Global Capitalism: Marxism: From Critique of Capitalism to Alternative System [May 2022] 

We don't even have choice on toothpaste or candy bars because most "competing" brands are owned by the same parent company. USA#1 right folks?

Good stuff my friend, my very good friend who I've never met but who I have much respect and much love for. I appreciate you

What we need is for the story tellers to begin imagining democracy based economies in different forms and placing them in stories as though they are an obvious development of society. Give people a vision of what we want, and make people expect to see it. If people can't picture it, they won't fight for it/work for it.

I worked many part time jobs as a University student at starvation wages. Part of my later college struggles were being in poverty, barely being able to afford to live, and the university did nothing. My loans were small at the beginning, but even after graduation with a bachelor's years of low wage work in order to gain "experience" kept me in poverty. The whole system is broken, a scam

10 different toothpaste choices, all owned by the same company. Same with the political process. It is a good analogy.

I love richard Wolff because he's a comrade that creates more of us at a rapid pace. He couldn't be doing anything else for the cause of workers.

We need more of this.

This is easily your best explanation of the core concepts needed to press on as a society. Tip of the hat to you, Prof Wolff. I have failed for over a decade to articulate these points as well as you do, here. I am elated, still, that I managed to find your voice 4 years ago. You have helped me organize my thoughts, and to break free of the rut I was in. I simply could not identify a mindset I aligned with, and that was because I, like many others, fell into the trap of "avoid Marx at all costs". You finally broke my mind free of that and will be forever grateful to you.

Thank you Professor Wolff for your insights on the economy, and most importantly, the political economy. Your a voice of sanity.

Amazing, I watched the whole thing

Great show

Thank you for this. The most important channel on RU-vid.

Funny thing about Prof Wolff's talk is how many ardent young defenders of the current state of affairs show up in the chat.

thank you for all you do prof. wolff. for the longest time i couldn’t put my finger on the source of unease/unrest i felt until i came across your lectures re: democracy at work and your elaborations on marxist theory

A live show! Good idea D@W!

Thank you for recognizing Apartment Rentals in the housing crisis… I never hear rent spoken about in my country of Canada. All they talk about is our homes and families :(

After 20 years of continual growth in the housing sector in Australia, the bubble has just burst, while the number of items unavailable at grocery stores is growing each day

Thank you Comrade. This is always appreciated. I wish you had a wider audience

Thanks professor . I appreciate you 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

Starbucks management believed they were doing right by their employees and were, in fact, doing better than most. But the problem is that they didn't realize that employees would like to have a regular schedule and time off to spend time with their families and participate in the rest of society.

Thank you very much for sharing this information with us! La monde va changer de base: Nous ne sommes rien soyons tout! 👍🇫🇷✊

Wish good times with struggle to Professor Richard Wolff,Paul Cockshott and David Harvey,the well to do marxist man's Red salute

