Richard Woolf

Wolff is a co-founder of Democracy at Work, a non-profit that produces media and live events to expose capitalism's systemic problems and to show how democratizing our workplaces solves them. The organization is based on his 2012 book, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism. Wolff also hosts the nationally syndicated program Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff, which is produced by Democracy at Work.

One of his students, George Papandreou, became Prime Minister of Greece serving from 2009 to 2011. Wolff remembers Papandreou as a student who "sought then to become both a sophisticated and a socialist economist." However, CUNY Economics professor Costas Panayotakis observed that "after being elected Greek prime minister in the fall of 2009 on a platform that excoriated austerity as the wrong kind of policy to be adopted at a time of deep economic crisis, George Papandreou has reversed himself and, faced with a debt crisis, called in the International Monetary Fund and imposed the most brutal austerity program the country has ever seen."

Wolff was a visiting professor in spring 1994 at University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne. 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.

In 1989, Wolff joined efforts with a group of colleagues, ex- and then current students to launch Rethinking Marxism, an academic journal that aims to create a platform for rethinking and developing Marxian concepts and theories within economics as well as other fields of social inquiry. For more than two decades, he served as a member of the editorial board of the journal. Currently, he continues to serve as a member of the advisory board of the journal.

In 1988 Wolff co-founded the journal Rethinking Marxism. In 2010 he published Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It, also released on DVD. In 2012 he released three new books: Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism, with David Barsamian (San Francisco: City Lights Books), Contending Economic Theories: Neoclassical, Keynesian, and Marxian, with Stephen Resnick (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: MIT University Press), and Democracy at Work (Chicago: Haymarket Books). In 2019 he released his book Understanding Marxism (Democracy at Work).

A founding member of the Green Party of New Haven, Connecticut, Wolff was the party's mayoral candidate in 1985. In 2011, he called for the establishment of a broad-based left-wing mass party in the United States. Wolff, especially since 2008, gives many public lectures throughout the United States and other countries. He is regular lecturer at the Brecht Forum. Wolff is often a guest on television and radio news programs, and, within the U.S., has appeared on a variety of programs, as well as writing for a number of publications and websites. Wolff hosts a weekly radio/TV show and podcast on economics and society, Economic Update, at WBAI in New York City.

Richard Woolf was born on June 17, 1979 in Nashville, Tennessee, USA.

Wolff taught at the City College of New York from 1969 to 1973. Here he started his lifelong 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. Wolff retired in 2008 but remains professor emeritus and that year joined The New School as a visiting professor.

Wolff earned a BA magna cum laude in history from Harvard in 1963 and moved on to Stanford—he attained an MA in economics in 1964—to study with Paul A. Baran. Baran died prematurely from a heart attack in 1964 and Wolff transferred to Yale University, where he received an MA in economics in 1966, MA in history in 1967, and a PhD in economics in 1969. As a graduate student at Yale, Wolff worked as an instructor. His dissertation, "Economic Aspects of British Colonialism in Kenya, 1895–1930", was eventually published in book form in 1974.

Richard David Wolff (born April 1, 1942) is an American Marxian economist, known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis. He is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School in New York. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City University of New York, University of Utah, University of Paris I (Sorbonne), and The Brecht Forum in New York City.