Richard Wolff

The System After Capitalism

• Top takeaway The speaker is confident the working class will figure out how to do better than capitalism, just as people moved past slavery and feudalism before it.
• He concedes capitalism did good things and was better than slavery and feudalism, while stating he is not an admirer of it.

Richard Wolff credits capitalism as progress over slavery and feudalism, but rejects calling it the final answer in economic organization. He sees a repeating historical pattern: people in each system eventually organize something better for themselves. He is very confident today's working class will build a successor to capitalism, just as earlier systems were surpassed.

Richard Wolff: The Truth About Why Socialism Is On The Rise In America

• Top takeaway Top point: his central claim is that the employer/employee split works like master and slave. He says a very small group of major shareholders and owners walk away with the profit while everyone else they hire gets a wage, and that for a socialist this looks, smells and talks 'an awful lot like master and slave. Lord and serf.'
• He calls meritocracy a moral myth and argues it from his own record. He went to Harvard, Stanford and Yale and holds a PhD in economics from Yale, but says nothing happens there that doesn't happen everywhere and that the schools have simply paid for a good reputation.
• He credits the 1930s coalition of unions, communists and socialists with forcing the New Deal. They told Roosevelt that 40 million people would vote against him unless he acted, and he delivered Social Security, the first minimum wage in 1938, unemployment compensation and a federal jobs programme hiring 15 million unemployed, paid for by taxing corporations and the rich. He says inequality dropped like a stone after 1929.
• He argues that has been rolled back since 1945 and gives the federal minimum wage as the measure: it is $7.25 as he speaks, last raised in 2009, while prices rose every year for the 16 or 17 years since. He says that is why the gap keeps widening and why Black workers suffer most.
• Inheritance is what makes the gap permanent in his account. The estate-tax-free threshold was $600,000 when he was young and is about $25 million today for a couple, and he argues the money matters less than the position it buys: the baby born next door to the wealthiest children may be worried about whether there is enough food in the can, and that inequality of starting point breeds envy, bitterness and anger.

Why Empires Fall Faster Than Expected

• Top takeaway Argues the United States inherited the global position the British empire once held and is now in decline, following the same rise-and-fall pattern as past empires.
• Traces global currency dominance shifting from the British pound in the 19th century to the US dollar in the last century.
• Warns that empires — British, French, German, Roman, Greek — died suddenly, going from empire to ruin rather than fading gradually.
• Contends Americans can still work the situation out, but only if the country admits and faces its problems.
• Says the hardest obstacle is that the country prefers to pretend its problems are already solved or do not exist.

Wolff argues empires throughout history — British, French, German, Roman, Greek — collapsed suddenly once dominance peaked, not gradually. He traces global currency leadership shifting from the British pound in the 19th century to the US dollar in the last century. Wolff contends the United States inherited Britain's global position and is now declining — on the harder road down the same cycle. He argues recovery requires admitting the problem, yet Americans prefer pretending the issues are already solved or do not exist.