On April 4th and 5th, the AESA/Rethinking Marxism conference on SURPLUS EXCESS took place at the University of California, Riverside, welcoming over 70 scholars from around the world to the Southern California campus. With the one exception of the session celebrating the 20th anniversary of RM, the conference dispensed with plenary sessions, offering instead a large array of panels on various aspects of SURPLUS and EXCESS.

S. Charusheela

Marxists may feel pleased to hear the terms "exploitation" and "slavery" gain wider currency in discussions about globalization. But I want to argue that we should be cautious about the implications of recent popular discourses of slavery and exploitation of third world workers, particularly women, under globalization.

Jack Amariglio

On March 15, 2008, members of Rethinking Marxism and AESA were informed about an article entitled "Fairness, Consumer Consciousness and the Welfare of Less Developed Countries" by Giovanni Immordino. This article appeared in the most recent issue of the Global Economy Journal. Upon reading the following sentence in the article's abstract--"An increase in activism deteriorates labour practices and decreases welfare"--one of our horrorstruck friends exclaimed (online), "OH MY GOD!"

Maliha Safri

The last one year period has been incredibly tumultuous for Pakistani society: the late December assassination of Bhutto preceded by the October assassination attempt on her which caused the death of 120 persons, the March imprisonment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, and the subsequent political unrest as well as other incidents. The recent elections seem to have left a good taste in everyone's mouth- signaling the resumption of democracy. The party of Bhutto, the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), won the most numerous block in the Parliament, and hence, even if Bhutto was not able to be elected and placed

Rick Wolff

Many aspects of our "efficient" capitalism combined to produce the credit meltdown that now threatens ever more aspects of the global economy. One was the private rating companies' failure to accurately assess and honestly reveal the risks of securities based on a "bundle" of loans (securities that provide their owners with a portion of that bundle's principal and/or interest). This was especially true for securities based on mortgage loans issued in the go-go years of the housing boom. Investors around the world bought those securities based on those companies' ratings. Their purchases financed the US housing bubble now gone bust. We know now that those ratings were badly mistaken. Owners of those securities around the globe are taking staggering losses and reducing their lending to all borrowers. Anxiety about the risks of all sorts of borrowing has risen alongside deepening distrust of all risk assessments. Defaults, bankruptcies, and foreclosures rise together with the odds of recession in 2008.

Exactly twenty years have passed from the time the first issue of RETHINKING MARXISM

I saw Michael Moore’s Sicko on the last day that it was showing in Northampton. Sitting by myself in the basement of Pleasant Street Theater, I had nothing better to do before movie began than to listen to the two elderly couples ahead of me discussing what they had heard about the film, their own medical woes, and how easy it was for them to see a doctor.

Rick Wolff

Capitalism is. The leftists who target neoliberal globalization denounce privatization, free markets, unfettered mobility of capital, and government deregulations of industry. They propose instead that national or supra-national governments control and regulate market transactions and especially capital movements, increase taxes on profits and wealth, and even own and operate industry. "All in the interests of the people," they say, democratically.

Amherst, Massachusetts (September 2008)

New York University (22-24 May 2008)

University of California-Riverside (4-5 April 2008)

Cooper Union, New York City (14-16 March 2008)

20/4 (October 2008)