Hey Holla Forums.
My economics professor has somehow magically managed to get Richard Wolff to Skype with our econ class in the next few days. I'm so fucking excited.
There's going to be a Q&A session afterwards for about 30 minutes, and I was wondering what I should ask. My professor's a bona fide Marxist and all of my classmates are decidedly left, so I'm not in any danger of getting flak or blow back.
Thoughts about questions and directions to take?
You lucky motherfucker. I
Which school?
Don't forget to report back, I fuckin love the alpha Wolff.
Not comfortable saying the name because its so tiny and I'm a security culture moron. It's a liberal arts school in the Northeast US, we're definitely not known for economics let alone Marxian econ. For the last 5 years we've sourced all our professors from the ultra-lefty US econ grad school though, which has been genuinely fortuitous, and means that all my profs have had at least one class with Wolff.
OP please monitor this thread tommorow. I wanted you to ask something to Wolff but I need to think about it ok
Can't guarantee I'll be on here or that this thread won't get sucked into the ether after a few hours. Do you mind flying it with me right now in its raw form?
You lucky little shit.
Ask him if Eminent Domain can really be used to appropriate a factory or something and used it to form a coop when a globalist company is leaving the country to move production elsewhere.
This is good. We just watched a lecture about the legacy of worker owned businesses / coops in Ohio by some economist whose name fully escapes me right now, so this is topical. Any more?
maybe ask him his opinion on how volatile he think the economic situation is? As in does he see the inevitable next downturn to be especially bad?
Here's one thing I've actually been meaning to ask him via his Democracy@Work e-mail but you might as well ask him there too. I would like a Marxist perspective for why Keynesian/New Deal measures supposedly failed to deal with the stagflation of the '70s and why neoliberalism rose in its place.
We're reading a New Keynesian (Stilinsky?) analysis of the 2008 crisis and are actually at the bit about stagflation, so this is also good. As far as I know Wolff and him are actually colleagues at UMass so I'm sure they've actually discussed it. Neat idea.
Ask him if he is interested in Rojava's market socialist co-op economy and what he thinks about it considering he's mentioned it
(reddit.com
ask your prof to ask for permission to record it
Will definitely ask and maybe post if I can get permission. Don't know how enthused the Wolff would be though, apparently he charges a fairly hefty fee even for Skype conversations.
This
That's awesome news OP.
I'd be interested in hearing about how this goes. I just picked up one of his books, and am trying to get people to read it.
send an email to prof in advance and tell him that RDW is already a youtube phenomenon
ask prof to ask RDW permission in email in advence
Bumping this for the user yesterday who wanted to mull on a question to ask today.
Bump
How'd it go OP?
Bump, what happened OP?
hey OP got update?
No more real updates except that he's officially Skyping in tomorrow in the afternoon with us! I'm in the Eastern US for time approximations.
I'm gonna write down all of your questions and see how many I can get answered. Thanks again. My professor was ambivalent about recording but I can't imagine it will be a problem.
What wonderland do you call home?
Holla Forums hell
Are you kidding? This is their fantasy; it proves all their crackpot conspiracy theories and defends their ability to play the victim.
They do that anyways
How'd it go OP?
(didn't I make this post earlier today)
It's a fluke. He's only teaching here for a year as a visiting professor because our econ department is such a precarious joke (only one professor, and we get a new one every 2 years and their school of choice is always a crapshoot and not actually discovered until they start teaching). We're absolutely tiny and the left/right academic trends come in unpredictable waves. I got lucky with this pink wave, and there's maybe 14 of us in the whole undergrad department.
Ask him about his perspective on the viability and limitations of anarchist strategies and what historical evidence he would use to support his claim.
I thought they were libertarian socialist?
They can easily be both. If you mean a more syndicalist setup that one's a bit trickier under these conditions, remember just a few years ago they were porky-controlled. and probably will be again soon but hey here's hoping, they seem like one of the few socialist regimes that isn't corrupt or totalitarian
Well for what it's worth my Latin teacher is a huge Marxist, I even invited him here.
yuck
Should ask him if he'll get a fucking clue what socialism is
Woah, weird that this was the last comment. Was kind of actually alienated by the shit he was saying (his wife was fucking cool though).
Bumping this for everyone who was interested a few days ago - I have another thread up but it's not really grabbing any attention. I took a ton of notes and asked the first question out of everyone about his thoughts on how to redirect the Bernie stan energy into actually building class / worker power and not letting it die and hopefully turning it /actually/ left and invested in socialism, and it wasn't really what I anticipated.
Anyways took a lot of notes for anyone who wants to hear about the variety of topics that he spoke on / questions he answered.
Also here's a picture so you know I'm not lying.
Well what did he say?
What did they say?
bump
...
this
Op why
Come the fuck back here.
bump
fuck u OP respond
I've also met Wolff a couple times. chill, smart guy.
I'm still waiting you little shit
Woah! Thanks for bumping this, I was upset because I thought it had died out completely after I posted in it last Friday.
What does everyone specifically want to know? I can outline his entire talk / subsequent answers to questions but it'll take a minute.
...
It didn't get attention until Saturday night and I wasn't really paying attention.
well? fucking summarize the talk d00d
I'm currently writing it out, will be up in less than 10 minutes.
So he started out with some truly entry level facts about capitalism and had three specific points that he hammered home: capitalism is inefficient, capitalism is prone to crisis because it is a fundamentally contradictory system, and capitalism is unequal. The first point he made by citing the amount of unused productive capital in the US (standing now at around 20 percent according to him and this fed stat he referenced) compared to the number of American workers out of jobs, the second he illustrated by walking through how between the Depression and the 2008 crisis there were 11 smaller crises in the middle that we never address because they're not nearly as extreme as those two poles, and the third he obviously cited the insane global wealth discrepancy (he also asked us if we knew who Oxfam was, so I really don't know what level of basic knowledge he thought we were working with which was strange because he knew coming in it was a senior level Marxian economics course).
