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:
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.