Wolff, Richard

Marxist economist and historian, professor at the New School

Richard Wolff: Marxism and Communism

Lex Fridman Podcast · Jun 17, 2022

• Richard Wolff
• Marxist economic theory
• surplus value and exploitation
• worker cooperatives
• Soviet Union historical isolation
• Stalinism causes
• Nazism and socialism relation
• cultural Marxism
• Bernie Sanders and AOC
• socialism vs. Marxism definitions
• Cold War academic taboo

Core ideas

Wolff defines Marxism as the broad, geographically and historically fragmented tradition descending from Marx's work, noting that Marx himself wrote almost exclusively a critique of capitalism (not a positive blueprint for socialism or communism), and traces how later movements — the short-lived 1871 Paris Commune, and especially the 1917 Russian Revolution — were forced to improvise concrete governing systems Marx never specified. He argues a key, under-examined historical shift occurred in the late 19th century when Marxist debate moved from "should capitalism be surpassed" to "how" — splitting into reformist (electoral, exemplified by Eduard Bernstein) versus revolutionary (state-seizure, associated with Lenin) camps — and that reformism has historically won more often than revolution, citing 1930s America's rapid, tax-funded expansion of Social Security, unemployment insurance, minimum wage, and federal jobs programs as a major reformist success achieved without revolution.

Wolff describes the core analytical concept of Marxist economics as the "surplus" (in German, mehr, "more" — output produced by workers beyond what they themselves consume) and defines exploitation strictly as any arrangement where that surplus is appropriated and distributed by someone other than those who produced it — true, in his account, of slavery, feudalism, and capitalist wage labor alike. He defines communism, in this framework, not as government ownership (which he calls a common but mistaken popular association, e.g. equating "socialism" with the U.S. Postal Service) but as workers collectively and democratically deciding what happens to the surplus they produce — a definition he says is absent from and unrelated to central planning, which he attributes specifically to the Soviet Union's particular historical implementation rather than to Marx's writings themselves.

Wolff argues that Soviet, Chinese, Cuban, and other 20th-century implementations failed, in his assessment, because they substituted a government official for the private capitalist as surplus-appropriator without changing the underlying exploitative relationship between decision-makers and producers — a shift he says derailed the original goal without the participants fully understanding why (invoking the German word schief, "gone crooked"). He proposes worker cooperatives — democratic ownership and decision-making within individual workplaces — as what he considers to be the practical alternative implied by Marx's own analysis, arguing this would extend democratic principles into what he calls the "autocratic" governance of the modern workplace, and using a thought experiment (a factory automating away half its workforce) to argue technological gains under capitalism are typically captured entirely as profit rather than shared with displaced workers as increased leisure — a framing Fridman pushes back on by raising competitive/market accountability mechanisms and entrepreneurial mobility as counterweights, which Wolff argues are insufficient and, per his own analysis (via Hegel's dialectic), tend to produce monopolization rather than sustained competitive discipline.

On the causes of Stalinist violence, Wolff attributes much of it not to flaws inherent in Marxist theory but to the USSR's international isolation (Western invasion attempts by the U.S., Britain, France, and Japan after 1917; global economic isolation; the failure of parallel revolutions in Berlin, Munich, and Budapest that left the USSR without an international socialist bloc as Marx's own internationalist vision anticipated) and to long-entrenched authoritarian habits inherited from Tsarist feudalism, comparing this to how the Cuban people, in his account, "made" Fidel Castro into an authoritarian figure through social pressures rather than Castro seeking dictatorial power innately. On the rise of Nazism, Wolff argues Marxism's connection is limited to Hitler cynically appropriating the popular word "socialist" (as in "National Socialist German Workers' Party") to compete for a German working-class electorate that, by 1932, was voting roughly 50% for explicitly socialist and communist parties — while stating plainly that Hitler and his allies had no genuine interest in Marxist ideas and violently persecuted communists as their first targets.

Wolff distinguishes Marxism (a systematic economic critique of capitalism specifically) from socialism (a broader, longer-standing tradition holding merely "that we can do better than capitalism," within which Marxism is one influential current among others including anarchism), and argues that the post-WWII "Cold War taboo" against discussing Marxism seriously — which he says persisted even within elite American academia, including his own decades at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, where he says Marxist thought was taught in only one course out of twenty semesters — has left both ordinary Americans and self-described intellectuals largely ignorant of the actual content of 20th-century Marxist and socialist thought, including cultural theorists like Antonio Gramsci, György Lukács, Louis Althusser, and the Frankfurt School's Walter Benjamin. He argues the term "cultural Marxism," as used pejoratively on social media to describe identity-focused "woke" politics, bears little relation to the actual academic tradition of that name (which studies the interaction between capitalism and culture), calling the popular usage largely uninformed name-calling.

Discussing contemporary figures, Wolff frames Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as early, comparatively moderate signs of American socialism "waking up" from Cold War-era hibernation — noting Sanders himself describes his politics as similar to 1930s New Deal reform rather than a fundamental break from capitalism — and predicts further, more confrontational currents will emerge as this reawakening continues, citing internal socialist-movement disagreement over U.S. aid to Ukraine as an early fracture point. He also discusses his own long, largely untroubled personal relationship with holding unpopular views, attributing this partly to elite academic credentials that afforded him social protection, and describes a marked recent increase in public demand for his commentary (multiple media appearances per day, versus once every few months a decade ago) as evidence of a broader cultural shift.

Excerpts