Richard D. Wolff Quotes

“If you lived with a roommate as unstable as capitalism, you would’ve moved out or demanded that your roommate get professional help.”

“Elon Musk is a dictator to Tesla employees.”

“The CEO is the modern incarnation of the king, and we ought to think about that because long ago we got rid of kings.”

“There's nothing democratic about an inflation. The only thing you might call democratic is who suffers the most from it.”

“A cooperative enterprise is the key alternative to a traditional capitalist enterprise. All the workers, whatever they do inside an enterprise, have to be able to participate in collectively arriving at the decisions about what, how, where to produce, and what to do with the profits in a democratic way. One person, one vote should decide how these things are done.”

“In America, we debate everything except capitalism. If there's an institution in your society that's above criticism, you're giving it a free pass to indulge all of its weaknesses and darker tendencies.”

“Moving to a cooperatively organized enterprise is one of the best ways to really do something about unequal distribution of wealth.”

“The more successful capitalists are in cutting their wage costs, the less money workers will have to buy back what those same capitalists produce. It's a contradiction.”

“Capitalism, Marx said, never went beyond those economic models where a few dominate a majority. Capitalism just replaced the dichotomies of master/slave and lord/serf with a new one. A dominating and exploiting minority was still there, but it had a new name: employers.”

“Greed is not the cause of capitalists’ behavior; it is a quality they acquire in accommodating to and internalizing the requirements of competitive survival within the capitalist system.”

“To achieve a society that exhibits liberty, equality, fraternity and democracy, the object to change first and foremost is production.”

“Socialism is a kind of yearning for a better life than what capitalism permits for most people. Socialist yearnings are as old as capitalism itself, because they are its products.”

“Socialism is when the government does stuff. And it's more socialism the more stuff it does. And if it does a real lot of stuff, it's communism.”