Democracy at Work

Today, Wolff has emerged as one of — if not the number one — most prominent leftist economist in America. In addition to teaching the Big Bad Wolff appears on Free Speech TV, Link TV, Pacifica Radio, does public speaking at the Brecht Forum and other venues, writes books such as Capitalism Hits the Fan, Occupy the Economy and Democracy at Work and has a substantial online presence, arguing there’s a better way to run the economy that’s in the interests of the 99%, instead of the 1%. In this interview, Wolff discusses his vision for changing the capitalist system.

Fundamentally, he poses the question that if America has repeatedly gone to war abroad “to make the world safe for democracy,” isn’t it time that we brought the war home to make the American workplace safe for democracy, too? 

Across the history of modern capitalism until recently, three forces often combined to contest for political power as one strategy for basic social change. The three were labor unions, social movements, and, finally, labor, socialist, or democratic parties. The changes they favored often included a transition from capitalism to what they called socialism (usually an economy with [1]more public than private ownership of the means of production and [2] more central planning than markets as mechanisms for distributing resources and outputs). In practice, what they mostly sought and often achieved was a transition from a largely private, harsh, unstable capitalism to a relatively more state controlled, state-interventionist, mass-welfare-focused capitalism.

Economic Update with Richard Wolff

These Tuesday evenings will each begin with an update and analysis of major economic events of the last month and their contexts of longer-term economic trends shaping politics and society here and abroad. We will focus on the evolving global capitalist economic crisis and its consequences. We will examine topics such as

the social costs effects of the historic long-term US unemployment,

national debt crises and “austerity programs” in Greece, Ireland, Spain, and beyond

changes in today’s Chinese economy and their global effects,

tax reform and the entire tax issue in the US today,

continuing crisis in the US housing and credit markets

the economics of immigration

Since 2011 rdwolff.com and democracy at work have been scraping together donations and doing some fundraising. We are lucky enough to get some institutional support in the form of matching grants. We use the modest incomes we gather to set up, maintain and populate our two websites. We have a weekly radio show, Economic Update, based at WBAI 99.5FM New York and syndicated to 14 other stations including in San Fran, LA, Tampa…

Ask Rick

Worker Self-Directed Enterprise Spotlight: TRADOC worker cooperative in Mexico

Economic Reality Checks Economic Update with Richard Wolff

Updates on "recovery," No. Dakota's public bank, costs of US wars, global austerity, and rising health care costs for employees.

Major discussions of banking crisis, Stockton, CA bankruptcy, declining US manufacturing and "neutrality on raising corporations' taxes.

Worker Self-Directed Enterprise spotlight: Mexican tire factor run by workers since 2005