Articles by Richard D. Wolff
We found 12 results.
The Undemocratic Reality of Capitalism
Richard D. Wolff | Independent Media Institute – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Aug 2024
2 Aug 2024 – Fans of capitalism say it is democratic and supports democracy. Some equate capitalism with democracy, using the terms interchangeably; it is simply not true and never was. It is more accurate to say that capitalism and democracy are opposites.
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Socialism’s Self-Criticism and Real Democracy
Richard D. Wolff | Independent Media Institute – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Dec 2023
5 Dec 2023 – Democracy is incompatible with class-divided economic systems. Masters rule in slavery, lords in feudalism, and employers in capitalism. Whatever forms of government coexist with class-divided economic systems, the hard reality is that one class rules the other.
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Why Capitalism Cannot Finally Repress Socialism
Richard D. Wolff | Independent Media Institute – TRANSCEND Media Service,
30 Oct 2023
In fact, the capitalism-versus-socialism contest does not really resume because it never really stopped. As changing social conditions changed socialism—a process that took time—it sometimes seemed to wishful thinkers that the systems struggle had ended with capitalism’s victory.
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G7 Versus BRICS: Power Struggles Are Not Class Struggles
Richard D. Wolff | Independent Media Institute – TRANSCEND Media Service,
23 Oct 2023
16 Oct 2023 – Class struggles interact with but are different from power struggles. The ancient conflicts between city-states Athens and Sparta were power struggles, while within each, slaves and enslavers engaged in class struggles.
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Economic Growth in G7 vs BRICS: A Reality Check
Richard D. Wolff | Independent Media Institute – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Sep 2023
7 Sep 2023 – We are confronted with a combination of denials and pretenses by the conjoined decline of U.S. capitalism and its global empire (or hegemony). Those declines have become clear to observers within the old capitalist establishment. For example, …
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U.S. Leaders Are Split on China Policy
Richard D. Wolff | Independent Media Institute – TRANSCEND Media Service,
7 Aug 2023
3 Aug 2023 – The U.S. bipolar approach to China: It aims to constrain China’s economic, political, and military development because it has become U.S.’ chief economic competitor—thus, enemy. However, U.S. also seeks to secure the many benefits of its companies doing business in China. “Decoupling” or “de-risking”?
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Richard D. Wolff | Independent Media Institute – TRANSCEND Media Service,
15 Aug 2022
“Market mechanisms” and “market solutions”: politicians, bureaucrats, media pundits, and academics like to refer to them as if they were somehow politically and ideologically neutral, above partisanship. They are not. Markets existed long before capitalism, but capitalism, as Karl Marx noted, made them ubiquitous, almost universal. Capitalism also raised and praised markets—and their prices—to give them an ideological importance, which leaned toward the absurd.
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The Different Ways That the U.S. and Chinese Governments Use Their Power to Regulate Capitalism
Richard D. Wolff | Independent Media Institute – TRANSCEND Media Service,
2 May 2022
28 Apr 2022 – As defined by its productive relation of employer/employee, capitalism is now developing its productive forces and GDP growth faster in China’s public form of capitalism than in the United States’ private form. The role of the state is central to this decline and ascent.
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Understanding the Basics of 21st-Century Democracy, Autocracy, and Capitalism
Richard D. Wolff | Independent Media Institute – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Sep 2021
16 Sep 2021 – Marxism’s criticisms of capitalism in the century after Marx’s death might have led it to advocacy for worker cooperatives. Instead, it focused on which agents could accomplish a transition from capitalism to socialism: the working class or the state.
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Explaining 21st-Century Capitalism in a Way Everyone Can Understand
Richard D. Wolff | Independent Media Institute – TRANSCEND Media Service,
30 Aug 2021
19 Aug 2021 – For those of you trying to understand economics and what capitalism is about, here is an excellent introduction. Capitalism is just one particular way of—a system for—organizing the production and distribution of goods and services. It differs from other systems such as slavery and feudalism but also shares some similarities with them.
→ read full articleStart with Worker Self-Directed Enterprises
Richard D. Wolff | The Next System Project – TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Aug 2016
Richard Wolff describes a next economic system centered on worker-directed cooperatives. To transition to a non-capitalist system we must change the “who and the why of key economic decision making.” To do so he proposes changes at the “basic enterprise level” by “making workers their own bosses.”
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Richard D. Wolff – TRANSCEND Media Service,
4 Nov 2013
The classic problems of early, rapid capitalist industrialization are obvious daily in the new centers. What we learn about early capitalism when we read Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, Maxim Gorky and Jack London, we see now again in the new centers.
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