I am sharing this reply I made to a YT video featuring Professor Isabella Weber, author of How China Escaped Shock Therapy. It might be too academic, dense even, but for those who have a keen interest on Professor Wolff's emphasis on the production side of capitalism, as the arena where changes must take place, this might shed some light on how Marx views this production side and how it is related to the circulation side (the selling side, i.e.). Thanks for reading. Dear Ms. Weber, I watched the RU-vid video “2020 HES Conference: 2B Marxist Themes' ' where you and Mr. Sina Badiei made brief presentations of research papers. My comment has to do with Mr. Badiei’s seeming confusion about productive and unproductive labor, more specifically his perplexed observation that Marx considers the circulation process of capitalist reproduction as an area where value is not created. Marx does not consider the labor of sales clerks and the like as producing value, thus are unproductive since production of surplus value, the source of profit, is the qualification of productive labor (originally an idea coming from Adam Smith). The labor of sales clerks enables the commercial capitalist, the merchant, to take a share of the surplus value created during the production process, as he performs the function of realizing the value (price) of the commodity. It must be a confusion, as I find it not fitting of an academic to deliberately criticize what Marx has been writing about, without much basis. As such, he did not mention the explanation given in Chapter 17, Commercial Profit in Capital volume 3, Penguin Classics. This chapter explains fully how the merchant class, e.g. wholesalers, such as Walmart owners, make their profit. It is a general point in Capital that labor power creates value in the production process of capital, not in the circulation phase. Vulgar economists insist that profit is made by an addition of profit to price of production (constant plus variable plus surplus), in other words, it’s all about “profit upon alienation,” an idea expounded originally by Sir James Stewart (see Chapter 1 of Theories of Surplus Value or Volume 4 of Capital). I am slightly digressing here. But back to the point. The example given by Marx in Chapter 17 is as follows: Assume that the total industrial capital advanced during the year is 720c + 180v (say in million of pounds sterling) and that s’=rate of surplus value=100%. Then the product is 720c + 180v + 180s = 1,080, making the rate of profit = (180/900) = 20%. This is not a particular rate of profit, but it is the average profit since it is about the total capital with its average composition of 720c + 180v. Now assume that the industrial capitalist does not sell his own product, but that a commercial capitalist buys the product, using an extra amount of investment in addition to paying for the whole product and that this amount is 100. The total capital = 900 + 100. Being one-tenth of the total capital, the commercial capital of 100 is entitled to one-tenth of the surplus value of 180 or = to 18, making its rate of profit = 18/100 = 18%. The industrial capitalist profit goes down to 162/900, also = to 18%. The price paid by the merchant to the industrial capitalist would then be 720 + 180 + 162 = 1,062. The merchant sells this product for 1,062 + 18 = 1080, i.e. at their price of production, which above is 1,080, or taking the commodity capital as a whole, is sold at their value. And as Marx says, “Commercial capital thus contributes to the formation of the general rate of profit according to the proportion it forms in the total capital.” (p. 398) And coming back to Mr. Bidiei’s confusion about the labor of sales clerks, not being considered by Marx as productive labor, let me quote Marx again: “Commercial capital, therefore, stripped of all the heterogeneous functions that may be linked to it, such as storage, dispatch, transport, distribution and retailing, and confined to its true function of buying in order to sell, creates neither value nor surplus value, but simply facilitates their realization, and with this also the actual exchange of commodities, their transfer from one hand to another, society’s metabolic process.” (p. 395) I won’t go into a thorough discussion of productive and unproductive labor, but to keep this email short, I would just refer anyone interested in a proper understanding of this by reading Book 1 of Theories of Surplus Value, chapter 4. It’s quite thorough and contains lots of economic history. BTW, I am currently reading your Shock Therapy book. It’s quite good, well-written. I’ve recommended it to others. The last thing I want to mention is somewhat unpleasant, in that I object to your characterization of the Tiananmen protest as a massacre. It was not, though many died outside the square AND many of them were PLA soldiers. This is now well known as conscientious journalists have corrected this misinformation, and I believe there is even Wikileaks information about such western media distortions and lies. Thank you very much for your work. P.S. I’m not trained in the economics field, but I really like learning from Karl Marx. Doing so has shed light on the assumptions of mainstream economics, which has a fondness for obscuring the true source of value, of wealth. Warmly, Onestraw

Thank you @Democracy At Work and prof. Wolff! Stay strong love from Greece

I like your new background. Happy to be here.

We need more of this what also has to happen is boycotting some places but also democratization of capital through the creation of worker cooperatives like you State but also nonparticipating in places like Disney e Walmart places known to have slave wages but also things like getting out of debt is another way Hurt the system where it hurts in corporations pockets

Marxism: From Critique of Capitalism to Alternative System [May 2022] In this lecture, Prof. Wolff will discuss the following: 1. Rising US labor militancy: Amazon to Grinnell College 2. Housing and stock market: bubbles and bursts 3. French left unity: a model for the world? 4. McConnell, GOP serve lenders, crush students with debt

Looking dapper Prof

Thank you professor for a wonderful show as usual informative I'm progressive cheers mate... ✊🏾

If the French elections used ranked choice voting they wouldn't have work together to put forth a single candidate. But glad the left in France are forming a coalition.

brilliant. strategic. focus driven

Love Professor Wolffs dressing style choices! 😀👍

Production feedback. Nice to see prof wolf standing. He performs so much better than seated. It sound better.

ranked choice voting would make a lot of difference for france

Hence The Debt Collective's success, nascent as it is.

This is great.

Any CEO that has a home worth over billion dollars, is blatant greed. The $6 hour homeless person needs to take a wrecking ball to CEO s home, even with startup of unions, it doesn't begin to level the playing field! I suggest CEO packs his tent before the wrecking ball reeks havoc on their way down. SOLIDARITY IN NUMBERS for United We Stand Divided We Fall, alternative is civil war!

