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blinktwiceforyes1368 karma

My grandfather was the man who drove the train in that infamous scene on the tracks in Stand By Me. He was also a huge fan of yours, Stephen. I spent one month out of every summer until I was 13 stuffed into the engine room with my grandad, riding up and down the tracks with him. It was too loud to talk, so we usually read. Usually, it was something written by you. It was how we bonded.

He passed away two years ago, but I know he would've wanted me to drop by and say thank you.

EDIT: Thank you so much for the gold, kindred soul.

blinktwiceforyes76 karma

Hi Professor Wolff! Thank you for doing this AMA. I’m a long-time listener and a big advocate for your work (even my right libertarian-leaning mother-in-law is slowly getting on board!)

I’m wondering if you could elaborate a bit about a point you made in a recent edition of Economic Update in which you said that the structure of the workplace shapes the market. One common criticism of your work that I hear from other socialists is that converting more workplaces to coops/WSDEs wouldn’t change much, because they’d still be subject to the pressures of a market and the need to make a profit, so that converting more workplaces to coops/WSDEs without necessarily getting rid of markets would lead to the workers (to quote a friend of mine) “exploiting themselves”. Without a revolution at the top to demolish the market and institute planning, this line of thinking (as I understand it) goes, we won’t achieve socialism. How would you respond to this criticism?

Thank you for your time, and for everything else that you do. Shout out to the Democracy @ Work West LA action group, which is working hard to spread that class consciousness out here on the west coast!