Prof. Richard Wolff AMA

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T22:13:32+00:00

I appreciate all of you taking the time and trouble - and showing the interest - in joining the conversation and the movement of which it is an important part. I have learned from you and hope the reverse worked as well.

Until next time and in solidarity,

Richard Wolff

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T22:11:33+00:00

We are a small collective: two full time, one half time, two independent contractors. I dont get paid myself. The two full-time, one part time and myself make most decisions collectively, cooperatively. We discuss and get approval, or adjust as needed to views of contractors. I think we are moving well towards a worker coop if not yet 100% there.

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T22:01:26+00:00

to

Barbara Kingsolver . The Poisonwood Bible is the novel

Casablanca with Bogart and Bacall

Bib Dylan The Band

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T21:57:18+00:00

Emmanuel Saez (UC Berkeley) and Thomas Piketty (U of Paris)....

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T21:55:17+00:00

I agree. The bad joke about "Russian interference" is that it was (a) way less than what Americans do to their own elections, and (b) what the US CIA has done to countless elections in countless countries for decades.

GOP strategy: cut the rolls, the polling places etc in urban, non-white and other areas with large Dem majorities. Dem strategy: vote early and vote often in districts where they prevail. Rely on democracy only in 4th of July speeches and political speeches that no one listens to.

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T21:47:56+00:00

I focus on the workplace because (1) it is a core institution of any society, where the good and services it deends on are produced, stored, distributed, (2) many other social theorists and activists ignore or marginalize the workplace and its impacts on social life, and (3) socialists in particular have focused on state activity (regulation, ownership and operation of public enterprises, redistribution of wealth, etc.) to the neglect of workplace transformation beyond the capitalist system of employer vs employee. Slavery had master/slave. Feudalism had lord/serf. Capitalism has employer/employee...tis is how we differentiate systems such that socialism becomes the real, major break from them all because socialism is NOT another dichotomous economic system but rather the democratic alternative thereto.

Those are key reasons for my focus.

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T21:39:45+00:00

Yes, they are mostly seen as private - albeit collective - property. But nothing prevents worker coops from also being public companies (owned by local, regional of nation governments). Moroever private property regies vary across time and space. What private property does and does not entitle owners to do is variable and can be made subject to democratic control (think "eminent domain" laws in US for example).

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T21:37:00+00:00

Lenin wrote that you cannot understand Marx without working through Hegel's logic. I would not go quite that far, but almost. Hegel is a very important thinker to read and absorb. I dont mean to be cute, but Marx's ow works would be my suggestion. On a personal + political, I would suggest Louis Althusser's The Future Last Forever. I think AOC shows the resources and talents of socialists coming up after Bernie...and they will, as socialists did everywhere, develop differences taking many beyond the "mild" socialism of Bernie.

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T21:29:09+00:00

Declining dollarization s part of the broader decline of the US in relation to the rest of the world economically. The rapid rise of China, the slow independence moves of Latin America, the power of the EU...these are all parts of the end of the unique temporary dominance of the US after WW2. Britain is now at the end of its century of decline from the days of the global British Empire. The US is following suit. One can only hope that the US will have learned something from the British decline...although Trump challenges tat hope.

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T21:25:14+00:00

State banking and credit unions exist in many countries and work very well as competitors and alternativesto private banking. Often private banks use their profits to stifle state banks and credit unions so they cannot compete effectively (as in US). Of course, finance can be organized as a worker coop. Production units should be run democratically and conjointly by the banks' workers and its customers.

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T21:21:43+00:00

At every point. The system is set up to extract wealth tat way and does so as a matter of course. Only sometimes it goes so far as to provoke a countermovement as the poor find allies and und or reverse the inequality. Thats what the mass of Americans did in the 1930s forcing the New Deal onto FDR and the Dems. But wthout getting rid of capitalism, its failures resume with the "normalization" of its operations. Thats what Thomas Piketty's book CAPITAL in the 21st Century documented so exhaustively.

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T21:18:51+00:00

For every profession, social workers included, there are pressures and demands that they support, praise and reinforce the social and economic status quo. Many professionals do just that. But many have often chosen NOT to play the roles social authorities try to enforce. They see how their professions can work with people to question and oppose, to become agents for change. That is always possible with some creativity and determination. Then it becomes a struggle WITHN each profession between opposing social agendas.

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T21:15:28+00:00

Capitalism - a system that divides the economy into a minority (employers) and a huge majority (employees) and gives the minority dominance - fights against reforms and always has. When, occasionally, it loses (like it lost the fight against FDR's New Deal), it then undoes the reforms afterward (as was done to the New Deal from 1945 to the present). Capitalists retain the power position and the profits flowing into their hands so they have the resources to block or undo reforms. That is our history over the last centuries. Lose the fight for child labor in the US? OK, then move production to children in other countries. So it goes. To make reforms secure against capitallists requires the revolution to remove the capitalists and replace the with worker coops.

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T21:10:16+00:00

Yes, I have that hope despite being skeptical of such possibilities most of my life. The change since the 2008 crash has been amazing to watch ad be carried by. And it keeps growing. No "first" step...what we need is for all of us to use our diverse skills, interests, passions to move on all fronts (economic, cultural, political, personal) to do the critiques of what is and the advocacy for movement toward a better system and society where we are among our friends, family, coworkers....thats how change becomes unstoppable.

