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The current economic crisis in the US has generated the greatest popular discontent with the system and from that possible potential for radical change since World War II. This article looks at the Marxist tradition for generating revolutionary demands, including the essential issue of avoiding sterile revolutionary demands, and what distinguishes revolutionary demands from the socially more common progressive reformist demands. It then considers this issue specifically in the particular context of the US today of a working class that has been almost entirely demobilized for three decades, and largely politically disarmed since World War II. It specifically considers an important progressive set of economic demands that was issued early in the crisis, and compares these with a few recently issued demands that come out of an analysis of the crisis by revolutionaries who are seeking to begin to mobilize the working class to the project of transcending capitalism. The article ends with some preliminary proposals for extending these latter demands, in the approach of Marx, Engels and Lenin, more broadly to the current crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work contributes to the almost nonexistent literature on the profit rate of the financial sector. It updates the single study to include financial variables to cover the past decade, compares this profit rate to the (almost unpublished) Weisskopf and NIPA financial profit rates, compares the financial and nonfinancial sector rates, and details the procedure to construct the profit rate in the financial sector including relevant financial variables which capitalists consider to make profit-rate decisions.JEL Classification: B50, E11 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper looks at the most recent aggregate profit rate data for the United States. It then makes five arguments. First, the new data reinforce the rejection of "neoliberalism as successful capitalist restructuring that could possibly restore or surpass the pre 1970s rate of profit." Second, when the new data are viewed together with the rest of the post-WWII data, it reinforces the appearance of the fall in the rate of profit as a one-step fall between an earlier and a later period. Third, this result argues against understanding the fall in the rate of profit in terms of an increasing organic composition of capital. Fourth, the one-step fall understanding is consistent with understanding profit rate dynamics in terms of the change of economic regimes between the "Keynesian compromise" period and the neoliberal period. These first four results are all consistent with, though certainly not broad enough to claim to be a proof of all of, the recently reformulated social structures of accumulation theory by Kotz and Wolfson. Finally, when the new data are considered together with several now widely held general beliefs about the near-term performance of the U.S. economy, this paper makes arguments about some likely characteristics of the behavior of the aggregate profit rate over the next business cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]