Whats everyone's take on Richard Wolff...

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name one thing this retard said that was of any value
pro tip: u wont cos there isnt anything

i watched a few of his 1 hour+ lectures, where he basically said 0 things and just repeated some words over and over and talked real slow and pretended he was retarded or that people he was talking to were retarded or a combination of those, i dont know, i dont care, nothing he said was of any importance and he even failed at popularizing

tl;dr
he should be shot cos he is giving it all a bad name, prolly a plant doing it on purpose

No he quite literally talk about marxist theory on how markets are aids and shit like that in his regular shows, saying that markets are shit and you need something like a command economy. Its just not the vast majority of his stuff, its very occasional.

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huh

It's more straightforward than that. Wolff's argument is ultimately fairly left-com, so your mileage may vary, but he critiques socialism as enforced by the state as suffering from all the faults that generally befall any state program (bureaucratic slowness, corruption, revision) in addition to being vulnerable to well poisoning by reactionary elements. The idea being that a social revolution of sorts could take place if workers are introduced to socialism in a way that they actually feel, i.e. targeting their shitty job that they hate. If socialism is built on the ground level through things like worker democracies and co-ops then production as a whole could be shifted away from markets.

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That's because you don't come out guns blazing talking about Communism and Socialism in the US. You have to start with different terms that wean people in like "democracy" and "inequality". Hell, even "inequality" isn't that good because of it's modern connotations, but "workplace democracy" sounds a lot more enticing to an average American than Socialism

He's in the "The Soviet Union was state capitalist" camp. That's all I can say to sum him up.

I fully support him. There are various ways in which he gets thing right. To start with, he is concerned with the practical, the concrete, which is where you should locate every struggle. It's the only way to answer the question of what is to be done. He bases his analysis on the economy as it exists, and often references known and measured qualities. Agree or disagree with his conclusions, its the right approach.

Secondly, he's a competent communicator. He doesn't talk as if he is among cognoscenti, makes issues understandable to an average listener. Most importantly, his demeanor is cordial, patient and folksy. It gives an authentic touch, and makes people willing to listen, doesn't scare people away or make them defensive. If you want to talk about socialism, that's how you should generally do it, absent agitating in a crowd or something.

Finaly, there is the question of how much of a socialist he is. I don't think this should be subject to debate; if you listen to him, follow his trains of thought, it's clear that he grounds his reasoning in Marxist analysis of the labour process. He doesn't always stick to jargon or hammer down the technicalities, but he is obviously concerned with the question of what the relation is between the controller of the MOP and the worker, the power of the worker, his agency and self-determination etc.

Now of course there remains the question of what he is in fact proposing. It's co-ops, his golden egg is the worker owned business, which he talks about as if it will resolve most of the concrete challenges people daily face. Reasoning along the lines of "of course the factory won't offshore if it's the people who work there who have to decide it". In that, he is clearly ignoring the problem of having to compete with bourgeois-owned firms, international trade, the rate of capital investment, and so on. I don't know if he does it out of truly held belief, or just as a tactic, not wanting to highlight the weaknesses of the ideology he is trying to sell. Frankly, I'm already happy to have an effective communicator out there who at least familiarizes people with class based analysis, a necessary step to creating class consciousness.

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Well the USSR in its long lifespan was both state capitalism and quasi-socialistic.

Wolf thinks it was state capitalist as far back as the 20s though. He's Muke with a university degree.

how is not even 100 years a long lifespan?

Compared to most nationstates + their regimes that exist today it is long, and compared to other leftists states it is very long. 100 years of unbroken regime is a pretty long time if you look among all of the second and third world.

I have an issue with Wolff not because he uses entry level talking points to talk to liberals. The thing is, nothing he says is actually that meaningful or makes sense. As somebody already pointed out, he talks like he would address retards and repeats the same point over and over. I have no idea how this guy got his PhD.

Fucking Jimmy Dore has more diverse and complex thoughts than this liberal stooge

And probably a mutuality as well!:DD

I've watched prolly 4 of his lectures so far and all I've gotten is "you're being ripped off" and "worker co-ops".

He is not a soc-dem, he wants to replace capitalist firms with worker cooperatives.

Even the Bolsheviks themselves thought that the Soviet Union was state capitalist. Lenin explicitly said that Russia is too underdeveloped to become a socialist country, which is why it should become a state capitalist one instead.

And then Stalin industrialized in 5-10 years. Lenin's point bout it being too underdeveloped became moot.

Which is 100% compatible with social democracy. Co-ops aren't socialism anymore than universal healthcare.

Wolff has good stuff. He is not just a market socialist who wants coops. He has a lecture series from 2011 (Advanced topics in Marxism?) that goes over many topics including his take on the USSR and marxist analysis of family structure. On the topic of famines in the early USSR his take is essentially that collectivization was the solution to the famines and also the solution to the unintended consequences (kulaks) of the earlier land reforms (he calls them land privatizations) done by the Bolsheviks. In last year's Left Forum talk on Gramsci he emphasizes the point that Gramsci took much inspiration from the Bolsheviks and the October revolution. On the topic of family, his take is that the traditional family is a miniature feudal system and socialists revolution ought to address the family structure as well. I also recall on multiple occasions of him saying markets are not the end all be all of economics. These are not views of a mere market socialist with coops kind of dude, he is constrained by the culture in America and the need to appeal to a typical American audience.

One aspect I dislike about Wolff is his stance on taxation, he hasn't taken the MMT pill yet even though he certainly has been in contact with MMT economists like Michael Hudson. Granted, I don't know if this is because he doesn't comprehend MMT or if it is due to him wanting to present the layman's understanding of taxation.

That's where you're wrong kiddo.
t. Lenin

Ownership and management of the means of production by the workers is what literally defines socialism

NO IT DOESN'T! THAT'S NOT REAL SOCIALISM!

Yes, real socialism is when the means of production are owned by the state rather than by workers.

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tl:dr for ☭TANKIE☭s everyone is either a ☭TANKIE☭ or a anarchist/liberal

Socialism is where commodity production and the capital accumulation cycle have been abolished. Anything less is just red capitalism.

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Ah, yes, voluntary exchange of goods and services between workers is not socialism. Real socialism is when the state dictates to the workers what they must produce.

t. muke

looks like a fat pig to me, his rants are incoherent most of the time.

Ignorance. Marx describes capitalist relations re: the MOP a constitutive part of capitalism. If you take that away, whatever else it might be, it's no longer capitalism.

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How?

I never heard of this before and i need someone to ruin it for me before I get obsessed with it.

I’ve been watching him for about 2 years.I would say he is definitely a Marxist but quite liberal.He explains things in a simple, easy-to-understand way.He might not be the comrade we want but he is definitely a comrade we need. And his wife,Dr.Fraad is also good.

This. Market socialism isn’t socialism, but a system that abolishes wage labour and the dictatorship of capital sure as shit isn’t capitalism, and is clearly a step in the right direction. It would be far easier to transition to genuine socialism from market socialism than from capitalism.