Some people do not understand that as a 40 years experienced academic and university professor, he knows very well that the message must be tailored to reach the specific target. And his target are people that know very little about Marxism, and are also still very scared about: the average Americans. I think he’s an extremely important “first stage” of radicalisation. The “experts” can just ignore him probably.

Good as a halfway between Marxism-Leninism and liberalism, but generally his support for petty bourgeois cooperative quasi-socialism over collectivized production and distribution leaves his analysis a bit lacking.

He’s pretty good when it comes to spreading the message. I used to watch his monthly “economic updates” and he was well-informed, entertaining and a decent analyst. I think he can be very convincing to the average non-communist Westerner. He’s been pushing the idea of creating worker co-ops a lot, and his organization is pretty good at offering help to unionize as far as I can tell.

He gets criticism from communists because:

• One of his main talking points is that AES (Soviet Union, China, etc) are not really socialism/communism and are instead state capitalist. According to him, it wasn’t for lack of trying, but because their economic, political and diplomatic issues were so extreme after their revolutions, that they had to stop the transition to stabilize, but never restarted again. As far as I can tell, he still supports their existence, and maybe I can see his reasoning, but it’s a vast oversimplification and very close to revisionism (if not there already). His support for China has grown a lot in more recent years, as he sees that the their economic model is similar to the one he espouses.

• Similar to above, his books receive criticism that they misrepresent with multiple errors how AES economic systems worked/work. His own proposals, when written in detail and a more academic way, seem to rile people up about his perceived misunderstandings.

• His constant push for an anarchosyndicalist economic model might harm the perception of future Marxists towards ML.

I haven’t listened to him much in recent years, but I honestly find some of this criticism to be a bit harsh. I think at least to some degree it is a part of his strategy (as he occasionally brings up the point indirectly), in that he won’t be listened to by the average American/West European if he starts outright praising the Communist Manifesto, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc etc.

His important contribution is how many people he’s converted to leftists over the years. Whether they end up being anarchists, anarchosyndicalist, social democrats, democratic socialists, or whatever else is immaterial, as they usually trickle into Marxism-Leninism over time (at least judging from my experience lurking in online communities connected to him for a while, sometime ago). I consider him one of the currently best stepping stones towards Marxism.

Richard Wolff is a well known Marxist Economist and any news source that needs a Marxist opinion this including mainstream and alternative news sources will use him.

He’s a good entry point for normies, but he’s no ML. In terms of solutions, he’ll bring up co-ops, for instance. But I’ve never heard him significantly disparage any AES state, and I think that’s a huge plus. He’s often seen with Michael Hudson, who is a much better economist and doesn’t sugar-coat things as much, making him a good next step for normies on their journey, though he’s not explicitly ML, either. Radhika Desai is also great.

(I do have another quibble with Wolff.)