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?
He definitely, absolutely moderates the way he presents his ideology.
And I think he does good work because of it.
Not everybody needs to be fully brazen about their ideology. And not everyone needs to do what Wolff does. But Wolff is good at what he does, which is to remain palatable to people who go along with capitalism purely out of herd mentality but are smart enough to think critically about their situation. The kind of people who sense there’s something wrong with capitalism but have been conditioned to run screaming from places like this website, or anything branded as problematic by twitter or other media. Wolff is able to address those people and have them listen.
He wouldn’t be able to do that if he was also liking Chen Weihua tweets. But the Wolf Warriors are doing valuable praxis, and the Big Bad Wolff is doing a different, equally valuable praxis.