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The upswing in public attention to “socialism” continues. Although the term is still used to scare people, it is likely in the coming years that many more hearts and minds will be open to the idea. There is one basic reason for this optimism: Every day more and more people become aware of the radical disconnect between (a) the vast resources that the US government is putting into the economy and (b) the insufficient degree of control and of attention to popular needs that its policies embody.

Annelies Laschitza, Die Liebknechts: Karl und Sophie -– Politik und Familie (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2007).

Francis A. Boyle, Protesting Power: War, Resistance, and Law (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

Messay Kebede, Radicalism and Cultural Dislocation in Ethiopia, 1960-1974 (University of Rochester Press, 2008).

This book is an exemplary work of self-examination by a professor of philosophy who participated in the Ethiopian student movement at a formative moment. Messay Kebede draws from this existential fount and examines his subject by blending scholarly discpline with lived experience. The result is a work that provokes, fascinates, educates and informs the lay reader as well as the seasoned scholar.

Aviva Chomsky, Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

Nicholas Powers, Theater of War: The Plot Against the American Mind (Brooklyn, NY: Upset Press, 2004);

Sam Friedman, Seeking To Make the World Anew: Poems of the Living Dialectic (Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2008).

We must not get trapped in the hype, the historic occasion, the Black face in a high place of the capitalist imperialist system -- especially since this trick of pacifying the masses of the people has been used quite consistently by the Empire and its lackeys across the world in the past to re-legitimize systems of tyranny and oppression and racism, i.e., FDR and his New Deal concessions of the 1930s and Nelson Mandela of South Afrika.

Although most Latin American governments continue [as of February 2009] to view the global crisis as something that does not concern them, working-class people have been facing price-increases of food and other basic necessities for over a year. The specter of hunger is knocking on the door of the poor.

The crisis in capitalism today is not, or not yet, a crisis of capitalism. Whether it evolves into a crisis of capitalism – when the system itself is in question for significant numbers of people – depends on three factors. The first is the extent of the economic meltdown now underway, and the mass suffering, resentment, and opposition it provokes. The second factor comprises the policies undertaken to contain and reverse the crisis, their effects, and their public perception.