Thanks!

oh wow 4k! Looks clean af

Beautiful video

Please do a talk about the benefits and evils of the ownership of shares of stock in corporations and how that relates to Marxism. Thanks.

Yo Prof. Wolf! What's with the newsie cap?

You must go beyond coops if you want a socialist system.

Richard what do you think would be a more equitable tax system generally speaking? Is a 2% expenditure tax viable?💥👍

Great hat Prof

Structures which were improvised and conditional have a way of entrenching themselves and being turned from conditional to absolute. That's another thing which is all over church history, which is essentially a recording of the improvisations and conditional adaptations which became enforced orthodoxy. Buzgalin uses this term "bureaucratisation" to describe the way in which the class character of the Bolshevik party changed and how the contingent necessities of the civil war ossified into a policy structure which couldn't thereafter be changed, which became officially correct and seen as the definition of Socialism. Some of that policy framework came from the Utopian Socialist traditions that predated Marx's work, and which played a key role in the development of Marxism in Russia in particular, because of the shortness of the period between the founding of Marxist organisations like Emancipation of Labour by former Utopian Socialists and the seizure of state power in the October Revolution by those same individuals. The problem of inflexibility and the anathematization of reassessment is especially a problem where you have what is officially a dsecular idea being treated as a de facto religious authority deviation from which is tantamount to heresy, and where you have a one party state in which no legitimate opposition is tolerated or allowed to contest elections.

They are a decentralized free market but with workers as owners.

The Paris Commune was brutally crushed, was it not? Capitalists don't give up power easily

Workers may be rising up, but we should not fool ourselves that wealth and power won’t retaliate.

I agree the state isn't the only thing to focus on, and that the democratization of the work place must be central to a society for and by the workers... but a third importance is that of a planned economy. Worker coops competing with each other will lead to inequality. We need the workers to not only have power of the workplace, but have democratic power over the economy as a WHOLE, AND a state to safeguard the workers organization from capitalist fascists who will do everything they can to crush socialism.

Could you please have Stephanie Kelton on the program. She's an advocate of the MMT point of view and can demonstrate that the 'how are you going to pay for it' argument holds no weight.

Excellent video, very educational. 11:11 But I think the “wishful thinking’ of our leaders of the economy is on the march is not wishful as much as it reflects how much our leaders are talking to the corporations not the people in comments about a recovery. Capital on its march of progress, develops itself, while human development digresses. The comments sound to us as delusional because there two realities, two economies, and the leaders speak to the participants of the primary economy that for for all us in the secondary economy not developing but rather, falling apart, perceive those comments as utterly delusional.

Shouts out Grinnell college

I tried to like this video but the button is disabled

Thank you for the education. I knew a lot of this but there is always room to learn more. I'm still learning at 80 years old. You convinced me when I read Democracy at Work. Now how do the Chinese get rid of Xi and allow Democracy to thrive there? How do we get rid of Democrats and Republicans and give our country to the people of the United States? Now I want specifics so I can continue the work of a lifetime in defense of working folks. Whatever we do in democratizing the work place we also must democratize larger organizing entities. In my work in unions It was vital to keep the unions honest and responsive to the membership. Democracy requires never ending work and constant vigilance to keep it alive and it requires the participation of everyone. It requires compromise and acceptance of the results of consensus. We can achieve it and I think we can keep it. But honestly. 4 years of Trump has me scared. We never had Democracy in this country but we are on the way to the anthisis of it and the election in November is critical. By 2024 we could lose the opportunity to ever see democracy or to read Marx or even hear Professor Wolff educate us. Authoritarianism stalks the globe and we have a bad case of that disease. Get off the sofa and start working for your own self interest. Just understanding Marx isn't enough. You must work for democracy in the workplace where we have to learn how to cooperate not compete. But first we have to make sure we can make that leap into practical Marxism and true Democracy. Get off the sofa and work for your own self interest.

Feudalism, slavery, communism, capitalism -. what is the next system? Nihilism? How will i pay my bills??

Hi, capitalist here. I watched this whole video and am open to exploring this idea further, for"democratising the workplace?"(is that Richards/Marx's idea). But I'm not sure how this would work/play out. Is there anyone that understands Richards arguments, able to describe how this would work. Maybe we could use Amazon as an example, as everyone knows their worker conditions are pretty shite. Cheers.

