Quotes from Richard D. Wolff

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?

The more successful capitalists are in cutting their wage costs, the less money workers will have to buy back what those same capitalists produce. It's a contradiction.

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?

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.

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.

All words that are important in history have been picked up and used by all kind of characters, for all kinds of reasons.

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.

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.

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.

To achieve a society that exhibits liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy, the object to change first and foremost is production.

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.

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.

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.

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.

this country has made a Fetish of democracy in the community, but in large part it's a guilty conscience because it's missing from the work life. And what possible excuse is there?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

2,000 of the richest have more together than the bottom three and a half billion. That's a level of inequality that any system should be deeply ashamed of.

He never wrote a book about the state, because it wasn't the center or focus of his analyses. That focus was rather the relationships among people as they go about producing their existence: relationships such as master-slave, lord-serf and employer-employee.

If you lived with a roommate as unstable as this economic system, you would've moved out or demanded that your roommate get professional help.