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.