Richard D. Wolff

There Are Better Ways for Societies to Address Inflation Than by Hiking Interest Rates

A deafening silence defines “debates” among U.S. leaders about stopping or slowing today’s inflation. Alternatives to the Federal Reserve’s raising of interest rates and curtailing money supply growth are ignored. It’s as if there were no other ways to rein…

The Role of Capitalism in the War in Ukraine

To the motives for war in human history, capitalism added another: profit. That motive drove technological advancement and created a genuine world economy. It also built new capitalist empires such as the Spanish, Dutch, British, French, Belgian, Russian, German, Japanese,…

U.S. Politicians Spend Their Time Papering Over the Social Problems Caused by Profit-Driven Capitalism

The declines of U.S. capitalism and of its imperial position provoke fear among its mainstream politicians. Their response, in large part, has been to deny that any such decline is happening. These politicians do this partly by acting as though…

A Critique of Obscene Wealth

Wherever and whenever obscenely rich people existed, they always protected their wealth and the privileges that come with it from the majority of non-wealthy people working for them and around them. Emperors, kings, czars as well as masters of huge…

What China Learned From U.S. Capitalism’s Development

U.S. capitalism was, in certain ways, the world’s most successful capitalism until recently. Better than the capitalist systems of Britain, Germany, and Japan, U.S. capitalism avoided two key traps. First, it found a remarkable way to manage the capitalist-worker class…

Understanding the Basics of 21st-Century Democracy, Autocracy, and Capitalism

Democracy exists if and when a community organizes its self-governance around the full participation, on an equal basis, of all the members of the community. Its other, autocracy, exists when a community organizes (or allows) its governance by an individual…

The United States Underestimates China’s Economic Challenge at Its Own Peril

This is not a moment for rose-tinted glasses. By Richard D. Wolff The economy of the People’s Republic of China has been growing much faster than that of the United States for decades. So too has China’s average real wage.…

Increasing Desperation as the U.S. Capitalist System Declines

Like all previous economic systems in recorded history, capitalism is on track to repeat the same three-step trip: birth, evolution, and death. The timing and other specifics of each system’s trip differ. Births and evolutions are commonly experienced as positive,…

A Minimum Wage? A Fake Debate

By Richard D. Wolff Capitalism’s “conservative” defenders yet again oppose raising the minimum wage. They fought raising it in the past much as they tried to prevent the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) that first mandated a U.S. minimum wage.…

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