Is capitalism and militarism necessarily eventually intertwined?.

but there also happened the countermovement calles restauration, mainly driven by germans aristocracy, whihc unitl today is running the show in germany sidelined by obedient people.

What do you think of what is going on in Singapore?

Is that a photo of Mondragon, Spain?

where was the proof that forgiving student debt would not mostly benefit the rich , as McConnel said ?

I gotta ask: What's with the cap?

Free the Land

Coops are not a system

When it be nice if us the people can make the decisions and we didn't need anyone running the show what do you think?

Everyone must chip in /this work is v important I bought a book as well /put our $ to good work

A system is something that is economy wide, everyone accepts it

As usual, 5 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟 🌟

they also add costs of collection to student loans, so they make money dunning students with autodialers. part of our vaunted GNP.

sud solidaires/cgt/cnt on est là meme si macron ne veut pas on écoute le professeur Loup viva la viva la

Like like like

Pitchforks will travel?

Ho i want yo be part of this work because i m promotting an universal ideology called PROUT that means progressive utilization theory. Soi i m in Haïti, if you desire to reinforce humain society, i m available to internationalize those thoughts ans ideas. Thank you si much. I appreciate a lot the work you re doing. I got mission yo save my country and humain society because we are one and indivisible.

57:47 This will be terrifying.

50:16 Duuuuuude seriously? "Stalinism"?

You use the example of France for arguing for the unity in the left. Don´t overlook Mexico's case which has done that twice since 1988 and now holds the Presidency and the Legislative power, and will shurely win both powers again in 2024. And all because the left wing unity. Maybe you should study that case.

54 minutes: until common services are taken from parasites, nothing will change. It is the workers that make everything go, not parasites. How this can be achieved, you have a better idea than I do.

TFW Professor Wolff accidentally makes a cogent argument for Anarchism. I’m familiar with Marx’s work and it only strengthens my view that the State MUST be abolished for true freedom to be obtained

Why did we all just wait till people died or got real sick ?Why did we wait for the pandemic to just blow away ? who started the pandemic By doing Nothing ?

Apparently, these days , you use the word "socialism" in whatever context you like - it now has no meaning apart from loosely describing one fetish form of capitalism from another. In Marx and Engels time it was synonymous with "communism" which described a system where no money, wages, exchange or state where everything owned in common by all, to each according to need, from each according to abilities.

debt relief.. a debt jubilee is Christian

All societies of sufficient size become oligarchies. Capitalism is just one example. To counter our own oligarchic bias, we must create a federation of smaller communities. But there is no guarantee that this will work. Larger societies tend to have stronger militaries which are tempting to use. Bigger ones gobble-up smaller ones and you get oligarchy.

🦋🐝

Mitch Mconnell and educational "socialism"! I nearly vomited! Has he forgotten the generous "bail-out" of Wall Street only a decade ago? He must be senile. Or simply evil.

you need a phd to be able to buy a cardboard box.

Why did Trump Not Stop the Pandemic . MONEY ?

22:43 Prof Wolff does a solid Baron Harkonnen

But Jordan Peterson says Marxism leads to gulags.

Give Allah all you can - Receive from Allah all you need !

Is there surplus value when the enterprise provides a service rather than a commodity? If it does not, then most workers are not exploited because most people work in service industries.

So many inaccuracies in this speech, where does one start? OK. Let's start here - in 1917 Russia was predominantly feudalism with a fledgling capitalist class. The peasants were largely illiterate, and sick of years of war and all they yearned for was "peace, bread and land". So Lenin and his cronies leveraged that discontent to establish state capitalism. Lenin admitted this in a public address. Marx must be spinning in his grave to hear this nonsense from Prof Wolff.

38 minutes: why don’t we transition to capitalism? Regardless of what you say, which is correct, we do not live in capitalism. You keep saying it over and over again, “a tiny few make all the decisions“. Sounds like feudalism to me. Capitalism is Socialism. You have the best description. You say, “your brains, your muscles, what you produce“.

The nonsense spewing out of Mr McConnels.... "mouth"...

The blockchain tech is now making its way to the workers in decentralize manner

35 minutes: you say “a tiny number of people make all the decisions“. Wow, that sounds like feudalism. I do not disagree with anything you say, just the language.

When they are marching you to the concentration camps just remember to thank them for the free Healthcare.

