Editors Introduction

Abstract

This issue offers a robust, wide-ranging encounter with the forces of commodification and alienation, with different efforts toward intervention and political engagement. The contributions herein—sometimes weaving these themes together, sometimes unraveling or knotting them up—include a book symposium, three individually submitted essays, two book reviews, and a special symposium on the public-scholar work of one of the journal’s former chief editors, David Ruccio. The issue begins with David F. Ruccio and Kenan Erçel’s vibrant conversation about Ruccio’s impactful, long-running blog, Occasional Links & Commentary on Economics, Culture and Society. The blog emerged in part from Ruccio’s desire to respond to the 2009 crisis, what he refers to as the Second Great Depression, and it has enabled an expansion of the pedagogical approach Ruccio had been advancing in the classroom for years as a teacher of economics at the University of Notre Dame. The blog has since generated 10,000 posts and nearly 1.3 million views. It is a public-education project intended to upend common-sense ideas and categories and to open spaces for new possibilities and demands. Reflecting on both the blog and the historical context in which it has developed, Erçel and Ruccio think through differences between classroom teaching and the types of conversations that can take place through a blog. They compare the constraints of academic work and the contrasting freedoms that the blog engenders—in particular, as a means to produce and communicate provisional, emergent ideas through a wide range of textual forms (perhaps most notable here is Ruccio’s extensive use of cartoons)—and they discuss the importance and the challenges of interrogating the features of the current conjuncture. States Ruccio, “the grotesque features of contemporary capitalism—its obscene inequalities, its role in creating global warming, the continued disciplining and punishing of the working classes, its systemic racism, and most recently the unequal conditions and consequences of the novel coronavirus pandemic—as well as the instances of resistance and the forging of new utopian visions, constitute the raw materials ... that, at least for me, keep the blog relevant as a project of ruthless criticism.” The symposium, edited by Erçel, feautures a range of contributors—Ruccio’s students, interlocutors, and colleagues—who extend the insights generated in the interview and highlight the thematic interventions that for each contributor RETHINKING MARXISM, 2021 Vol. 33, No. 3, 329–334, https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2021.1935582