Recently, through an e-mail exchange I was able to ask Richard Wolff a few questions about economics and alternatives to capitalism. Dr. Wolff is a Professor of Economics Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst...

Capitalism as a system seems incapable of solving its unemployment problem. It keeps generating long-term joblessness, punctuated by spikes of recurring short-term extreme joblessness. The system's leaders cannot solve or overcome the problem...

Barack Obama speaking in March 2013 about the sequester, the automatic spending cuts mandated by Congress. Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/AP

After 200 years of concentrating its centers in western Europe, north America, and Japan, capitalism is moving most of its centers elsewhere and especially to China, India, Brazil and so on. This movement poses immense problems of transition at both poles. The classic problems of early, rapid capitalist industrialization are obvious daily in the new centers. What we learn about early capitalism when we read Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, Maxim Gorky and Jack London, we see now again in the new centers.

The economic aim of both major US political parties is, in the end, the same: to protect and reinforce the capitalist system.

Curators of New York City’s annual arts festival called us a couple of months ago. Would we be interested in having a public discussion with the artist, Steve Lambert, whose work was a major part of this year’s festival? The festival’s title is “Crossing the Line 2013,” and Lambert’s large neon-lighted installation (9 feet by 20 feet by 7 feet) says “Capitalism Works for Me.” Observers can respond by pressing either a “True” or “False” button.

Many Germans in the years before 1933 dismissed the little man with the mustache: He could never take power, let alone keep it. Tzarist Russia’s elites thought the small social democratic party posed little threat. Batista’s minions ridiculed the lawyer and his friends...

From President Obama on down, defenders of the status quo insist that the US economy has "recovered" or "is recovering". Some actually see the world that way. They inhabit, imagine they inhabit, or plan to soon inhabit the world of the infamous top 1%. Others simply seek security in life by loyally repeating whatever that 1% is saying.

Organized labor's decline in the US over the past half century is well-known; what drove that decline, less so. The New Deal's enemies – big business, Republicans, conservatives – had...

A Catalan translation of this article is available at Espai Fàbrica.

Capitalism as a system ought to be judged by its failures as well as its successes.

Detroit's struggle with bankruptcy might find some relief, or at least distraction, by presenting its desperate economic and social conditions as a tourist attraction. "Visit Detroit," today's advertisement might begin, "see your region's future here and now: the streets...

Capitalism and real democracy never had much to do with one another. In contrast, formal voting in elections has worked nicely for capitalism. After all, elections have rarely posed, let alone decided, the question of capitalism: whether voters prefer it or an alternative economic system. Capitalists have successfully kept elections focused elsewhere, on non-systemic questions and choices. That success enabled them first to equate democracy with elections and then to celebrate elections in capitalist countries as proof of their democracy. Of course, even elections were and are allowed only outside capitalist enterprises. Democratic elections inside them -- where employees are the majority -- never happen.