Richard D. Wolff Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Nothing would more quickly and definitively reduce U.S. income inequality than allowing every worker in all businesses to participate in deciding the range of incomes from one worker to another. They would never do what is now a matter of normality: give one person millions, in some cases billions, while others have barely enough to make a living.

To cut 1930s jobless, FDR taxed corps and rich. Govt used money to hire many millions. Worked then; would now again. Why no debate on that?

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

If you lived with a roommate as unstable as this economic system, you would’ve moved out or demanded that your roommate get professional help.

The word "collective" is not so often used because it has been basically used by socialists and communists and has a different history. The word "cooperative" means the workplace itself is organized cooperatively, rather than in the conventional capitalistic, hierarchical form.

The capitalist workplace is one of the most profoundly undemocratic institutions on the face of the Earth. Workers have no say over decisions affecting them. If workers sat on the board of directors of democratically operated self-managed enterprises, they wouldn't vote for the wildly unequal distribution of profits to benefit a few and for cutbacks for the many.