Richard D. Wolff Quotes

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.

If Americans actually understood the structure of our taxes, they would not only become angry, they might also find our economic and political systems intolerable because they are the cause of our unjust tax codes ... We could revolutionize the financial conditions of every American city and town - solve all or most of its tax revenue problems - if the property tax system were simply extended from tangible property to also include intangible property. If you want some quick solutions to our nation's fiscal problems, that would be one. Even on the simple basis of fairness, how can we justify having a property tax system that exempts the intangible property owned mostly by the richest amongst us? What a prime example of the Occupy movement's central point about the economic injustice perpetrated by the 1 percent against the 99 percent.

The word "collective" is not so often used because it has been basically used by socialists and communists and has a different history. The word "cooperative" means the workplace itself is organized cooperatively, rather than in the conventional capitalistic, hierarchical form.

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 capitalist workplace is one of the most profoundly undemocratic institutions on the face of the Earth. Workers have no say over decisions affecting them. If workers sat on the board of directors of democratically operated self-managed enterprises, they wouldn't vote for the wildly unequal distribution of profits to benefit a few and for cutbacks for the many.

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.

Moving to a cooperatively organized enterprise is one of the best ways to really do something about unequal distribution of wealth.

A cooperative enterprise is the key alternative to a traditional capitalist enterprise. All the workers, whatever they do inside an enterprise, have to be able to participate in collectively arriving at the decisions about what, how, where to produce, and what to do with the profits in a democratic way. One person, one vote should decide how these things are done.

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.

In America, we debate everything except capitalism. If there's an institution in your society that's above criticism, you're giving it a free pass to indulge all of its weaknesses and darker tendencies.

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.

Nothing would more quickly and definitively reduce U.S. income inequality than allowing every worker in all businesses to participate in deciding the range of incomes from one worker to another. They would never do what is nowadays a matter of normality: give one person millions, in some cases billions, while others have barely enough to make a living.

If you lived with a roommate as unstable as capitalism ...