Episodes

4 days ago
4 days ago
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Saturday Apr 12, 2025
Economic Update: Unlearning Market Idolatry
Saturday Apr 12, 2025
Saturday Apr 12, 2025
This week's edition of Economic Update explores the last 150 years of largely uncritical celebration of "the market," as if it were a perfect institution that must be protected from intrusion of other institutions such as the government, labor unions, and popular organizations. We compare an historical example and also the present to criticize today's peculiar mix of market idolatry and its rejection in the US.

Saturday Apr 05, 2025
Economic Update: Mounting Economic Problems
Saturday Apr 05, 2025
Saturday Apr 05, 2025
In this week's episode of Economic Update, Professor Wolff discusses certain minimum wages by the Trump administration, the costs of Germany's rearmament, and how Trump's tariffs and deportations have hit central America with economic catastrophe. The second half features a detailed discussion of the historical blaming of foreigners for the internal problems of capitalism in the U.S.

Saturday Mar 29, 2025
Economic Update: How Marx's Class Analysis Could Solve Inequality Now
Saturday Mar 29, 2025
Saturday Mar 29, 2025
In this week's episode of Economic Update, Professor Wolff discusses how Marx's class analysis presents a solution to today's inequality and the challenges to overcoming it we have faced throughout history. In short, since the early existence of human society, people lived in tribes, clans, and villages that exhibited equality of wealth, income, and political power among their members. As modern history began to unfold, slavery, feudalism, and capitalism evolved as society as we know it took shape. In each of those three systems, huge inequalities separated people into masters vs slaves, lords vs serfs, and employers vs employees. Exploited and oppressed slaves, serfs, and employees opposed the inequalities of those systems but were unable to overcome them despite repeated efforts (revolutions). Marx questioned why modern societies failed to install and sustain systems of egalitarian wealth and power distribution (democracy). His answer lay in the understanding that class differences within the organization of production produce inequalities and sustain them. Overcoming those inequalities thus requires ending the class divisions within the organization of production and instead organizing in favor of a worker-cooperative structured method of production.

Saturday Mar 22, 2025
Economic Update: Build and Fight: The Resistance Forms
Saturday Mar 22, 2025
Saturday Mar 22, 2025

Saturday Mar 15, 2025
Economic Update: Federal Employees Fight Back
Saturday Mar 15, 2025
Saturday Mar 15, 2025

Saturday Mar 08, 2025
Economic Update: The Nobel Prize in Economics Exposed
Saturday Mar 08, 2025
Saturday Mar 08, 2025

Saturday Mar 01, 2025
Economic Update: US Policy Toward China: A Failing Effort to Contain Historic Change
Saturday Mar 01, 2025
Saturday Mar 01, 2025
In this week’s episode of Economic Update, Professor Wolff discusses unionizing Whole Foods workers VS. Amazon and Trump and the contradictions, dangers, and global retaliation of the new administration's tariff program. The show's second half features an interview with political scientist Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III on the China-U.S. competition: its costs, the stakes, and why the U.S. is losing.

Saturday Feb 22, 2025
Economic Update: Capitalism, Lost Empathy, and Rising Addictions
Saturday Feb 22, 2025
Saturday Feb 22, 2025
Professor Wolff discusses Trump's attempts at taking Panama as more evidence of rising colonialism and imperial ambitions, the recent organizing and strike of 10,000 Colorado grocery workers, and finally corporations and investment funds abandoning DEI. Finally, we have an interview with psychotherapist Tess Fraad-Wolff on capitalism's causal links to declining empathy and rising addictions.

Saturday Feb 15, 2025
Economic Update: The View From Prison
Saturday Feb 15, 2025
Saturday Feb 15, 2025
In this week's episode of Economic Update, Professor Richard Wolff delivers updates on the North Carolina union election at an Amazon warehouse, the deportation of immigrants, and the U.S. construction industry, a lesson in how capitalism installs new technology like A.I. and how it could be far better done. In the second half of this week's episode, Professor Wolff interviews Serena Martin, a formerly incarcerated social activist and executive director of New Hour for Women and Children.