Richard D. Wolff

Hi Professor Wolff, I am a tech entrepreneur who is really interested in socialist ideals. I am thinking about incorporating co-operative governance in some form within my company but there are a couple of issues I can see at a macro level. 1) Innovation requires the space to experiment and try new things. Research and Development can consume a lot of natural resources and a high degree of risk. At the moment, when starting a company an entrepreneur takes a risk to try to convince people of their idea in order to get the resources to attempt the enterprise. Usually most people are not convinced of the idea and a small minority believes in the entrepreneur and invests. This risk / gamble is what allows new ideas to be attempted. How do you see the starting of new enterprises working in a socialist economy? 2) Socialism relies on the workers deciding together on how the collective should be run. In theory this sounds great but I can see potential problems around having slower decision making, bureaucracy and at times populist decisions being made rather than the right decision when expert knowledge is needed. Do you know of any systems or ideas that can help mitigate these problems? I have been looking into liquid democracy, what are you thoughts on it? Thank you very much Hiren