Richard D. Wolff > Quotes

“To cut 1930s jobless, FDR taxed corps and rich. Govt used money to hire many millions. Worked then; would now again. Why no debate on that?”
― Richard D. Wolff

“In this spirit, Marxists recognize that all social analyses, no matter which theoretical framework is used to produce them, are partial and never complete or finished, No one can understand or write the whole story about how a society is structured and how it is changing.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Economics: Marxian Versus Neoclassical

“If Americans actually understood the structure of our taxes, they would not only become angry, they might also find our economic and political systems intolerable because they are the cause of our unjust tax codes ... We could revolutionize the financial conditions of every American city and town—solve all or most of its tax revenue problems—if the property tax system were simply extended from tangible property to also include intangible property. If you want some quick solutions to our nation's fiscal problems, that would be one. Even on the simple basis of fairness, how can we justify having a property tax system that exempts the intangible property owned mostly by the richest amongst us? What a prime example of the Occupy movement's central point about the economic injustice perpetrated by the 1 percent against the 99 percent.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism

“Capitalism, Marx said, never went beyond those economic models where a few dominate a majority. Capitalism just replaced the dichotomies of master/slave and lord/serf with a new one. A dominating and exploiting minority was still there, but it had a new name: employers.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Understanding Marxism

“All words that are important in history have been picked up and used by all kind of characters, for all kinds of reasons.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism

“Socialism is a kind of yearning for a better life than what capitalism permits for most people. Socialist yearnings are as old as capitalism itself, because they are its products.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Understanding Socialism

“Our leaders keep saying phrases like, “Let the market decide.” or “The market will get to the efficient outcome.” Really? The market is a very flawed institution that does not deserve the nearly religious kind of endorsement of it that our leaders are eager to provide over and over again.”
― Richard D. Wolff, The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself

“To achieve a society that exhibits liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy, the object to change first and foremost is production.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Understanding Marxism

“Greed is not the cause of capitalists' behavior; it is a quality they acquire in accommodating to and internalizing the requirements of competitive survival within the capitalist system.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Understanding Marxism

“Any individual exhibiting a personal instability comparable to the economic and social instability of capitalism would long ago have been required to seek professional help and to make basic changes.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Understanding Marxism

“The impoverished families of the long-term unemployed strained to the point of dysfunction, communities deprived of viable economies, interrupted educations, lost skills: these and many more results of capitalism’s crisis will put difficult demands on governments for years. On the one hand, they will aggravate social problems that impose costs on governments.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

“The level of economic literacy in the U.S. had been underdeveloped for a long time ... As a teacher, the best situation is when your students want to learn. But if you have an underdeveloped literacy, then your economic analysis is going to be all over the place, particularly in times like now in the middle of a crisis.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism

“it turns out that when we reach a certain age. for some of us High school. for some of us college. for some of us full career. like Tucker. a moment comes and that's where Tucker is, when he realizes he has been lied to. he has been misled. he has been miseducated. he is not only upset to learn it. but he is angry. why was this done to us? Why have we been told this silly story?”
― Richard D. Wolff

“the market has been anthropomorphized. It is not created by us but creates us. That's what the market distates. If Jesus can talk to you, the market can talk to you.”
― Richard D. Wolff

“Elections outside the workplace stand in an ambivalent relation to capitalism’s exclusion of real democracy inside. On the one hand, elections distract people from their conscious and unconscious upsets with working conditions. Elections focus instead on political candidates, parties, and alternative policies around issues other than capitalism versus alternative economic systems and other than their respective working conditions. That is why supporters of capitalism appreciate elections. Well-controlled elections do not question, let alone threaten, capitalism.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Capitalism's Crisis Deepens: Essays on the Global Economic Meltdown

“Greed is not the cause of capitalists’ behavior; it is a quality they acquire in accommodating to and internalizing the requirements of competitive survival within the capitalist system.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Understanding Marxism

“Socialism is when the government does stuff. And it's more socialism the more stuff it does. And if it does a real lot of stuff, it's communism.”
― Richard D. Wolff

“Business and the rich made trillions from both trends. By keeping workers' wages flat, profits soared as employers alone kept the full fruits of rising worker productivity. Employers and the rich profited further by getting Washington to lower their taxes. They then lent at interest to the government what they no longer needed to pay in taxes. After all, the government needed to borrow precisely because it had stopped taxing corporations and the rich at the rates of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s,. Business and the rich happily financed a political system that converted their tax obligation into secure, well-rewarded loans to the government instead.”
― Richard D Wolff

“The system is a contradiction: the very logic imposed on the capitalist enterprise undermines the overall success of the capitalist. For Marxists, no law, rule, regulation, or behavior pattern provides an escape from this contradiction; none ever has.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Understanding Marxism

“people. The great debate between capitalism and socialism, the debate that so many (Francis Fukuyama, Robert L. Heilbroner, and others) had declared finally resolved in capitalism’s favor by the 1990s, turns out to have been a debate between private and state capitalism. Within actually existing socialist states there have been greater and lesser movements back toward private capitalism over the last half-century. Many social reforms achieved as part of the movements toward socialism after 1917 proved temporary and subject to erosion or reversal. Especially after the 1980s, socialized property in the means of production reverted to private property. Planning apparatuses gave way to market mechanisms of distribution. Relatively more economic and social equality returned to greater inequality. To the millions who struggled for socialism and communism over the last 150 years, who believed them to be embodiments of a more egalitarian and democratic social order, the last several decades of movement back toward private capitalism have been deeply”
― Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

