![]() It’s a suburb about a half-an-hour outside of New York. But when he came as an immigrant, he was told it was too dangerous to live in New York, so he settled in a place called New Rochelle. And then my father got a job in the New York area. RICHARD WOLFF: Well, we lived in Ohio, Missouri and Colorado in my first five years, my formative life, very much Midwestern American. And luckily, my parents were determined that I hold on to my two other languages, and so I became fluent in French and German, which has been a wonderful blessing for me all my adult life.ĪMY GOODMAN: Yet you have a kind of New York accent. And I grew up in a household speaking French and German until they put me into kindergarten-a German word, “kindergarten”-and I had to learn English.ĪMY GOODMAN: So, English is your third language. RICHARD WOLFF: Fleeing Hitler, got this job in Youngstown, Ohio, had a child-me. And my mother was born in Berlin, so she was a real German. But most of his activity was done on the German side. RICHARD WOLFF: In Köln, in Cologne, and sort of-he was born in Metz in France, which is in the Alsace-Lorraine on the border of France and Germany, where you basically have to learn both languages, and you’re half in one culture and half in the other. And that was one of the first jobs he got, in a steel factory, even though he had been a lawyer in Europe. He and my mother were immigrants from Europe, running basically away from World War II and European fascism, were welcomed here in the United States. My father was pushing a wheelbarrow in the Youngstown Sheet and Tube steel factory. RICHARD WOLFF: Well, I was born in Youngstown, Ohio. But I just want to ask you, for this web exclusive, Richard, to talk about your life, where you were born. Go to our website at to hear our hour conversation with Richard Wolff. His latest is Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism. Our guest is Richard Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, visiting professor at New School University, has a show on WBAI in New York every Saturday at noon, author of a number of books. See more from this Richard Wolff interview: Capitalism in Crisis: Richard Wolff Urges End to Austerity, New Jobs Program, Democratizing WorkĪMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!,, The War and Peace Report. See Richard Wolff’s interview on Monday, March 25th: A People’s Revolt in Cyprus: Richard Wolff on Protests Against EU Plan to Seize Bank Savings And I think that would be the same for my colleagues, and that it’s a deficiency of theirs that the education didn’t do it.” Wolff also examines lessons from communist countries and economies over the years, including China. “So I always have said I use Marxist theory, I find it very insightful, I think it’s a shame that other people don’t have it, and I think it’s made me a better economist when it comes to writing and teaching than I would have been without that. ![]() ![]() “Over the last 40 years in America, it’s a sort of a sad comment, but if you’re interested in Marxism, then people look at you as if you either are a Marxist, or worse, some sort of caricature of a Marxist,” Wolff notes. The man The New York Times has called “probably America’s most prominent Marxist economist” also talks about Marx’s influence on his work. “I grew up convinced that understanding the political and economic environment I lived in was an urgent matter that had to be done, and made me a little different from many of my fellow kids in school who didn’t have that sense of the urgency of understanding how the world worked to be able to navigate an unstable and often dangerous world,” Wolff says. In this extended interview with Richard Wolff, he discusses how his parents fled Hitler and immigrated to the United States from Germany during World War II, and their influence on his worldview. ![]()
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