Summary of Richard Wolff's Democracy at Work - E-book - ePub

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 Capitalism has had an extraordinary run in the United States, and it is responsible for catapulting Britain's former colony to its status as a global economic, political, and cultural superpower. However, the costs of the journey were huge and widely distributed, and the gains were also huge but less widely distributed. #2 The two key dimensions of capitalism are private property and the market.
Many contemporary usages of capitalism focus on these two dimensions. However, many capitalist economies also contain significant amounts of productive property and products owned by state apparatuses in the name of the society as a whole. #3 Capitalism is defined differently by different people. I define it as a system in which a mass of people, called productive workers, produce a total output greater than the portion of that output given back to them in wages.
The difference between their total output and their wage portion is called the surplus and it accrues to a different group of people, capitalists. #4 The capitalist economic system in the United States and many other parts of the world has gotten a free pass in terms of criticism and debate over the last half-century. This was the response of business and political leaders, the mainstream media, and the academic community to the Cold War and the conservative resurgence after the Great Depression.