Prof. Richard Wolff: “Socialism represents the critical demand to extend democracy into the economic sphere”

Prof. Richard Wolff. DR.

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: You have done a very important work throughout these years and you wrote among other things this remarkable book New Departures in Marxian Theory that you co-signed with your colleague Stephen Resnick. In your opinion, is there not a need for a revolutionary interpretation of Marxism far off the beaten track?

Prof. Richard Wolff: Marx and Marxism were themselves overdetermined (in Althusser’s sense) by their social conjunctures. So too will be the next revolutionary interpretation(s) of Marxism. The current global crisis of capitalism, built on its global collapse of 2008-2009, plus the criticisms by Marxists of (1) the rise and fall of the USSR and (2) other early experiments in constructing « socialisms » will together produce those next revolutionary interpretations. On this let me direct you and your readers to two works: S. Resnick and R. Wolff, Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR (Routledge, 2002) and also R. Wolff, Understanding Marxism (2019).

How can we build today a workers’ movement capable of fighting big capital in the most effective way?

From the perspective of the US, our two top priorities are (1) organizing the left (which is large and deep but utterly disorganized), and (2) developing a clearly focused set of social goals and strategy  that does not mimic the strategic mantra of the past (i.e. socialize means of production and replace markets with planning) because their severe incompleteness makes them inadequate to the task.

You wrote Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism. In your opinion, why did the Occupy movement fail? Why does the American left have difficulty to be a framing force of the working class?

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