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When we study Marx in my graduate social theory course, it never fails that at least one student will say (approximately), "Class struggle didn't escalate in the way Marx expected. In modern capitalist societies class struggle has disappeared. So isn't it clear that Marx was wrong and his ideas are of little value today?" I respond by challenging the premise that class struggle has disappeared. On the contrary, I say that class struggle is going on all the time in every major institution of society. One just has to learn how to recognize it. One needn't embrace the labor theory of value to understand that employers try to increase profits by keeping wages down and getting as much work as possible out of their employees. As the saying goes, every successful capitalist knows what a Marxist knows; they just apply the knowledge differently. Workers' desire for better pay and benefits, safe working conditions, and control over their own time puts them at odds with employers. Class struggle in this sense hasn't gone away. In fact, it's inherent in the relationship between capitalist employer and employee. What varies is how aggressively and overtly each side fights for its interests.

Here are just some of the sobering facts:-- There are 8.5 million people receiving unemployment insurance and over 40 million receiving food stamps.-- At the current pace of job creation, the economy won't return to full employment until 2018.-- Middle-income jobs are disappearing from the economy. The share of middle-income jobs in the United States has fallen from 52% in 1980 to 42% in 2010.-- Middle-income jobs have been replaced by low-income jobs, which now make up 41% of total employment.-- 17 million Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor's degree.-- Over the past year, nominal wages grew only 1.7% while all consumer prices, including food and energy, increased by 2.7%.-- Wages and salaries have fallen from 60% of personal income in 1980 to 51% in 2010. Government transfers have risen from 11.7% of personal income in 1980 to 18.4% in 2010, a post-war high.The bottom line is simple says Schwenninger: The middle class is shrinking, which threatens the social composition and stability of the world's biggest economy. "I worry that we're becoming a barbell society - a lot of money wealth and power at the top, increasing hollowness at the center, which I think provides the stability and the heart and soul of the society... and then too many people in fear of falling down."

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Why this absence of political ambition? What explains the rioters' genuflection at the altar of "crude materialist, market-driven hedonism"? To zone in on the answer, we need to step back and remind ourselves how strikingly unequal distributions of income and wealth impact how we interact with "things." In relatively equal nations, societies where minor differences in income and wealth separate social classes, people typically do not obsess over "things," the baubles of modern life. The reason? If nearly everyone can afford much the same things, things overall tend to lose their significance. People in more equal societies will be more likely to judge you by who you are than what you own. The reverse, obviously, also holds true. "As inequality worsens," as Boston College economist Juliet Schor has explained, "the status game tends to intensify." The wider that gaps in income and wealth go, the greater the differences in the things that different classes can afford. In markedly unequal societies, things take on ever greater significance. They signal who has succeeded and who has not. In London, the developed world's most unequal city, these signals may dominate daily life as ferociously as anywhere else on Earth. Their incessant repetition drowns out the socially cohesive signals that people see and hear and feel in more equal societies, the sense that "we're all in this together." "Let this week be a wake up call," London's Compass think tank observed right after the heaviest rioting. "There is more to clean up than broken shop windows."

A luta de classes está de volta à Europa e em termos tão novos que os atores sociais estão perplexos e paralisados. O relatório que o FMI acaba de divulgar sobre a economia espanhola é uma declaração de guerra. Os movimentos e as organizações de toda a Europa têm de se articular para mostrar aos governos que a estabilidade dos mercados não pode ser construída sobre as ruínas da estabilidade das vidas dos cidadãos e suas famílias. Não é o socialismo; é a demonstração de que ou a UE cria as condições para o capital produtivo se desvincular relativamente do capital ou o futuro é o fascismo. O artigo é de Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Wall Street Isn't Winning - It's Cheating The two-tiered justice system: an illustration 9/10/2001: Rumsfeld says $2.3 TRILLION Missing from Pentagon  The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality The Quiet Coup "the finance industry has effectively captured our government" What OWS is about + data behind the movement Data privacy is now extinct in the U.S. "The problem that confronts us is that every living system in the biosphere is in decline and the rate of decline is accelerating. There isn't one peer-reviewed scientific article that's been published in the last 20 years that contradicts that statement. Living systems are coral reefs. They're our climatic stability, forest cover, the oceans themselves, aquifers, water, the conditions of the soil, biodiversity. They go on and on as they get more specific. But the fact is, there isn't one living system that is stable or is improving. And those living systems provide the basis for all life." The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen The prison industry in the United States: big business or a new form of slavery? How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich: The inside story of how the Republicans abandoned the poor and the middle class to pursue their relentless agenda of tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent

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On May 20, the Senate passed its bill to reregulate Wall Street by a vote of 59-39, complete with a (watery) version of the Volcker Rule. The story of the legislation's passage can be told in a number of ways: a tale of conflict or compromise, triumph or capitulation. But on any reading, that story is only the climactic chapter in a larger narrative: how the masters of the money game fell out of love with-and into a state of bitter, seething, hysterical fury toward-Obama. The speed and severity of the swing from enchantment to enmity would be difficult to overstate. When Obama was sworn into office, Democrats on Wall Street rejoiced at the ascension of a president in whom they saw many qualities to admire: brains, composure, bi-partisan instincts, an aversion to class-based combat. And many Wall Street Republicans-after witnessing the horror show that constituted John McCain's response to the financial crisis-quietly admitted relief that the other guy had prevailed.

AFTER months of speculation over whether the Arab spring would spread to the Palestinians, it has spread, in a way, to the Israelis. Rothschild Boulevard, a pleasant, leafy thoroughfare that meanders through Tel Aviv, with offices and commodious flats on either side, has oddly become a colourful encampment, seething with talk of people-power and social revolution. The tent-dwellers, a mixed bunch but with a preponderance of young, educated, middle-class families, are demanding-above all-affordable housing. Their protest, now into its third week, has sparked sleep-outs and demonstrations around the country. The movement seems to be growing daily, despite the torrid summer heat.

Since America's political and media class steadfastly ignore this glaringly obvious point, it's nice (albeit self-interested) of the Chinese to point it out for us.  As we endlessly hear about a massive debt crisis, the current President has started one optional war that has already exceeded its estimated costs, plans to continue (if not escalate) two more, is drone-attacking a new country on a seemingly weekly basis, expands sprawling covert military actions in still other countries, builds new overseas detention facilities, all while offering only the most modest, symbolic and illusory "cuts" in military spending.  The alleged need to slash the financial security of American citizens -- and the notion that America faces a severe debt crisis -- would be more persuasive if the country didn't continue its posture of Endless War and feeding the insatiable, bloated National Security State (to say nothing of the equally insatible and wasteful Drug War and its evil spawn, the increasingly privatized American Prison State, which the Obama administration is expanding as aggressively as the War on Terror).