Wolff began teaching at the
City College of New York in 1969, where he collaborated with economist
Stephen Resnick, who joined in 1971 after being denied tenure at Yale for signing an
anti-war petition. In 1973, Wolff and Resnick, along with economists
Samuel Bowles,
Herbert Gintis, and
Richard Edwards, joined the Economics Department at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst, where Wolff became a full professor in 1981. Wolff retired from UMass Amherst in 2008, becoming
professor emeritus, and joined
The New School as a visiting professor in the graduate program in
international affairs. He has also taught as a visiting or guest lecturer at institutions including
University of Utah,
Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, and
The Brecht Forum in New York City. Wolff and Resnick's early co-authored publication, "The Theory of Transitional Conjunctures and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism," appeared in the
Review of Radical Political Economics in 1979. The article explored the transition from
feudalism to
capitalism, focusing on class dynamics and economic structures. Their collaboration extended to works like
Knowledge and Class, which drew on
Louis Althusser and
Étienne Balibar's
Reading Capital and interpreted
Karl Marx's
Capital Volumes II and III. He served on its editorial board for over two decades and remains on the advisory board as of 2025. In 1994, he was a visiting professor at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Wolff was a founding member of the
Green Party branch in
New Haven, Connecticut, and its mayoral candidate in 1985. In 2011, he called for a new left-wing political party in the United States. He is a regular lecturer at the
Brecht Forum and appears on television, radio, and in print media. Since 2011, he has hosted
Economic Update, a weekly radio/TV show and podcast on
WBAI in New York City. One of Wolff's students,
George Papandreou, served as
Prime Minister of Greece from 2009 to 2011. Wolff described Papandreou as a student interested in socialist economics. However,
CUNY professor
Costas Panayotakis noted that Papandreou, despite campaigning against
austerity, implemented a criticized austerity program after Greece's debt crisis. Unlike most modern economists, Wolff is sceptical of the use of
mathematical methodology in economics, writing with Stephen Resnick in
Contending Economic Theories that "There is certainly no necessity to use mathematics. Everything in economics can be explained just as clearly and logically without it." They further speculate that usage of mathematical methodologies is motivated by "the desire of neoclassical economists to bestow on their work the aura of 'science' and 'truth' that surrounds mathematics", and that its purpose is often to "suggest that their respective economic theories have the force of mathematical necessity, the absolute truth often associated with the so-called hard natural sciences, rather like the claim that 2 + 2 = 4." == Projects ==