Decade in review

The so-called recovery from capitalism’s latest crises has been going on now for a decade. During that time, we’ve been witnessing—and attempting to survive and, at the same time, imagine and enact a future beyond—the devastating conditions and consequences of what I came to call the Second Great Depression.

As it turns out, that’s the same time frame for this blog. I started it back in 2009, after I stepped down as editor of the journal Rethinking Marxism, and have been publishing it ever since. The initial idea was to post “occasional” links and commentary but, as regular readers know, it became much more than that. Thousands of shorter and longer posts, especially on inequality and class; critical engagements with contemporary debates on economics, culture, and society; a few guest posts; original data and charts; and, of course, daily cartoons.

Thanks to the number-crunching algorithms of WordPress, this is what the past decade looks like:

• • more than 9000 total posts
  • 1.6 million total words published
  • 1.2 million views from readers
  • visitors from 219 different countries and territories

Plus more than 4000 posts on my Twitter feed.

As I see it, the large number of views seems to indicate that there are many people out there—students, professors, activists, and others—who are dissatisfied with business as usual, both with the uneven recovery from the latest crises of capitalism and with the blithe assertions by economic and political elites (and those who represent their interests in the academy and media) that there are no alternatives.

Once again, I want to thank the folks at the Real-World Economics Review Blog, Progress in Political Economy, and Democracy at Work for reposting some of the items that originally appeared here, thus expanding the discussion and debate.

I especially want to acknowledge the many readers—Wordpress and email followers (more than 1500 of you), as well as regular and infrequent visitors—who, my hope is, have found the occasional useful insights in what I link to and comment on. . .