While the world still reels from the 2008 financial meltdown, the top 1% are doing just fine. But what about the rest of us? Economist Rick Wolff lays out how we got into the financial mess, where we are now and where we might go to create a more just and egalitarian economy. He is Emeritus Professor of Economics from UMASS Amherst, currently a visiting professor at the New School and host of the WBAI show Economic Update.
Over the last twenty five years, in collaboration with his colleague, Stephen Resnick, he has developed a new approach to political economy. While it retains and systematically elaborates the Marxist notion of class as surplus labor, it rejects the economic determinism typical of most schools of economics and usually associated with Marxism as well. This new approach appears in several books co-authored by Resnick and Wolff and numerous articles by them separately and together. Common to all of Professor Wolff’s work are two central components. The first is the introduction of class, in its elaborated surplus labor definition, as a new "entry point" of social analysis. The second is the concept of overdetermination as the logic of an analytic project that is consistently non-determinist.
