Richard D. Wolff

This Op-ed originally appeared at Truthout.org

After the dot-com crash in 2000, economic policy aimed to “get us back to normal.”

This article originally appeared at Truthout.org

The crises affecting the political economies of the U.K. and U.S. are strikingly parallel. The 2008 capitalist crash hit and hurt both badly. Each arranged government bailouts of their major banks and many large corporations. After 2008, they both imposed real economic suffering — austerity — on the mass of their people. Finally, in both countries, pre-2008 trends toward greater economic inequality accelerated post-2008. Those trends in turn provoked deepening political and cultural divisions.

This article originally appeared at Truthout.org.

Written by Vaios Triantafyllou

Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he taught economics from 1973 to 2008. He is currently a visiting professor in the Graduate Programs in International Affairs at the New School University in New York City. In this interview, Wolff discusses how market-based economies have had their critics since the times of Plato and Aristotle, how both major US political parties have become subservient to the gospel of capitalism and how technology isn’t always constructive. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

This article originally appeared at Truthout.org.

In this interview, Prof. Wolff discusses how the revolutions that overthrew feudalism laid the foundations for our current crisis of capitalism, why historical models of socialism put into practice failed, and what lessons we can learn from them in creating a new socialism.

This article appeared originally at Truthout.org

Recent extreme volatility and sharp drops in US stock markets underscore the instability of capitalism yet again. As many commentators now note, another economic downturn looms. We know that all the reforms and regulations imposed in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s failed to prevent both smaller downturns between 1941 and 2008 and then another big crash in 2008. Capitalism’s instability has, for centuries, resisted all efforts to overcome it with or without government interventions. Yet mainstream economics mostly evades an honest confrontation with the social costs of such economic instability. Worse, it evades a direct debate with the Marxian critique that links those costs to an argument that system change would be the best and most “efficient” solution.

This article was originally published at Truthout.org

With the Democratic Socialists of America now counting 48,000 people within its membership and socialist candidates such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushing for free universities and Medicare for All, Americans are once again discussing capitalism versus socialism. Fortunately, they are not doing so in the old Cold War manner of uncritically celebrating one while demonizing the other. Rather, it’s a debate over the choice Americans must make now between keeping capitalism or changing the system to some form of socialism. As debates often do, this debate awakens us to problems and differences in how we understand its basic terms. For clarity and to make progress in this important debate, we need to stop conflating “capitalism” with the market. This is done far too often and on all sides of the debate.

This article originally appeared at truthout.org.

In response to the passage of the GOP tax bill, many voices are now offering variations on the theme of "speak truth to power." It's true enough that tax overhaul, coming after 30 years of widening inequality, widens it further. It is likewise yet another exercise in trickle-down economics, the policy promise that direct economic help to corporations and the rich will eventually lift up the rest of us. The GOP and Trump conveniently disregard the countless economists who have shown that trickle-down is a false promise.

Once more with feeling, the old debate rises into the headlines and the talk show circuit: Should governments -- state, federal or local -- raise the minimum wage or not? Employers of minimum-wage workers weigh in to say "no." But that raises a PR problem: It looks bad to advocate keeping...READ MORE

(Photo: Susannah Kay / The New York Times)

This article originally appeared at Truthout.org

Capitalism as a system is now increasingly challenged. Critics proliferate and steadily deepen their opposition (alongside, of course, the persistence of capitalism's defenders). Yet capitalism's traditional "other" -- namely, socialism -- has also been widely devalued. It has lost its position as the goal (however variously interpreted) for anti-capitalist social movements. When not simply ignored, socialism (and even more its derivative "communism") is often treated as utterly passé. When taken seriously, it is mostly a vague rhetorical gesture expressing criticism of the capitalist status quo, not advocacy of a concrete alternative. Socialist parties now mainly support capitalism but with a human face -- i.e. with the social supports and safety nets that their "conservative" counterparts disdain. 

This article originally appeared at Truthout.org 

Over the last century, capitalism has repeatedly revealed its worst tendencies: instability and inequality. Instances of instability include the Great Depression (1929-1941) and the Great Recession since 2008, plus eleven "downturns" in the US between those two global collapses. Each time, millions lost jobs, misery soared, poverty worsened and massive resources were wasted. Leaders promised...READ MORE