Professor Richard Wolff: A Cure for Capitalism

some background on "A Cure for Capitalism", from an earlier interview:

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Mark Karlin: Refreshingly, you offer a key alternative to capitalism in decline. You promote Workers' Self-Directed Enterprises (WSDE) in Part III of your book. What would be a succinct description of a WSDE?

Richard Wolff: Quite simply, a WSDE entails the workers who make whatever a corporation sells also functioning - collectively and democratically - as their own board of directors. WSDEs thereby abolish the capitalist differentiation and opposition of surplus producers versus surplus appropriators. Instead, the workers themselves cooperatively run their own enterprise, thereby bringing democracy inside the enterprise where capitalism had long excluded it.

Mark Karlin: In your sixth chapter, you contrast WSDEs with worker-owned enterprises, worker-managed enterprises and cooperatives. What are the primary differences?

Richard Wolff: Workers have a long history of multiple kinds of cooperatives. That is, workers can cooperatively own (e.g. their pension fund holds shares in the company that employs them), buy (e.g. the many food coops around the country), sell (e.g. grape growers who combine to market their outputs), and manage (e.g. workers take turns supervising themselves). All such cooperatives can and often do co-exist with a capitalist organization of production in the precise sense of workers being excluded from the decisions of what, how and where to produce and what to do with the profits. What makes WSDEs unique is precisely that they are about cooperative production, about ending the capitalist division of producers from appropriators of the surplus, and replacing it with democratic cooperative decisions governing production and the social use of its fruits. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.rdwolff.com/content/democracy-work-cure-capitalism