Professor Wolff speaks with Kevin Brown on his History for the Future radio show about the origins of the current economic crisis, especially changes in the system since the 1970s, and how we can do better than capitalism.

Marxian analyses are now resurfacing in public dialogues about economy and society. A generation of marginalization is fading as a new generation discovers the diverse richness of the Marxian tradition’s insights. Just as an economic crisisin 1848 helped to provoke and shape Marx’s original insights, today’s crisis helps to renew interest in Marxism.

In the century before the 1970s, the victims of capitalism’s recurring crises and its critics increasingly turned toward Marx’s and other Marxists’ works.

  Like most capitalist crises, today’s challenges economists, journalists, and politicians to explain and to overcome it. The post-1930s struggles between neoclassical and Keynesian economics are rejoined. We show that both proved inadequate to preventing crises and served rather to enable and justify (as ‘‘solutions’’ for crises) what were merely oscillations between two forms of capitalism differentiated according to greater or lesser state economic interventions. Our Marxian economic analysis here proceeds differently.

Of the roughly 56 million homes in the US today with mortgages, one in seven is "delinquent." That is over 7 million homes more than 30 days behind in mortgage payments.  Those homeowners face foreclosure procedures likely leading to evictions.  Very high (and still rising) unemployment levels guarantee rising mortgage delinquencies.   Mass media and political statements about government and banks helping people avoid foreclosures ("mortgage modification") are often misleading.  Relatively few have been helped and the help has been too little.

  From the National Radio Project:   "It’s a time of economic transition, and systems that may have seemed stable over the past few decades are proving to be far from it. But how did we get here? And how can we learn from the past, to build a more fair and just system in the future? While many politicians and pundits claim that no one saw the current economic collapse coming, in fact, we had plenty of warning, depending on who we listened to.