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A Letter to a Contributor

The Same Old State

As mentioned over the phone, we like your article very much. It needs to be shortened, and we will be suggesting some editorial changes. Meanwhile, I would like to get your thinking about my disagreement with this statement in your conclusion: “Today’s neo-liberal state is a different kind of capitalist class than the social-democratic, Keynesian interventionist state of the previous period.” I can’t see any significant difference in either the state or its relation to the ruling class, even though clearly there is a considerable difference between the functioning of the capitalist economy during the so-called golden age and the subsequent long stretch of stagnation. I do not mean the absence of any change at all in the capitalist class. Thus, the growing influence of the financial sector (not necessarily a separate sector) is noteworthy. But that is hardly a measure of a major change in the state  | more…

The Irreversible Crisis (Economic History As It Happened, Vol. V)

The Irreversible Crisis (Economic History As It Happened, Vol. V)

The economies of the capitalist world-individually and as part of a closely knit global system-have been in an ongoing state of crisis since the early 1970s when the long post World War II boom finally came to an end. This crisis has gone through several phases but has not at any time shown signs of giving way to a renewed long wave of prosperity. | more…

Stagnation and the Financial Explosion (Economic History As It Happened, Vol. IV)

Stagnation and the Financial Explosion (Economic History As It Happened, Vol. IV)

This is the fourth in the magisterial series of essays by the former editors of Monthly Review on the state of the U.S. economy and its relation to the global system. Like its predecessors, this volume focuses on the development of U.S. capitalism as it takes place, and covers the 1980s. The authors stress the profound contradictions of the underlying processes of capital accumulation and identify, before any other economic commentators, the immense implications of the use of the explosion of debt to attempt to solve the problems presented by the underlying stagnation in the real economy. | more…

The Deepening Crisis of U.S. Capitalism (Economic History As It Happened, Vol. III)

The Deepening Crisis of U.S. Capitalism (Economic History As It Happened, Vol. III)

This is the third book of essays on the United States and the world economy produced by the fruitful collaboration of Monthly Review editors Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff. In these essays, written between 1977 and 1981, the authors assess the results of efforts taken to stabilize the economy after the epochal changes of the early 1970s, the end of capitalism’s “golden age,” by attempts to counteract the effects of inflation, debt dependence, speculation, and financial instability. | more…

The Dynamics of U.S. Capitalism (Economic History As It Happened, Vol. I)

The Dynamics of U.S. Capitalism (Economic History As It Happened, Vol. I)

This is the first of the series of four collections of essays in which Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, the editors of Monthly Review, chronicled, as it was taking place, the development of U.S. and global capitalism from the end of its “golden age” in the late 1960s to the full onset of the financial explosion of the early 1990s and after. | more…