Capitalist crises, especially severe ones, are case studies in that system's social costs.

Mid-August, 2009, was a peculiar time in the US economy.   Wall Street, big banks, and the media were mostly celebrating "economic recovery."  Meanwhile, average Americans were suffering record levels of unemployment, job insecurities, home foreclosures, personal debt anxieties, and the upsets, tensions, and angers that inevitably result.

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.

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.

Most US economists are professors in colleges and universities.  Their academic positions enable research and teaching that is supposed to be independent of corporate interests.  Th

The Editor of Rethinking Marxism, David Ruccio, was approached this week about the swirling accusations surrounding presidential candidate's Barack Obama's supposed "socialism," or at least some key aspects of his economic and social policy (such as his "spreading the wealth" comments on the objective of his proposed tax policy). David was first asked by the News and Information Department from the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches, to help them make sense out of these rumors and attributions as they appeared in an article from the Chicago Tribune. We thought readers' interest would be piqued by David's reply: