Watch Extended Interview with Economist Richard Wolff on How Marxism Influences His Work

From:  Democracy Now

COMMENT - Interesting article which touches on the form taken by society.  Limited by failure to consider the function of freedom in determining the forms adopted.  

Interview by Amy Goodman of Richard Wolff

In this extended interview with Richard Wolff, he discusses how his parents fled Hitler and immigrated to the United States from Germany during World War II, and their influence on his worldview. "I grew up convinced that understanding the political and economic environment I lived in was an urgent matter that had to be done, and made me a little different from many of my fellow kids in school who didn’t have that sense of the urgency of understanding how the world worked to be able to navigate an unstable and often dangerous world," Wolff says. The man The New York Times has called "probably America’s most prominent Marxist economist" also talks about Marx’s influence on his work. "Over the last 40 years in America, it’s a sort of a sad comment, but if you’re interested in Marxism, then people look at you as if you either are a Marxist, or worse, some sort of caricature of a Marxist," Wolff notes. "So I always have said I use Marxist theory, I find it very insightful, I think it’s a shame that other people don’t have it, and I think it’s made me a better economist when it comes to writing and teaching than I would have been without that. And I think that would be the same for my colleagues, and that it’s a deficiency of theirs that the education didn’t do it." Wolff also examines lessons from communist countries and economies over the years, including China. 

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