Richard D. Wolff

idea of workers’ self-directed enterprises (which I will call WSDEs throughout this book), I offer a new version of an old idea: that production works best when performed by a community that collectively and democratically designs and carries out shared labor.

Unprecedented numbers of foreclosed and homeless people live not far from unprecedented numbers of homes that stand empty.

The Great Depression provoked the formation and immense successes of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The CIO organized millions of industrial workers into unions for the first time, bringing about the greatest unionization wave in US history.

Wages and benefits are trending downward while profits are simultaneously increasing.

Members and leaders agreed that unions were working people’s best weapons against the ravages of a severely depressed capitalism.

In the current crisis of capitalism, an FDR-type solution has not emerged, for several reasons. First, the fifty-year decline and consequent weakness of the labor union movement and the extreme decline of socialist and communist movements removed them as effective agents for such a solution.

Second, the majority of businesses and the rich see little need—yet—for any compromise solution that would increase their taxes.

Second, the majority of businesses and the rich see little need—yet—for any compromise solution that would increase their taxes. Third, no actually existing socialism (such as the Soviet Union represented during the 1930s) poses an alternative today that might attract significant working-class support and thereby frighten conservatives into FDR-type political partnerships.

Political Dysfunction Worsens Economic Dysfunction

The absence of a left-wing force from below has left the United States with a severe crisis but without government intervention adequate to sustain a broad economic recovery.

The government-enhanced wealth at the top does not “trickle down” in the real world. Instead, boards of directors continue to see their self-interest in not sharing the recovery funds poured into their hands. Thus we experience continuing high unemployment, massive numbers of home foreclosures, declining real wages and job benefits, and inaccessibility of credit for personal borrowing. Stagnant consumption and investment are the results. They undermine the recovery of business and the stock markets. The global capitalist crisis deepens.