

Richard D. Wolff
Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to millions via several TV networks and YouTube. His most recent book with Democracy at Work is Understanding Capitalism (2024), which responds to requests from readers of his earlier books: Understanding Socialism and Understanding Marxism.
Released for Syndication:
01/29/2025
My birth emerged from European capitalism’s fascistic catastrophe in the 1920s–1940s. That catastrophe also produced Israel’s experiment with settler colonialism in Palestine. This article refers to both these incidents to analyze the current Palestine-Israel catastrophe.
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Released for Syndication:
01/17/2025
Societies survive and grow when they successfully navigate their contradictions. Eventually, however, accumulating contradictions overwhelm existing means of navigating them. Then social problems arise that persist or worsen inside such societies because they are unsuccessfully navigated or go unattended. Sometimes, the dominant conscious reaction to...
Released for Syndication:
12/20/2024
The Republicans (GOP), traditionally the U.S.’s anti-tax party, now promise to use tariffs to wage trade wars, to massively deport immigrants, and to stop drug traffic. But tariffs are simply the name of one kind of tax (on imported goods and services). So the GOP...
Released for Syndication:
11/25/2024
The immigration issue has split and/or weakened both center and left parties and movements across many nations in recent years. Serious economic and social problems afflicting national working classes have been “managed”—at least temporarily—by scapegoating immigrants as if they were responsible for those problems. Leaders...
Released for Syndication:
10/18/2024
An old theme within social theory holds that societies with very unequal distributions of wealth can sustain their social cohesion so long as total wealth is growing. Such total growth enables all who get a distributed share of that wealth—even those with the smallest shares—to...
Released for Syndication:
09/06/2024
The evidence suggests that empires often react to periods of their own decline by over-extending their coping mechanisms. Military actions, infrastructure problems, and social welfare demands may then combine or clash, accumulating costs and backlash effects that the declining empire cannot manage. Policies aimed to...
Released for Syndication:
08/26/2024
From its beginnings, the capitalist economic system produced both critics and celebrants, those who felt victimized and those who felt blessed. Where victims and critics developed analyses, demands, and proposals for change, beneficiaries, and celebrants developed alternative discourses defending the system.
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Released for Syndication:
08/12/2024
In the wake of his huge defeat on June 30, 2024, when 80 percent of voters rejected French “centrist” President Emmanuel Macron, he said he understood the French people’s anger. In the UK, Conservative loser Rishi Sunak said the same about the British people’s anger,...
Released for Syndication:
08/07/2024
As the French economist Thomas Piketty most recently exposed, capitalism, across time and space, has always tended to produce ever-greater economic inequality. Oxfam, a global charity, reported that 2022’s 10 richest men together had six times more wealth than the poorest 3.1 billion...
Released for Syndication:
08/02/2024
Fans of capitalism like to say it is democratic or that it supports democracy. Some have stretched language so far as to literally equate capitalism with democracy, using the terms interchangeably. No matter how many times that is repeated, it is simply not true and...