How Marx's Class Analysis Could Solve Inequality Now

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

Democracy at Work

Coops, Economics, Economy, Workercooperative, Capitalism, Politics, News, Government

4.8 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 25 March 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome, friends to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the
0:26.6	economic dimensions of our lives and those of our children.
0:31.0	I'm your host, Richard Wolfe.
0:35.3	Today's show is a little different from what we normally do.
0:39.5	It's a presentation of Karl Marx's analysis of classes.
0:46.1	Why?
0:47.6	Because it is extraordinarily pertinent and insightful for us here, now, in 2025.
0:57.0	Marx made a major contribution, and we're the losers if we don't learn from it.
1:06.0	Just as is true with Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and other great thinkers in the history
1:13.6	of economics and of the other related topics we deal with.
1:19.6	And so I am devoting today's program to showing what a remarkable contribution Marx made and how and why we need it and
1:31.3	to use it now.
1:35.2	I don't want to forget to remind you that Charlie Fabian, our volunteer, is available to
1:41.3	take any suggestions you have for improvements on this program.
1:47.0	And you can reach him as always, Charlie.info-438 at gmail.com.
1:55.0	I want to also remind you about two books. Normally I only remind you about one,
2:00.0	understanding capitalism, the one that we released last year. remind you about two books. Normally I only remind you about one, Understanding Capitalism,
2:02.1	the one that we released last year at the end of last year. But there's an earlier book,
2:09.0	which is particularly appropriate for what we're going to be doing today, which is called
2:13.9	Understanding Marxism. It's part of a three book series that we produced,
2:21.0	understanding Marxism, understanding socialism, and understanding capitalism, all of which
2:27.9	are available at our website, Democracy at Work.info slash books.
	...

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