“This cure involves, first, replacing the current capitalist organization of production inside offices, factories, stores, and other workplaces in modern societies. In short, exploitation—the production of a surplus appropriated and distributed by those other than its producers—would stop. Much as earlier forms of class structure (lords exploiting serfs in feudalism and masters exploiting slaves in slavery) have been abolished, the capitalist class structure (employers”
― Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

“If workers become owners of a capitalist corporate enterprise, they have the right to elect as members of the board of directors persons other than themselves. They usually do that and leave the directing of the enterprise to those directors, much as nonworker shareholders typically do. It might be legally possible for worker-owners to transform the enterprise so that they become not only owners but also, collectively, directors. However, that has very rarely happened. Worker-owned enterprises are thus conceptually and also empirically different from WSDEs.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

“There are a lot of things we all know that don't want to face. I hope you already know that. It will save you a lot of grief if you are aware and expect to discover it about yourself.”
― Richard D. Wolff

“The importance of publications like Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens lies in their reinsertion of repressed discourses into public conversations. The once robust debates over capitalism and alternative economic systems were never settled in the Cold War or by the implosion of the former Soviet Union. They were only temporarily submerged first by anticommunist hysteria and then, after 1989, by delusional capitalist triumphalism. The 2008 crash of global capitalism reopened the space for those debates to resume. Now however, they have to take account of the many changes within capitalism, socialism, and communism—conceptual as well as practical—over the last half century.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Capitalism's Crisis Deepens: Essays on the Global Economic Meltdown

“distressing”
― Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

“In capitalism, as I have noted, productive workers add more value to the commodities produced in and sold by the enterprise than the value of their wages paid by the capitalist who hired them. That additional value or surplus is appropriated by the capitalists. They distribute portions of that surplus to a variety of others (and to themselves) to support activities they believe are needed to keep the capitalist enterprise in business. This particular way of organizing the production and distribution of the surplus is capitalism. What, then, is socialism? If socialism is to be a distinct economic system, then it must clearly differentiate itself from capitalism in terms of how surplus is produced and distributed. Marx’s critique of capitalism offers a clue as to the defining characteristic of socialism in his suggestive references to “associated workers” and other images of workers having replaced capitalists as directors of productive enterprises. The”
― Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

“threat that another enterprise will be able to offer an alternative product of higher quality, lower price, or both. The uncertainties of changing tastes and preferences, changing interest rates for loans, changing prices for necessary inputs, and so on confront enterprises with a vast array of threats to their survival. Political shifts in the larger society mean that the taxes they have to pay, regulations they have to endure, and subsidies they may lose can also threaten their survival. The typical capitalist enterprise’s response is to seek more profits, increase the size of the company, or gain a bigger share of the market. Different enterprises stress one or another of these goals, depending on which is more important or available for its survival. Achieving these goals strengthens the capacity of the enterprise to prevent or lessen or absorb the endless array of threats it faces. Likewise, achieving these goals improves the enterprise’s capacity to take advantage of any opportunity that arises. Thus, for example, greater profits enable an enterprise to make the investments needed to tap a new market; faster growth attracts capital and good press reports; and a larger market share can secure lower prices for larger quantities of purchased inputs. In short, what capitalists do is governed by the system that unites the enterprises directed by capitalists, the markets in which they buy and sell, and the larger society and government for which they provide the bulk of goods and services. Capitalists respond to the signals they receive from the markets, the media, the government, and so on. The goals they pursue—profits, growth, and”
― Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

“(what combination of greater leisure for workers or greater quantities of output). Since workers in WSDEs decide the size and distribution of surpluses, that includes deciding whether and when to use a portion of their appropriated surpluses to purchase and install technical changes. In capitalism, where workers are excluded from choices about technology, they choose between labor and leisure based on the wage given by their competition in the labor market. In contrast, workers in WSDEs make their labor/leisure choice together with and as part of their decisions about technological change.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

“The capitalist organization of production must now be dissolved. Workers must become their own directors, receiving and distributing the surpluses they produce. They must become the collective decision-makers in productive enterprises, no longer the directed wage and salary receivers.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

“Wikipedia: Richard D. Wolff

To escape Nazism, Wolff's parents emigrated from Europe to the United States during World War II. …
Wolff states that his European background influenced his world view:

"[E]verything you expect about how the world works probably will be changed in your life, that unexpected things happen, often tragic things happen, and being flexible, being aware of a whole range of different things that happen in the world, is not just a good idea as a thinking person, but it's crucial to your survival. So, for me, I grew up convinced that understanding the political and economic environment I lived in was an urgent matter that had to be done, and made me a little different from many of my fellow kids in school who didn't have that sense of the urgency of understanding how the world worked to be able to navigate an unstable and often dangerous world. That was a very important lesson for me.”
― Richard D. Wolff