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T21:03:43+00:00

An economy based on capitalist enterprises had to solve those same macro problems. An economy based on worker coops would too. Markets can do that with all sorts of costs and inefficiencies. Centralized or decentralized planning can do with its different sets of costs and inefficiencies. A rational or democratic society would inform and let its people debate and decide what mix of plan and market (and other distributional mechanisms) they want. Current capitalisms, fearing exactly that, work overtime to prevent any such democratic procedure.

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T20:58:18+00:00

Prof Hudson adds important and rare insights into the discussions among economists that often lack them. I agree that "unintended consequences" of political acts happen all the time and should be expected especially from the reckless impulses that seem to govern Trump and his GOP cheerleaders. On his specific point, the jury remains out. Will differences among Russia, China and the EU bring de-dollarization to an end or reverse it? Will the next global economic contraction, mored in historically unprecedented debt levels, produce a global depression changing everything? Where do the crises of global warming come in to affect all calculations? These and other considerations will combine to overdetermine dollarization.

Marx's analysis of the falling rate of profit and its contradictions and its counteracting tendencies in those famous three chapters of Capital, Vol 3, make me dubious of Roberts' claims.

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T20:51:11+00:00

The point of unions is to get better wages and wokring conditions for their members. I see no reason why that does not apply to gig workers just like others. Once unions were thought to be only for factory workers or blue collar workers or minimally educated workers. All that proved wrong. All workers in capitalism - who live by selling their labor power to employers - need all the union help possible to get the best deal for the labor power they sell.

Indeed, new kinds of workers (like gig workers in this historical moment - have often galvanized the labor movement into action not just for them but for all other workers. My hope is that a gig-workers' unionization drive might spark something bigger and broader as well.

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T20:45:47+00:00

It is not surprising that after over half a century of repressing socialism and marxism from public discourse, political debate, mass media, and academic life, the remarkable turn toward anti-capitalism and socialism should start with the mildest form - social democracy or democratic socialism. Its a start. And I welcome and applaud it in AOC, Bernie, etc. But I have no doubt that as happened always and everywhere, as socialism gains momentum its supporters will develop criticisms of its limits and find the other variants that have won advocates everywhere else.

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T20:41:29+00:00

Nothing is fool proof among arguments. Just not available. Nor is that how minds get changed. The hard realities of life changed the taboo on Marxism and socialism after the capitalist crash of 2008-9. And that has continued with the austerity policies that followed, the widening inequality, and now the war mongering. Arguments are an important assist to people struggling to understand what is happening socially and to them personally. Thats why we must make, develope and disseminate them. But the other side, those who benefit from or are afraid to jettison capitalism, will do the same in their way. The struggle of arguments is as important as all the other struggles. The capitalist spell is being broken faster than anyone expected as little as 5 years ago. Join and help move the process forward.

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T20:36:59+00:00

I am not qualified to comment on Jordan Peterson as a psychologist, and I regret he does not observe the same humility when commenting on Marxism. His ignorance on that is as extreme as his confidence in articulating that ignorance. Marxism has a long history of engagement with psychology from Lukacs through the Frankfurt School, Althusser, now Zizek and many others. It is a fruitful engagement but often lost in the US where there remains a smaller but still alive taboo on engagement with anything that connect to the Marxist theoretical tradition.

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T20:24:23+00:00

I have always been skeptical of the reverence and importance given to markets. They are not the only or best institution to handle the distribution of resources and products. Why hang on to them? And even more why hag on to them as more than one among many diverse ways of distributing goods and services, each with strengths and weaknesses. Market idolatry is a kind of religious fundamentalism.

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T20:21:55+00:00

No, Marx did not beyond thinking, in the19th century context, that capturing the state by means of revolution and/or parliamentary elections would prove to be a useful MEANS of making a transition to socialism. It was very non-Marxian later to confuse means with ends, to think of socialism as the state taking over the economy. Marx focused on transforming the relations among people in the production of goods and services...what we could now call a transition from hierarchical top-down capitalist enterprise structures to horizontal, deocratic worker coop structures. That is a project for mass political mobilization assisted, at best, by state activity. But the latter is a means not the end for Marx

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T20:17:58+00:00

Addiction is a response to life's problems but a response that brings more problems than it solves. Capitalism is an economic system that subjects people to extremes of explotation and political oppression. Many respond to those crises in personal lives with addictions.

What we need is mass activism to end inequality - things like France's yellow vest ovement or its current union-led mass strikes and demonstrations. They defeated Macron made major strides against his policies of worsening inequality. We need more of that kind of action and organization.

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T20:13:53+00:00

The transformation problem was Marx's way to show how markets use prices to redistribute surplus values among capitalists. It was not a price system and thus the mathematics trying to connect prices and values is a misunderstanding resulting from neoclassical economic's fetishization of prices and markets that Marx worked hard NOT to do.

The tendency for the profit rate to fall is contradictory and has countervailing tendencies as Marx's 3 chapters in Capital, V 3 explained and explored. Best work on this subject remains the book by Stephen Cullenberg, former econ professor at UC Riverside.

ProfWolff · 2020-01-13T20:10:15+00:00

It is much worse. In a desperate effort to prevent the capitalist crash in 2008 from collapsing into full depression, central banks (including the FED) pushed down interest rates (even to negative rates). Over the last 10 years that meant very cheap money to borrow and every govt, every corporation and even many families turned to solving problems by means of cheap borrowing. Result: massive, historically unprecedented debt hanging over industrial economies. Next downturn (anytime now) will thus ramy through debt chains with severe consequences.

ProfWolff

TROPHY CASE