I have always avoided everything Richard Wolff like the plague, after reading that terrible, atrocious book of his Economics: Marxian versus Neoclassical so many years ago. The book gives a fairly straightforward presentation of neoclassical economic dogma, but the “Marxian” section is just total garbage. It is as the user Augustus says: if he wasn’t spewing bullshit about Marxist economics, his university employers wouldn’t find him useful, and would just get rid of him. Academia has plenty of pseudo-Marxists, who serve the role of spreading as many stupid lies as possible about socialism, particularly to young people who already have their doubts about capitalism.

In addition to this video, Wolff wrote some article on the same subject, picked up by Counterpunch. Apparently whoever is in charge of formulating “Left” opinions of “Western” children has (once again) found a need to trot out some (they believe) respected academics to make sure certain opinions aren’t allowed to be had by young people. The idea that China is actually a socialist country is very, very threatening to the “Western” bourgeoisie, and not only because ‘Lefty’ kids might come to accept the notion, but that ‘Right’ wingers might actually start understanding it themselves, which also plays hell with their ideological management of the extra-stupid whites.

Both in this video and the Counterpunch article, Richard Wolff assumes his audience is idealistic young people, and hence plays on the most idealistic notions about what socialism is or isn’t. Do markets exist in any fashion! Not socialism! Because, of course, socialism means there are no such things as stores. What you presumably have instead are Socialist Item Exchangitoriums, where you go in and take whatever you want, and if you feel like paying for it, you do some amount of labor right inside the store that is equivalent to the labor it took to manufacture that item (and maybe the labor it took to actually get it to the store in the first place). The USSR had stores, you say? Well, there you go, it was capitalism all along.

The Counterpunch article, written for an older (yet still idealistic) audience, needs a little bit more sophisticated gibberish, so Wolff gets right to his “employer/employee” shtick. Apparently, if you’re not allowed to walk into a place of work, start sweeping the floor, and immediately demand payment for your un-asked for work, it is capitalism! Apparently those co-ops Wolff so fervently believes in as the savior of the labor aristocratic “Western” workers’ dignity, won’t be allowed to say who is, and who is not, a member of the co-op! And of course, there won’t be any jobs devoted to actually managing labor in the co-op, even though Marx explicitly says this is a necessary and productive job.

Wolff is interested in talking about things that don’t matter. Wolff is doing theology; he is interested in analyzing the imaginary economy of Heaven. To those of us who got into Marxism because we opposed “American” imperialism, this is all hilarious. He is, essentially, trying to appeal to the tiny amount of English-speaking children who think they’re exploited proletarians, and that if “America” was socialist, somehow their lives would be better. His message is created for children of the Labor Aristocracy, whose parents already consume more value than they’ll ever actually produce.

Wolff is not interested in using the Labor Theory of Value to calculate who is and who is not exploited. In the minds of pseudo-Marxists like Wolff, 99.99% of the world population are exploited proletarians. People like Wolff think middle-managers making $150,000 a year are exploited proletarians, they think second string football players being paid $250,000 a year to sit on a bench are exploited proletarians. They think computer programmers being paid $100,000 a year to debug old shitty software that companies just refuse to stop using are exploited proletarians. No doubt Richard Wolff would tell you pornographic film stars are exploited proletarians, but they are “more productive” than third-world street walkers, hence why they’re paid hundreds of times more for their “labor!” Vulgar Marxism indeed!

Before this gets much longer, there is a 4-year old Reddit post written by a certain someone (cough not me cough) dealing with Richard Wolff’s bullshit, that I highly recommend. It can be found here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/3th7zn/ugh_anyone_want_to_respond_to_richard_wolff_who/cx6v31k?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3