Amid generational shifts toward socialism in the United States, Dr. Richard Wolff emphasized the need to study up on Marx’s economic and historical theories.
Raleigh Adams
Original Reporting Editor, The Buckley Beacon
On Tuesday, the Yale Political Union (YPU) concluded its fall 2025 programming with a visit by Dr. Richard Wolff, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a renowned expert on Marxian economics. Wolff was invited to speak on the resolution, “Resolved: Marx Was Right.”
Wolff retired from his position in Amherst in 2008, and became a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School in New York City. Previously, he taught economics at Yale University, where he received his Ph.D. Wolff is also the co-founder of Democracy at Work, a nonprofit media site that advocates for workers’ cooperatives, and is the host of their nationally syndicated show, “Economic Update.”
“I’m ambivalent about being back at Yale, and that’s the nicest thing I can think of to say,” Wolff said in the opening to his speech. Throughout the night, Wolff was sharply critical of the university, particularly for claiming a mission of liberal education while, in his view, excluding Marx from that canon.
“I got a Ph.D. in economics at Yale. I got a masters in history and a masters in economics. And in order to get these degrees, I was not ever assigned one word of Karl Marx. That’s not education, that’s oppression,” Wolff added. Yale College has historically offered semesterly courses on Marx’s three-volume Capital, the philosophies of Marx and fellow German thinkers Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, among other classes.
In the United States, a recent Gallup poll found that around 42 percent of self-identified Democrats now view capitalism positively, the lowest share recorded since Gallup began asking the question in 2010. In the same poll, roughly two-thirds of Democrats and 14 percent of Republicans express a favorable view of socialism. That growing openness, according to Wolff, signals a long-term generational realignment toward systemic alternatives to market capitalism. Wolff pointed to the recent election of Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, to mayor of New York City.
“If I had come to talk to you years or months ago, I would have had to talk about socialism as something to be afraid of or look down on, to be ignorant of,” Wolff said of these public shifts toward socialism. “Recently a Muslim socialist got more votes than all the other candidates combined. This was in a city that has a larger Jewish population than any other, although Mr. Mamdani has been very clear about his compassion for the Palestinian cause.”
Wolff also celebrated the election of Katie Wilson, a progressive democrat, as mayor of Seattle in November, and expressed hope for the future of socialist candidates nationwide.
Wolff later recounted comments by President Donald Trump referring to Mamdani as a socialist, with Trump later turning to the stronger label of “communist.” Wolff expressed his belief that this reflects the diminishing pejorative force of the term “socialist,” which in Wolff’s view, is progress.
At several points, Wolff discussed the controversial People’s Republic of China, which has previously been sanctioned by multiple countries for its genocide of Uyghur muslims. “This is not an endorsement of China, or anything else,” Wolff said, “but you must know for the vast majority of people on this planet, stopping being poor with all that it means is the number one goal, and today, the number one achiever of that goal has been the People’s Republic of China, inspired by the teachings of Karl Marx,” Wolff said.
When asked by a student to explain this praise of China in light of the 45 million lives lost during the communist reign of Mao Zedong in the twentieth century, Wolff flipped the question to address the lives lost to the English colonization of Kenya. “It destroyed generations of the African people: their culture, their history, their music, everything. In the name of what? Profit,” Wolff said.
When offered the chance to respond to student speeches, Wolff argued that the United States is no longer the world’s leading power and has been overtaken by the People’s Republic of China—an international shift he told students they would witness in their lifetimes.
“Year in, year out, this century, 25 years, the average GDP of the People’s Republic of China has been 6-9%, the average GDP of the United States? 2%. It’s over folks. The notion that this country is in a dominant position, the notion you grew up with, the notion that has cemented itself in this institution, the only problem? It’s not the case anymore, and you’re living through the adjustment.”
Wolff closed by alluding to the need to understand and study Marxist theory, in spite of its historical manifestations. “It’s important to understand right and to learn that material and make a much better critique of it if you do that than if you pretend you went through it and follow somebody else’s limp and lame excuse,” he said.
YPU programming will resume in the spring semester after the holiday break.