En Passant

The recent swings in world financial markets and the growing international effects of an economic slowdown in China have raised fears in the U.S. that the economic recovery could be on its last legs–even before working people felt like they had escaped the last crisis. And what will come next? In the first instalment of a three-part series, Lee Sustar in Socialist Worker US answers questions about the underlying causes of the instability in the markets–and explains how the troubles in the world economy today are tied to the same problems that led to the Great Recession of 2007-09.

For many workers in Australia times will be tougher than in the midst of the crisis. Rising interest rates, the end of the cash handouts and government cuts to rein in debt will hurt.

I am a fairly excitable person. I can mistake the moment for the month; the ephemeral for the eternal. But I am not alone there. Capitalism regards itself as immutable,as something that will exist forever.  It mistakes now for the future and ignores the contradictory dynamics contained within the system. It also views the past through […]

McDonald’s is going to the Louvre.  The new outlet to be opened in one of the stations of the Museum has outraged some of the cultural elite who view art as their domain, not ours. The Louvre was once a palace filled with the art works of kings and queens.  French Revolutionaries made it a museum for the public […]

While we face increasing unemployment and less working hours, the bosses party. What a sick society. What a rotten system.

We are not yet out of the woods. And if we are I suspect we are in a clearing before we go further into the heart of darkness.

Rudd is going to hand back complete control to the casino capitalists and attack workers. What a great strategy for further disaster.

This might be a W-shaped recession, with the W moving towards a w.

This is a Budget built on illusion – the idea that growth will rocket to 4.5 percent in 2 years time.  It won’t. The only people who might believe this, apart from Wayne Swann and Kevin Rudd, are Treasury.  They’ve analysed previous recessions in the 80s and 90s to come up with the runaway growth figure two years […]

The IMF says that ‘the downturn is likely to be unusually severe, and the recovery is expected to be sluggish.’ In other words, even when the world economy stops shrinking, it is likely to find itself trapped in a long period of slow growth.