Suchergebnisse

Revolution in economic policy -- Understanding the economy -- Explaining unacceptable economic performance -- Alternative analyses -- The "revolutionary offensive," 1979-84 -- "Morning in America" -- Seven fat years, or illusion? -- Testing the various assertions -- Failures, real and imagined -- The Bush presidency and Clinton's first two years : the end of Reaganomics? -- The republican triumph and the Clinton surrender -- Coda: "There is no alternative."

Michael Meeropol, son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, examines a recent biography of Irving R. Kaufman, the judge who sentenced the Rosenbergs to death. Using his own deep research into his parents' case, Meeropol shows how Kaufman's virulent anti-Communism led him to put his thumb on the scales of justice, despite the later progressive liberalism for which he is often lauded. This in turn reveals a key contradiction: "Liberal democracy is fine as long as the basis of the system is not threatened. When it is…'dangerous' people—Communists and other leftists—are dealt with by any means necessary."

I joined URPE when it was first formed in 1968 and found a strong support group in the Springfield-Northampton-Amherst area of Western Massachusetts when I got my first teaching job. I was at a teaching institution where the Economics program mostly serviced students from the School of Business. Having a support group of like-minded radicals in the early 1970s gave me the confidence and support to develop my own approach to teaching that combined presenting mainstream analysis and making all students aware of the existence and substance of radical alternatives. Those early years of URPE were a heady time—we were involved in struggles to make sure radicals were not purged by hostile departments. We attended conferences and wrote articles and participated in local struggles. Most importantly, unlike, for example, Paul Baran at Stanford University who lamented in a letter to Paul Sweezy that he had "no one to talk to," we had each other—we had the Review of Radical Political Economics ( RRPE)—and we had visions of changing not just economics but the world. We still need that hope and enthusiasm today.

In 1964, I began my graduate studies at Cambridge University. The reading list included a book by Josef Steindl with the intriguing title Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism. I read it, and was immediately drawn to the last chapter, "Karl Marx and the Accumulation of Capital." Aside from reading the first few chapters of Capital in a study group, I had not yet read any of Marx's economic writings (predictably, none had been assigned in any of my college courses). However, that last chapter persuaded me that Steindl's analysis aligned with what I understood to be Marx's general vision about the "laws of motion" of capitalist economies.… This set the stage for my reading of Baran and Sweezy's Monopoly Capital in the spring of 1966. I devoured that book. I doubt that I got up from the kitchen table until I had read it from cover to cover.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.