Rethinking Marxism

Complete Editors' Introduction

22-2 Table of Contents

In this issue we collect a symposium of specially commissioned short pieces on the current economic crisis. The salience of Marxian explanations for these events has generated excitement, but also concern. We want Marxian scholarship to offer more than “I told you so,” as Randy Martin puts it in the second essay in our symposium, “What's in It for Us? Rethinking the Financial Crisis.” We have been troubled, at conferences and other forums, that speakers and audiences sometimes reach for an orthodox, simplified pedagogics of falling rates of profit and inevitable collapse, repeating old formulas rather than asking what might be interesting or different about the recent history of capitalism. More nuanced critiques of how worker consumers staved off an overproduction crisis through their debt-laden consumption and, in so doing, contributed to that very same crisis, may lead us to a less determinist understanding of economy, and back toward the interventions around ideology, hegemony, and the economy made by Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser.

We are pleased to announce that the project of scanning and digitizing all back issues of RETHINKING MARXISM has been completed. Please encourage your library to secure access to the contents--the editors' introduction, articles, essays, reviews, symposia, art, and fiction--of all current and back issues, dating back to the very first issue in 1988.