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Tuesday, August 22, 2017

TruthOut: Richard Wolff- Varney & Company: Richard Wolff Debates Stuart Varney on Socialism

Source: Democracy at Work- Richard Wolff & Stuart Varney-
Source: The New Democrat

If Richard Wolff was truly an Marxist he would be calling for the elimination of private wealth and ownership all together. Since Communists at least in the Marxist and Leninist sense don't believe in private property and wealth at all and believe in the state ownership of the means and production of society. That the central government owns and runs the economy and all business's that are part of the economy. Where private production and ownership are outlawed. Which was how the Chinese economy operated up until forty years ago until they started privatizing a lot of their economy. And how the Cuban economy was operated up until ten years ago until they started privatizing. Perhaps Professor Wolff calls himself a Marxist economist because he's studied and taught Marxism, but not someone who practices and believes in the philosophy himself.

So this wasn't a debate between capitalism and Marxism. The two socialist examples that Stuart Varney laid out were Denmark and France, both countries have large private sectors. France has the 6th or 7th largest economy in the world with only 65 million people. Not that they're a small country but that they have such a large economy even though their population is nowhere near the top ten in the world. What they were discussing was more like democratic socialism or social democracy, versus and free and uninhibited capitalism where you have a fairly small national government that taxes wealth at very low rates and doesn't regulate much if any.
Democracy at Work: Richard Wolff Debates Stuart Varney About Socialism