Oh Yes please do that ... Build your own Economic System for your Kind of People, have your own currency, flag , passport , governance culture , Just do not force it on people not interested in your "economic" model - just like the AMISH have done for so long now - BEST OF LUCK TO YOU - When we all respect the rights of others not to be forced into "somebody else's economic model" that is the best sign that the "economic model" is ethical ... and respects peoples basic HUMAN RIGHTS (see UDHR 1948) ... Having your own voluntary economic system, culture, flag, passport , currency is all supported by yes BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS (see UDHR 1948) Sadly marxism is not on the list of good models ...Karl Marx was a racist kook, who used the “N” over and over, hated all non-whites, and especially Jewish people (in spite of being Jewish himself) sad but true. It is hard to believe people still take this racist screwball seriously, most informed people know “Marxism” is a racist , secular-religious dogma, veiled in rhetorical “Emancipatory” nonsense, a form of racist anti-Semitism that undermines Jewish people, and the Judeo -Christian values that define todays Human Rights norms today (see UDHR 1948) and open free democratic societies. Marxism embeds (or normalizes) both an explicit and subliminal anti-Semitic Racism, social class and economic scapegoating, veiled in the mumbo-jumbo of class envy and nonsense economic theory. Karl Marx’s racist 1844 text, “On the Jewish Question” (also known as a world without Jews) was followed by his racist operational “practice” handbook “The Communist Manifesto” written 36 months later outlining a series of policies that would disproportionately impact Jewish people - as it destroyed the basic freedoms a functional high trust society is based on. Karl Marx’s explicit and implicit racism would define his sad pathetic life’s “work”, that… and the drunken squalor, poverty, maid raping, bad temper, violent rages and B.O. he forced his family to endure. Karl Marx … never a job, always a drink … and rarely a bath. Lol…the sad life of an angry racist bigot. The anti-Semitic Racism of the Cultural Leftists and Marxist dogmatists manifests today in a diversity of ways and rhetorical strategies from the anti-Semitic politics of the BDS, to updating and normalizing anti-Semitic rhetoric and tropes, such as “the 1%”, “ equity”, and terms like “patriarchy” and “ capitalism” used as pejoratives or promoting “social values” like censorship or coercive taxation, intrinsically incompatible with Jewish, Judeo-Christian values and human rights that protect, religious freedom, property rights, free speech and association (see UDHR 1948). Human Rights law is a useful tool to identify both the intrinsic RACISM and Human Rights Abuse that Marxist and Cultural Leftists always promote (see UDHR 1948) www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights Karl Marx’s RACIST discourse is veiled in a fraudulent pseudo-rational, economic mumbo -jumbo. A rhetorically closed self-justifying system, subjective definitions, an absence of natural economic or independent price signals, lack of internal consistency, bogus analytical categories (‘social class”), the nuttiness of a “labour theory of value” , the pagan religion (dogma) of “historical / dialectical materialism”, sectarian intolerance, envy rhetoric, racism, anti-Semitism a series of rather glaring epistemological problems and so on. It was more an expression of a narcissistic pathology than rational social or economic analysis, as noted by Robert Solow (Nobel Prize Economics 1987) “most serious English-speaking economists regard Marxist economics as an irrelevant dead end.” Sadly, for deluded Cultural Leftists there is no such thing as “Capitalism” a word invented in 1850 as an anti-Semitic pejorative by the socialist and racist Louis Blanc to denigrate the economic and individual freedoms found in open high trust cultures, cultures defined by Jewish and Judeo-Christian values. There is no such thing as “capitalism” just HUMAN FREEDOM that expresses itself as individual free choice in a diversity of free markets, be it economic, cultural, or social market that free people make choices in ( see UDHR 1948 again). A free market in ideas, beliefs, theories or artifacts is where crappy products, toxic values, theories, beliefs and ideas that rely on coercion to be inflicted in the name of “equality”, are quickly exposed and quickly die. www.news24.com/citypress/columnists/fmf/who-invented-the-term-capitalism-and-why-20181116 As all informed people know Karl Marx was a virulent RACIST. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-rZh01xRO_Qg.html Nobody not even his most devoted followers disagrees, as the evidence Karl Marx’s explicit racism in own words is too overwhelming to deny( see N. Weyl “Karl Marx Racist” ) So pathetic to see anyone taking Marxism and its embedded racism seriously ...Sad but True.

Won't debate Peter Schiff

Well socialism has always been fantasy...and you are getting your wish...or reaping the rewards.