Richard David Wolff has spent decades making an argument that most economics curricula treat as settled and therefore unnecessary: that capitalism is a specific arrangement of human relationships, invented at a particular moment in history, and therefore neither natural nor permanent. A professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor at the New School, Wolff approaches the subject from the Marxian tradition, which means his interest lies less in whether markets allocate goods efficiently than in who occupies which position inside the workplace, and what that positioning does to the distribution of wealth over time.

The distinction he tends to press hardest is between markets and capitalism, two things routinely treated as synonyms in public debate. Markets are a mechanism for exchange and have existed under feudalism, slavery, and various other systems. Capitalism, in Wolff's framing, describes something narrower — the internal structure of the enterprise, in which a small group of owners or shareholders hires everyone else, directs their labor, and retains whatever surplus that labor produces after wages are paid. The employees who generate the output have no vote on what gets produced, where it gets produced, what technology gets adopted, or how the proceeds are divided. Wolff's argument is that this arrangement, not greed or bad actors, explains why inequality compounds regardless of which party holds office or which regulations are on the books.

From that diagnosis follows his best-known prescription, developed through his work with Democracy at Work: the worker cooperative, where the people doing the labor also make the governing decisions. He frames this not as charity or utopianism but as an extension of democratic logic into the institution