I’m not sure if he is a meme or if people genuinely like Wolff. I haven’t read him extensively, but I’ve watched/read him enough times to get a sense. I have never been too impressed. While Marx and others leave me with clarity, Wolff consistently leaves me confused. It feels like he has a super narrow understanding of things but doesn’t reveal his own assumptions. It feels like a purely aesthetic Marxism to dress up his own ideas.
For example: https://youtu.be/flFyaguUqIo
The first 3 minutes is a correct summary of, basically, Marx’s letter to Kugelmann. After 3:00, his explanation falls apart. He bastardizes Marx when he says that labor in every society produces a surplus, and that in capitalism that surplus happens to take the form of a commodity. This is utterly wrong, surplus depends on the productivity of a society (I believe Marx wrote about this specific point in Grundrisse as well as Capital). No, the issue in capitalism is not that surplus is unfairly distributed, but that workers are compelled to work longer than necessary, precisely to produce a surplus.
He doesn’t make a clear distinction between surplus of use-value and surplus value.
The result is that he transform Marxism into a mere search for equitable distribution of goods, which is emphatically not what Marx himself believed as he wrote in his critique of the Gotha Program.
I’d love to be proven wrong here, or let in on the joke… thanks!
:RIchard-D-Wolff:
A useful entrypoint for liberals sliding into leftism. So, its something, not everything though.
As someone who was swayed by his rhetoric while in a politically "agnostic" phase, I second this. He's a great source for "baby's first leftism."
I went from someone who was generally swayed by working-class arguments to thinking I might actually read Marx. His discussion with Abby Martin on the Empire Files is specifically what swayed me. He broke down the core flaw in capitalist philosophy in an easily understood way.
As I've gotten more well-versed, he's become 'cooperative grandpa.' He's less useful the further down the rabbit hole you go because you start picking out holes in his arguments, as well as his stances that you wouldn't pick out otherwise. Specific tendencies tend to be able to pull him apart worse than others.
I generally have a positive opinion of him because he's on the "right" side of things.
He's a serious-sounding, stuffy, dry professor who keeps telling people to form co-ops. That's kind of useful.
I wish we had like five of him writing for some incredibly generic sounding think tank called, like, The Economic Review, so I could link their op-eds to respectability libs.
I do like him. If you’re well versed then perhaps there are better speakers. But for the average person, the difference between surplus value and surplus use value is unimportant.
He's fine, but if you need to show someone "baby's first socialism", I think this tall is really good: https://youtu.be/ynbgMKclWWc
He kinda drones on for the first few minutes, but about 7 minutes in he really catches his stride. If you've talked to some average liberal a bit, you can sit them down and say "hey this is like an hour and a half long, but watch 10 minutes and we'll turn it off if you think it's super boring".
The fact that it's at Google looks really good to laypeople too, so that's helpful.
iirc he goes hard on co-ops because he thinks the most radical thing that stands a chance here.
Almost a meme answer, but I like him generally but almost never specifically.
Nia Frome of RedSails once said that he's a marx-inspired Kantian instead of Hegelian/marxist, and all things I've heard since feel like it supports this theory
He doesn't repeat what Marx wrote 200 years ago, since he's not an orthodoxmarxist, nor an ML. He's a Marxian economist, which is different from Marxist
I think if he doesn’t agree with Marx’s theory and just likes the general ideas, that makes his Marxian influence purely aesthetic — related only in form, not substance. I wouldn’t call astrology “heterodox astrophysics”, they are two fundamentally different things. Perhaps I’m splitting hairs but I think a Marxian economist ought to agree with the major tenets of Marx’s theory.
Sorry if this came across condescending.
I think Marx was prolific enough, or at least that his ideas extend into so many spheres, that you could disagree with certain major tenets of his theory and still consider yourself a Marxist, or ascribe to Marxian theories. Right off the bat I think of the humanist versus anti-humanist split, as well as people who maintain the labor theory of value versus trying to reformulate Marxism to fit with the subjective theory of value.
I'd say if a person exists in academia within the neoliberal consensus and still believes in surplus value and labor theory of value, it's fair to call them Marxist or Marxian. There's just a ton of different ways to approach Marxist thought.
Wolff seems useful because he's approachable and has a lot of experience teaching (if a person vibes with his style). It's hard to say (without doing deeper research than I have time for) what his actual, core beliefs are, because I suspect he's positioned himself to be an entrypoint on the pipeline by hiding his power level.
Marxians usually grasp the political economy but not the revolutionary ideas of Marxism. Thus they're kinda stranded in "capitalism bad" with no real way out. It's why they fetishize cooperatives, individual action, and social democracy,
As a Marxist scholar? No not really. All of your critiques are pretty valid and on point. If you are not aware you should read Michael Roberts's blog and look up Michael Hudson's articles/books as a supplement opinion.
As a Marxist educator/content creator/personality? Absolutely I hold him in very high regards, I used to watch his old economic updates 3-4 years I think, the 1:30h long ones he used to do with an audience. He is very good as an entry point and imo his biggest strength is the way he can critique capitalism in a simple way.
I think he's a tedious blowhard who simplifies things to the point where he risks making his listeners sound like idiots, but if you really know nothing about economics you could do worse than listen to Economic Update as long as you use it as a starting point for your investigation instead of an ending point.
And tbh a lifelong Trot suddenly becoming good on USSR and China does strike me as an opportunist move, but that's more just a suspicion.
I don't trust any academic marxist beyond the point that i trust them to drop an absolute shit take at some point. If they were actually cool, they would not have gotten tenure in a bourgeois academic system, not even as an "open marketplace of ideas" fig leaf. The salvageable parts of the intelligentsia do not make it that far anymore, hegemonial control of capital has advanced too much to allow a professor to teach ideas actually dangerous to the propertied classes.
He's a good entry point into socialism with explanation of worker co ops and the like
He's a cooperative fetishist and is overrated, but he's fine as a critic at least