He very briefly initially addressed worker cooperatives and their fundamentally democratic nature and radical potential, and spent a good amount of time talking about the worker coop Mondragon in Spain and what their decision making / earning / labor schemes look like, and also made some brief allusions to cooperatively owned firms in the United States, specifically the ones in Ohio who have their history in the labor movement. He then wrapped his part up with a really weird collection of statements saying "there IS an alternative to this, there IS an alternative to capitalism" but that we hadn't heard of it because it is forcibly kept out of the potential solutions taught to us in school and offered in the popular discourse, but refused to say the word socialism which was truly bemusing. He also framed worker coops as being kind of the end-all be-all of this potential solution, so his market socialism really came out.
His wife is a Marxist psychoanalyst who spent her time addressing right populism and the widespread support for Trump through the lens of alienation in a general sense. She argued that workers are fully alienated and know something is wrong, but it comes out in this hypermasculine right wing machismo and that this is proto-fascist tendency is enabled and made much more extreme through the culture of commodified violence and hyper-individualism that the US specifically dabbles in pretty much to exclusion. She also touched on Mondragon and specifically how the factory shifts and culture of mutual cooperation and reliance resulted in tangible positive impacts such as reducing suicides and substance abuse and created a work environment that was collaborative instead of hostile and competitive. She wrapped her portion up with a bit about how socialism is defined by mutual reliance, support, and emotions like empathy and care and friendship, and that's why it's such anathema to the US context specifically.
That's their presentations - addressing the Q&A right now.
So I asked the first question, which was essentially along the lines of "given the fact that we know that Bernie isn't going to get the nomination whether or not he is actually still capturing mass support in the primaries, how do we redirect and channel this mass of youth energy that, while not radical is considerable and needs to be appropriately viewed given the absolute dearth of political fervor since 9/11, and ensure that this doesn't simply become a SYRIZA or even 2008 Obama situation where party action completely coopts a real potential for radical action resulting in absolute failure after he fails to get the nomination? How do we build people power and get this away from party capture?"
His answer was… lacking if I'm being kind. He first said that Sanders is much more devastating to the existing political regime than Trump which I am kind of eh on, especially with the opposite example of the rise of fascism in Europe right now. Then he essentially said that Sanders has made it okay to call oneself a socialist in American politics after 50 years where that would have been a death sentence, and then ended up with essentially saying that Bernie has generated interest in left(ish) politics and that people are going to wake up now and just pursue transformative large scale action regardless of whether or not he gets the nomination and wins, which is both a very sunny perspective and also fundamentally naive in my view. In retrospect he kind of didn't address the question at all, but his wife stepped in and made allusions to the feminist and black power movements of the 60's occuring simply as a result of mass disenfranchisment and consciousness raising on a mass scale.
(Also going to mention here that she introduced herself as a founder of the 2nd wave feminist movement and that feminism, in her words, "had taken a serious turn towards gender that none of us are happy about", so she's definitely not an idpol shill.)
My friend then asked a question about worker cooperatives that I'm honestly blanking on right now, but his answer wasn't anything that he hasn't said in print or during his speeches a thousand times before. Someone then asked an actually fascinating question about what his thoughts are on subsumed class processes in the US and whether or not we'd have to go back to a manufacturing export economy from our present entirely service based economy to see any effective movements take place because the site of oppression has been even more fully obscured, which he resoundingly said no to in brief terms but not because of an orthodox historical materialism reason.
(continued in second comment)
(part 2)
After that someone asked a frankly dumb question (which I knew came from some profoundly residual butthurt about a conversation he and I had actually had earlier that day lol) about how to ensure that revolutionary movements and energy aren't coopted and pacified specifically by neoliberal impulses and mechanisms, namely Tumblr-genre idpol, and he gave essentially the same answer he did to my question. Another friend then asked / made a general comment about how work places, namely Fordist ones in the 50's, serve to pacify resistance by giving workers some degree of autonomy and individual determination over their conditions thereby delaying the actual overthrow of the exploitation because its made cuddly and liveable, and Wolff responded to this by going on truly at length about the history of the labor movement and how the socialists and communists and IWW were hugely radical in the beginning of the 20th century / end of the 19th century specifically because the conditions were so hugely exploitative, and that a lot of this energy had come to an end because of the success of unions and implementation of Keynseian policies post-war.
The final question was actually the most fascinating because it was posed by a girl who had lived in Vietnam her whole life, who essentially asked about his opinions on "indie capitalism" (I really don't think she got he was just saying capitalism, same for most people - my anthro professor afterwards kept going on about how he was critiquing capitalism "as it exists today", which is just like intentionally missing the point), and to his wife she asked why if communism was so great and had all these awesome individual and emotional benefits she hadn't seen them at all in Vietnam. Wolff addressed the first one by saying he'd be fine with whatever she meant by "indie capitalism" as long as it ensured that workers if they so chose were given the right to own the means of production at their workplaces, and only then, otherwise it was just exploitation with nightmare Silicon Valley tech jargon. His wife addressed her question about Vietnam FEROCIOUSLY, essentially saying no one ever bitches about how long it took for capitalism to get to the moderately unlethal format it has in the West right now and hasn't even begun to achieve in the third world, but everyone's gung ho to jump down socialist experiments' throats despite the fact that they've existed for less than a century and have endured massive attacks on all sides for as long as they've existed, and that because they've largely failed doesn't mean socialism is bunk but rather that it hasn't been given any opportunity to succeed.
That's mostly what I remember, I'm working without my notebook and so am missing some things.