Richard D. Wolff is an American economist, well-known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis. He earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1963 and moved on to Stanford to study with Paul A. Baran. Baran died prematurely from a heart attack in 1964 and Wolff transferred to Yale University, were he received his Ph.D. in economics in 1969. His dissertation, “The Economics of Colonialism: Britain and Kenya” was eventually published in book form in 1974.

Wolff taught at the City College of New York from 1969–1973. Here he started his life-long collaboration with fellow economist Stephen Resnick, who arrived in 1971 after being denied tenure at Yale for signing an anti-war petition. Both would then be part, along with Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis and Rick Edwards, of the “radical package” that was hired in 1973 by the Economics Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where Wolff has been full professor since 1981.

The first co-authored academic publication of Wolff and Resnick was “The Theory of Transitional Conjunctures and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism” which laid out the pillars of the framework that they have worked on ever since. In it, they formulated a non-determinist, class analytical approach for understanding the debates regarding the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Their topics have included Marxian theory and value analysis, overdetermination, radical economics, international trade, business cycles, social formations, the Soviet Union, and comparing and contrasting Marxian and non-Marxian economic theories.

Wolff’s work with Resnick took Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar’s Reading Capital as its point of departure and developed a subtle reading of Karl Marx’s Capital Volumes II and III in their influential Knowledge and Class. For the authors, Marxian class analysis entails the detailed study of the conditions of existences of concrete forms of performance, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor. While there could be an infinite number of forms of surplus appropriation, the Marxist canon refers to ancient (independent), slave, feudal, capitalist, and communist class processes.

Wolff continues to teach graduate seminars and undergraduate courses and direct dissertation research in economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and, most recently, in the graduate program in international affairs (GPIA) at The New School.

www.rdwolff.com

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