Richard Wolff.

• Author: Rampell, Ed
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

Richard Wolff has emerged as one of the most prominent progressive economists in America. He appears on Free Speech TV, Link TV, and Pacifica Radio, and has been a repeat guest on Bill Moyers's program, as well as appearing on Charlie Rose's show. His books include Capitalism Hits the Fan, Occupy the Economy, and Democracy at Work.

Wolff got his B.A. from Harvard, a Masters from Stanford, and a Ph.D. in economics from Yale. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program for international affairs at the New School University in Manhattan, where he lives. Born in 1942 in Youngstown, Ohio, he's the son of working class parents who were refugees from the Nazis. After his family moved around the Midwest, they relocated to New York. In the 1980s, Wolff ran to be New Havens mayor and city councilman on the Green Party ticket.

I caught up with Wolff during a January California tour, where he was mobbed by overflowing crowds wherever he spoke.

Q: For most of your life, you've toiled in obscurity. How does it feel to finally have a mass audience?

Richard Wolff: I've got to pinch myself; I'm having the time of my life. But it's not me; it's the message.

Q: And that message is?

Wolff: The capitalist workplace is one of the most profoundly undemocratic institutions on the face of the Earth. Workers have no say over decisions affecting them. If workers sat on the board of directors of democratically operated self-managed enterprises, they wouldn't vote for the wildly unequal distribution of profits to benefit a few and for cutbacks for the many.

Q: Why do business leaders in the United States and Western Europe favor austerity? Doesn't it reduce demand for their products, and thus lower their potential profits?

Wolff: The question is good. Why are executives of corporations constantly looking for every conceivable way to lower labor costs? The more successful capitalists are in cutting their wage costs, the less money workers will have to buy back what those same capitalists produce. It's a contradiction.

Sure, businesses would like lots of purchases. But the only way to deal with a depressed economy would be to tax the rich, who are hoarding their money, and move it into the hands of the middle and lower classes, because they're in a situation where they'll spend it as fast as they get it. That would solve the problem of demand, but only at the expense of the rich and corporations.

They've made a choice: They'd rather tough it out--stick it to the mass of people, even at the cost of losing customers--than be the one who gets hit with the tab for boosting the masses' purchasing power.

Here's where globalization comes in. U.S. businesses...