Democracy at Work Quotes

“The impoverished families of the long-term unemployed strained to the point of dysfunction, communities deprived of viable economies, interrupted educations, lost skills: these and many more results of capitalism’s crisis will put difficult demands on governments for years. On the one hand, they will aggravate social problems that impose costs on governments.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

“The capitalist organization of production must now be dissolved. Workers must become their own directors, receiving and distributing the surpluses they produce. They must become the collective decision-makers in productive enterprises, no longer the directed wage and salary receivers.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

“(what combination of greater leisure for workers or greater quantities of output). Since workers in WSDEs decide the size and distribution of surpluses, that includes deciding whether and when to use a portion of their appropriated surpluses to purchase and install technical changes. In capitalism, where workers are excluded from choices about technology, they choose between labor and leisure based on the wage given by their competition in the labor market. In contrast, workers in WSDEs make their labor/leisure choice together with and as part of their decisions about technological change.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

“shifting demand patterns that have so often provoked or worsened economic cycles and crises in capitalism. Inventors and innovators in a WSDE-based economic system would, like their counterparts in capitalist systems, face problems to solve and incentives to realize the production of new goods or services. Funds would have to be secured (from public agencies provided with surplus allocations from existing WSDEs and/or from private sources that could include individuals and other WSDEs) when the inventors and innovators did not have sufficient funds of their own. Workers would have to be gathered who would leave existing employments to help start and staff the new WSDE. Similarly, incentives would have to be established, such as tax considerations, temporarily higher personal incomes for the worker/directors in successful new WSDEs, social recognition and rewards, and so on. Interestingly, the WSDE-based system would not need a patent system (nor suffer its constraint on other people’s use of new inventions), since it could provide alternative incentives for innovation just as it”
― Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

“If workers become owners of a capitalist corporate enterprise, they have the right to elect as members of the board of directors persons other than themselves. They usually do that and leave the directing of the enterprise to those directors, much as nonworker shareholders typically do. It might be legally possible for worker-owners to transform the enterprise so that they become not only owners but also, collectively, directors. However, that has very rarely happened. Worker-owned enterprises are thus conceptually and also empirically different from WSDEs.”
― Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

“distressing”
― Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

“people. The great debate between capitalism and socialism, the debate that so many (Francis Fukuyama, Robert L. Heilbroner, and others) had declared finally resolved in capitalism’s favor by the 1990s, turns out to have been a debate between private and state capitalism. Within actually existing socialist states there have been greater and lesser movements back toward private capitalism over the last half-century. Many social reforms achieved as part of the movements toward socialism after 1917 proved temporary and subject to erosion or reversal. Especially after the 1980s, socialized property in the means of production reverted to private property. Planning apparatuses gave way to market mechanisms of distribution. Relatively more economic and social equality returned to greater inequality. To the millions who struggled for socialism and communism over the last 150 years, who believed them to be embodiments of a more egalitarian and democratic social order, the last several decades of movement back toward private capitalism have been deeply”
― Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

“In capitalism, as I have noted, productive workers add more value to the commodities produced in and sold by the enterprise than the value of their wages paid by the capitalist who hired them. That additional value or surplus is appropriated by the capitalists. They distribute portions of that surplus to a variety of others (and to themselves) to support activities they believe are needed to keep the capitalist enterprise in business. This particular way of organizing the production and distribution of the surplus is capitalism. What, then, is socialism? If socialism is to be a distinct economic system, then it must clearly differentiate itself from capitalism in terms of how surplus is produced and distributed. Marx’s critique of capitalism offers a clue as to the defining characteristic of socialism in his suggestive references to “associated workers” and other images of workers having replaced capitalists as directors of productive enterprises. The”
― Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

“threat that another enterprise will be able to offer an alternative product of higher quality, lower price, or both. The uncertainties of changing tastes and preferences, changing interest rates for loans, changing prices for necessary inputs, and so on confront enterprises with a vast array of threats to their survival. Political shifts in the larger society mean that the taxes they have to pay, regulations they have to endure, and subsidies they may lose can also threaten their survival. The typical capitalist enterprise’s response is to seek more profits, increase the size of the company, or gain a bigger share of the market. Different enterprises stress one or another of these goals, depending on which is more important or available for its survival. Achieving these goals strengthens the capacity of the enterprise to prevent or lessen or absorb the endless array of threats it faces. Likewise, achieving these goals improves the enterprise’s capacity to take advantage of any opportunity that arises. Thus, for example, greater profits enable an enterprise to make the investments needed to tap a new market; faster growth attracts capital and good press reports; and a larger market share can secure lower prices for larger quantities of purchased inputs. In short, what capitalists do is governed by the system that unites the enterprises directed by capitalists, the markets in which they buy and sell, and the larger society and government for which they provide the bulk of goods and services. Capitalists respond to the signals they receive from the markets, the media, the government, and so on. The goals they pursue—profits, growth, and”
― Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism

“This cure involves, first, replacing the current capitalist organization of production inside offices, factories, stores, and other workplaces in modern societies. In short, exploitation—the production of a surplus appropriated and distributed by those other than its producers—would stop. Much as earlier forms of class structure (lords exploiting serfs in feudalism and masters exploiting slaves in slavery) have been abolished, the capitalist class structure (employers”
― Richard D. Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism