the same profits assuming stable prices). Workers wages remain the same but for half the work time freeing half worker's time for leisure activities. The technology in one case serves profits; in the other it serves labor reduction. The former helps those dependent on profit (always a small minority in capitalist societies); the latter helps workers (the majority). The economic problem lies not with technical change but with the economic system into which technical changes are installed.
Defining Socialism
December 29, 2016
Hi Prof. Wolff, I hear, quite often, how socialism embodies a state ownership of business and appropriation of surplus, with Cuba and the USSR as poster children for this line of reasoning. But with an understanding, after reading your work of course, that state capitalism is not synonymous with socialism, how do we reconcile this fact with the popular belief that dictatorships or other governmental problems are associated with socialism? Please see this 2-minute clip with Thomas Sowell explaining what socialism is (it’s frustrating to say the least). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnJEUR0gkZo
The history of Israeli Kibbutzim, Aaron David Gordon, etc.
December 29, 2016
Dear Professor Wollf, Thank you so much for your energy, commitment and efforts to educate and enlighten everyone out there! Your contribution is priceless. I came across your podcasts on youtube by absolute chance, and I am very glad I did. Have been listening to and watching all your videos I could possibly find. Have ordered a few of your books to get acquainted more closely with your teaching. As for my question, I would really appreciate it if you could speak a little a bit about social movements of the past taking place in Israel; in particular, the history of Israeli Kibbutzim, Aaron David Gordon, etc. would be very interesting. Yours sincerely, Alexander Mundrian P,S. I am a Russian-Jewish Israeli, 31 years old, currently living and working in Germany (Essen, NRW).
I got 2 very good talks about Dieselgate from the CCC meetings 32C3 and 33C3
December 28, 2016
33C3 Dieselgate – A year later 2016 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kTd4PWFAGU The exhaust emissions scandal („Dieselgate“) [32c3] 2015 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZSU1FPDiao I just found one more: Software Defined Emissions [33c3] #Dieselgate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCu8XIHjKwc https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2016/Fahrplan/schedule/0.html
Commentary on MMT (modern monetary theory)?
December 27, 2016
Could you please offer your opinions and/or commentary on MMT (modern monetary theory), Hyman Minsky, Warren Mosler, Stephanie Kelton, Randall Wray, Bill Mitchell, etc. and how this explanation of monetary systems might relate to economic democracy and socialism.