Anyone else get the impression that Richard Wolff is “hiding his power level” so to speak and is actually way more radical than he lets on? He seems to be more of a co-op, market socialism guy on the surface because he talks about workplace democracy a lot, but i remember him during an interview with Hakim saying pretty positive things about economic planning. Recently he has also been praising the People’s Republic of China a lot in various interviews, and in the latest interview i watched him give to Briahna Joy Gray he even snuck in a Lenin quote at the end (uncredited of course saying just “a famous political leader once said”) basically paraphrased the well known “there are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when decades happen” line. Is he a closeted ML or what? Is his focus on workplace democracy just a smart strategy to appeal to “baby leftist” Americans and introduce them to basic Marxist concepts without scaring them away?

  • Muad'DibberMA
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    192 years ago

    For me at least, he’s better than 99% of western leftists, because he supports modern China ( and the USSR of course ). Not even Parenti did that ( for China I mean ). Although the criticisms of his worker coop plan are legitimate, I think he uses the local unionization and coops as a radicalization starting place more than anything.

    He’s a legit Marxist, and doing a good a job as we can hope for, spreading communist ideas to a mainstream imperial-core audience indoctrinated to be anti-communist their entire lives. I really don’t understand it when some communists want to eat him. I’d argue that his dialogue and positions are even turning other popular Marxists like david harvey further left.

    • DankZedong A
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      82 years ago

      For some communists it’s never perfect enough. It’s communism on first try or nothing at all. They fail to see the differents states of different countries and that they all need different approaches to building communism. It’s a very immature and imo terminally online behavior.