I’m not sure if he is a meme or if people genuinely like Wolff. I haven’t read him extensively, but I’ve watched/read him enough times to get a sense. I have never been too impressed. While Marx and others leave me with clarity, Wolff consistently leaves me confused. It feels like he has a super narrow understanding of things but doesn’t reveal his own assumptions. It feels like a purely aesthetic Marxism to dress up his own ideas.
For example: https://youtu.be/flFyaguUqIo
The first 3 minutes is a correct summary of, basically, Marx’s letter to Kugelmann. After 3:00, his explanation falls apart. He bastardizes Marx when he says that labor in every society produces a surplus, and that in capitalism that surplus happens to take the form of a commodity. This is utterly wrong, surplus depends on the productivity of a society (I believe Marx wrote about this specific point in Grundrisse as well as Capital). No, the issue in capitalism is not that surplus is unfairly distributed, but that workers are compelled to work longer than necessary, precisely to produce a surplus.
He doesn’t make a clear distinction between surplus of use-value and surplus value.
The result is that he transform Marxism into a mere search for equitable distribution of goods, which is emphatically not what Marx himself believed as he wrote in his critique of the Gotha Program.
I’d love to be proven wrong here, or let in on the joke… thanks!
:RIchard-D-Wolff:
He’s a serious-sounding, stuffy, dry professor who keeps telling people to form co-ops. That’s kind of useful.
I wish we had like five of him writing for some incredibly generic sounding think tank called, like, The Economic Review, so I could link their op-eds to respectability libs.
He doesn’t repeat what Marx wrote 200 years ago, since he’s not an orthodoxmarxist, nor an ML. He’s a Marxian economist, which is different from Marxist
I think if he doesn’t agree with Marx’s theory and just likes the general ideas, that makes his Marxian influence purely aesthetic — related only in form, not substance. I wouldn’t call astrology “heterodox astrophysics”, they are two fundamentally different things. Perhaps I’m splitting hairs but I think a Marxian economist ought to agree with the major tenets of Marx’s theory.
Sorry if this came across condescending.
I think Marx was prolific enough, or at least that his ideas extend into so many spheres, that you could disagree with certain major tenets of his theory and still consider yourself a Marxist, or ascribe to Marxian theories. Right off the bat I think of the humanist versus anti-humanist split, as well as people who maintain the labor theory of value versus trying to reformulate Marxism to fit with the subjective theory of value.
I’d say if a person exists in academia within the neoliberal consensus and still believes in surplus value and labor theory of value, it’s fair to call them Marxist or Marxian. There’s just a ton of different ways to approach Marxist thought.
Wolff seems useful because he’s approachable and has a lot of experience teaching (if a person vibes with his style). It’s hard to say (without doing deeper research than I have time for) what his actual, core beliefs are, because I suspect he’s positioned himself to be an entrypoint on the pipeline by hiding his power level.
