Laura Flanders: ‘A Cure for Capitalism? Putting the Social Back in Socialism: Rick Wolff’

Source:Laura Flanders- Socialist Economist and Professor Richard Wolff.

“Employment’s up, wealth’s up, but the benefits of both are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. Welcome to capitalism, says GRITtv regular, Richard Wolff who suggests some alternatives, including “worker self-directed enterprises” if we want to democratize the economy, and US society.

GRITtv regular, Richard Wolff is the author of Capitalism Hits the Fan (Olive Branch Press, 2009) and, most recently, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (Haymarket Books, 2012).”

From Laura Flanders 

I don’t get the idea that Richard Woolf is either a Communist, Marxist, or even somewhere in between where he would combine Marxist (meaning state-ownership of the economy) with a democratic political system.

Professor Wolff’s alternative to private enterprise and liberal democracy seems to be workers co-ownership, where private businesses would be owned by the workers. Not by stockholders or any particular individual or a board of directors.

As a Liberal, (meaning a real Liberal) I’m as pro-choice as any individual that you’ll ever meet and have no issues with private individuals getting together and starting co-ops on their own and making that decision on their own. I just don’t see how you do that nationally, especially federally and forcing every private company in America, including small private businesses, to become co-ops.

And then you have the other problem with how forcing every private company in America to become a co-op and what that would do to individualism, creativity, and competition, the things that not just the American economy has always thrived on, but needs to be successful, but where very other developed country in the world thrives on and needs to be successful as well.

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