Sorry, I know debatebro-ism is the 12th type of liberalism :denguin:
Disappointed by Wolff tbh. He's too moralizing, comes off as a Christian Socialist. He's also long winded, yeah I know it was a live debate but he should've been able to make his points more focused. He also hangs on to dead ends (Socialism's definition isn't amorphous, Mondragon is good, etc.) which he doesn't need to. He basically rolls over to Destiny's weird hostility to using history and class relations to explain modes of production, doesn't put enough emphasis in them as processes instead of things that people just enact one day.
I don't get Richard Wolff sometimes. You watch some of his stuff and he comes across as a lib, but then you watch something like his interview with Hakim and everything he says makes complete sense and his viewpoint is very clear and reasonable.
Maybe a case of the famed """hiding your power level""""
Probably closer to meeting the audience where they are.
Either way his stuff is a good introduction to Marxist analysis for left-curious libs.
What Wolff did was ingraining that 'China bad' 'Russia bad' is not helpful. The different definitions for socialism (not communism!) I understand as creating a field of multiple options depending on the social and material conditions at some points (which is good and levels against the charge of monolithic nature of communism leveled against it within the US).
He also highlighted with it that the successes were won by socialists - not by capitalists. This is good, if it is helpful we will see (and there is no problem to deal with it differently). I for one believe there was not enough differentiation between social democratic ideas and factors and such from within a self identified communist perspective (but that is okay for a debate!).
What he said was left and close to liberalism, however Wolff himself is aware that if you would try to get workplace democracy it would clash with capitalism and a huge reaction would be the result. The debate wasn't the best place to underline that though, the debate was to purge this idea of the own US-American exceptional viewpoint as being the only legitimate.
The 'long windedness' for the most part was contextualizing how material reality works: it is depending on the material and social conditions before which are related to the modes of production and the resulting super structure is influencing each step on the way. To understand how capitalism or socialism come to being you don't look in a dictionary ("There is no one body which accredits if this is true socialism"), you look at the historical processes birthing them. This was basically an introduction of ideas of the political economy and such for lay persons (this is why he used the employer-employee relationship instead of the doubly free worker).
Lets be clear: Quite a few people wouldn't have listened to Wolff, but even more now experienced a person who an actual academic expert and doesn't withdraw and introduced dozens and dozens of important materialist talking points. For me it felt like a win (and the chat made clear Wolff won, too). Even within Destiny's chat he was not seldomly dunked on, which is something, too.
Edit:
Sorry for the wall of text, however I would like to add even more: The Mondragon thing was really a bit long winded, however it is nice to see that Wolff did not say small disparities from perfection defeat Mondragon (which would be idealist conceptions), but that the reality of the 1:6 wage limits are there (there is also a 38% more between coops ceilings) and Destiny was exposted for everyone who wanted to look Mondragon up as liar. This was important to discredit the legitimacy of Steve (Destiny) for most who only would do a cursory glance at Mondragon later on seeing that Wolff was right and Destiny uninformed and a liar.
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Well he def. looked like prof "I-talk-a-lot", but this was combined with "I-know-shit", so the messages amount about who was getting points and who was better was heavily skewed towards Wolff, most of the time 5:1 for him and in the near end there were situations were multiple screens went without flak vs. Wolff.