Volume 21 Number 3

In this issue we continue RM's longstanding engagement with the work of Antonio Gramsci. Contemporary Gramsci scholars—those who work with and on the categories and modes of analysis pioneered by Gramsci—have demonstrated across our pages the significance of Gramsci's contributions to opening up and rethinking the Marxist tradition and to analyzing the changing modalities of social reality. Now, especially, when Marxian ideas are receiving a new hearing and increased attention, and when the capitalist system (and not just one or another aspect of contemporary politics or economics) is being interrogated and called into question—when “the old is dying but the
new cannot be born” and thus “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”—Gramsci's ideas acquire increased relevance. We are therefore pleased to offer a symposium on Peter Ives's recent book, Gramsci's Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School.
21-3 Contents
Complete Editors' Introduction

 

Electronic access to back issues: 

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.

 

Political Economy of Right Now special section: Marxist analyses of the current economic crisis

GM's Tragedy: The System Strikes Back

 

The greatest tragedies among many in the collapse and bankruptcy of General Motors concern what is not happening.  There are those solutions to GM's problems not being considered by Obama's administration.  There are the solutions not being demanded by the United Auto Workers Union (UAW).  There are all the solutions not even being discussed by most left commentators on the disaster.  Finally there are crucial aspects of GM's demise not getting the attention they deserve.

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Capitalist Crisis, Socialist Renewal

This much is clear: not in a long time has capitalism been so critically questioned in the US and "socialism" so widely debated as a social alternative. The left can and should seize this moment. One part of doing that is to formulate a new program -- including a new definition of socialism -- that could grasp a mass consciousness, become central to public political debate, and inspire a new left mobilization in the US.

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On the Militancy of Labor in the US

Stephen Greenhouse’s otherwise effective synopsis of the history of U.S. labor militancy (“In America, Labor Has an Unusually Long Fuse” April 5, 2009, Week in Review, The New York Times) suffers from a simple but profound omission. A key factor explaining the decline of labor militancy since the halcyon days of the 1930s and 1940s has been American employers’ virulent repression of labor militancy and unions per se that transformed the character of American labor as an institution as well as U.S. workers’ political culture, and made such basic tools of labor militancy as a legal strike a suicidal act.

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Peak Oil and Peak Capitalism

The concept of peak oil may apply more generally than its friends and foes realize. As we descend into US capitalism’s second major crash in 75 years (with another dozen or so “business cycle downturns” in the interval between crashes), some signs suggest we are at peak capitalism too. Private capitalism (when productive assets are owned by private individuals and groups and when markets rather than state planning dominate the distribution of resources and products) has repeatedly demonstrated a tendency to flare out into overproduction and/or asset inflation bubbles that burst with horrific social consequences. Endless reforms, restructurings, and regulations were all justified in the name not only of extricating us from a crisis but also finally preventing future crises (as Obama repeated this week). They all failed to do that.

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Those Alternative Socialists "Stimulus" Plans

There are, of course, other ways to "support and stimulate" the declining US economy: those that congressional debaters, presidential advisors, and the dutiful media never discuss. All the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury ever do is justify their functions as lenders and spenders "of last resort" (when the private sector will not). Neither ever mentions that the state could stimulate the economy if it became the employer and producer of last resort (when the private sector lays off and cuts back). The carefully stage-managed passage of Obama's economic policy package avoided any troubling consideration of all the stimulus roads not taken.

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