Democracy in Action: A Path to a Sustainable Economic System

K.R.L. Narasimha Rao.: To Update knowledge

India on Aug 31, 2022

Georg Dybek: Since most books I have thus far read are exceedingly critical of socialism, I ordered this book to look at what a well known modern Marxists opinion on the matter is. Capatalism is undoubtedly far from perfect, yet so far trying to replace it alltogether has resulted in unspeakable suffering for the people engaged in those experiments. Therefore I was very interested in the authors claim that he has found a solution to Capatalisms flaws without repeating the mistakes that were made for example in Maoist China. I was looking forward to a well founded critique of capitalism and a resulting argument about the pros and cons of his idea. Unfortunately I was disappointed.
It is not my place to argue about the feasibility of his proposal to solve the "crisis of capitalism" by democratising the workplace with a professor in economics. I do however find his style of argumentation entirely unfit for the importance of the issue at hand. The entire text is written in a way that suggests the author has all the answers and understands perfectly what is wrong and what is to be done without seriously considering possible counter arguments. No statistics or references are used, except to other...

Germany on Jan 03, 2020

Michael Bindner: Wolff introduces this book with the example of FDR triangulating between a Marxist union movement and Wall Street, which allowed him to create a fair amount of social democracy, including Social Security. He contrasts this will the recent crisis, where the only solution tried was bailing out the banks while doing nothing for the borrowers, who he sees as blameless, although I must admit that no one held a gun to my head when applying for too much consumer or housing credit, almost always in a cooperative credit union or government housing program. At least government helped when it came time to wipe out that debt, plus some medical debt as well. The answer Wolff proposes to Capitalism is the Worker Self Directed Enterprise (WSDE), which would make production, distribution and governmental decisions with local communities.
Chapter 1 shows where Capitalism is failing. The key feature in capitalism is not private ownership of the means of production but the fact of the labor surplus, where workers produce more for capital than they are paid in wages. Workers are divided into productive and unproductive. As a cost analyst, I am not sure this a distinction with a difference....

United States on Sep 30, 2017

Al: It's a book about economics without the economic jargon. Fun and easy to read. I recommend the "monthly update" from Prof Wolff. You can watch it on his website or on Youtube. Very, very informative and I feel it is an honest and unique perspective about the whole we are in, and how things can change.

Canada on Feb 08, 2015

LC: Para uma visão de futuro empresarial. Analisa com profundidade crise econômica na década passada. Proporciona novas idéias e possíveis novos horizontes. Muito bom.

Brazil on Apr 13, 2014

Charles: This book is about how America come to be in the current economic mess caused by capitalism, why alternatives to capitalism such as socialism and communism have failed, and how to solve the mess.

In America as business profits increased so did workers' earnings but in the 1970s this stopped, this was caused by the following
1) Computers allowing businesses to become more efficient which results in them needing less workers.
2) More women entering the job market creates more competition for jobs.
3) Globalization means that factories can be moved to cheaper locations abroad.

Business profits and pay for the upper classes continued to soar but for the above mentioned reasons the middle and working classes stopped seeing any improvement in real earnings.

With all the extra profits made by not passing the increasing profits on to workers the money got put in the banks. The banks had to figure out how to use it to make money. One way was in easy credit on credit cards. Because workers had no improvement in their wages they were forced to borrow heavily on the credit cards running up massive dept. The sub prime mortgage mess was also the result of banks...

United Kingdom on Aug 14, 2013

Retired Reader: When the Soviet Union (USSR) imploded a large number of people both in and out of the U.S. Government, who should have known better, loudly proclaimed that among other things it represented a triumph of Capitalism over "Communism" and was proof that capitalism represented the best economic system ever developed. Wolff, a dedicated Marist, claims this is nonsense.

He devotes a large portion of this book doing an excellent job of showing the systemic flaws of capitalism and provides some compelling reasons why capitalism by the very way that the system operates produces gross social equalities, devastating economic fluctuations, and irrational behaviors bordering on lunacy. In doing so he points out that the USSR economy was not a Communist System in the sense that Marx envisioned, but a socialist system that had morphed into "State Capitalism." Wolff throws a lot of economic terms around, but is careful to explain their meanings and implementations. As a true Marxist he explains his views in terms of the ownership of tools of production and disposition of surpluses (profits). For an economist he is remarkably clear.

His solution is to replace the capitalist economic...

United States on Mar 21, 2013

William H. DuBay: Simply and intelligently written, Richard Wolff plots a way out of our economic malaise by centering on Worker Self-Directed Enterprises (WSDEs).

He contends there is no denying that the world-wide recession we face demonstrates the failure of capitalism as a system of production. The New Deal attempts to "fix" and tame capitalism in the 1930s have failed. Capitalists will always have the ability to defeat any attempt to control or limit its predatory reach. It is time to look for a better alternative.

As Marx and many others have taught, work is central to our lives. Separating workers from the products of their labor is deeply alienating and vastly dysfunctional for both the individual and society.

The author shows how both capitalism and state socialism have failed by failing to observe Marx's central teaching on the surpluses created in production. Under capitalism, those surpluses are appropriated and distributed by capitalists, people who do not produce them.

The socialist experiments in USSR and China also failed for the same reason. While they nationalized industries and used central planning, they failed to engage the workers in the in the...

United States on Nov 18, 2012