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The Political Tragedy of Capitalist Rule

In this prescient article from 1995, former MR editors Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy show that, through their own profligacy, the ruling classes have lost their capacity for political rule. The way forward, Magdoff and Sweezy write, is an “organized, militant struggle,” and with victory necessarily leading to the overthrow of capitalist rule. | more…

Post-Revolutionary Society

In this collection of articles, reviews and speeches written in the mid-1960s through 1980, Monthly Review’s founder, Paul Sweezy, discusses the development of societies, mainly within the former USSR, after Marxist revolution. Why did these societies develop as they did – situated, as they were at the time, in countries that were no longer capitalist, but also apparently not moving toward an ideal form of communism?

At the time, Sweezy wrote that Post-Revolutionary Society was more “concerned with what post-revolutionary society, exemplified mainly by the Soviet Union, is not, rather than what it is….it is neither capitalism nor socialism as these social formations have been traditionally

Caste Class and Race A Study in Social Dynamics by Oliver Cromwell Cox

Oliver Cromwell Cox’s Marxism

Oliver Cromwell Cox insisted on dealing with the crucial issues of his time and on telling the truth as he saw it, regardless of whose toes may have been stepped on or whose sensibilities may have been injured. He has aided in preventing the complete stultification of academic social science and in the long run exercised an immense influence on American life. | more…

Karl Marx on Alienation

The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society: Mental Health

When Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital was published by Monthly Review Press in 1966, two of the chapters originally drafted for the book were left out of the final volume: what was to have been Chapter 9 in the original plan for the book, entitled “Some Theoretical Implications,” and what was intended as Chapter 11, “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society: Culture and Mental Health.” In July–August 2012, “Some Theoretical Implications” was finally published in Monthly Review. This was followed by the publication of the first part, approximately two-thirds of the whole, of “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society: Culture and Mental Health,” titled “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society: Culture and Communications,” in the July–August 2013 issue of the magazine. The section on mental health was left out on the grounds that it was incomplete. We finally publish it here. | more…

Dark Clouds of Factory Smoke Obscure Clark Avenue Bridge in Cleveland, Ohio in 1973

‘The Deadly Implications of Capital for the Human Habitat’

A Letter to István Mészáros from Paul M. Sweezy, October 16, 1992

In October 1992, MR founding editor Paul M. Sweezy wrote the following brief letter, published here for the first time, to István Mészáros in response to an interview with Chris Arthur and Joseph McCarney that had just been published in Radical Philosophy. Sweezy saluted the critical significance of Mészáros’s argument on “the monstrous power of capital,” and the failure of many Marxists to perceive this problem in its full dimensions. He also affirmed the imperative of incorporating the ecological economics of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen.
The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, 1949-1964

The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, 1949-1964

Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy were two of the leading Marxist economists of the twentieth century. Their seminal work, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order, published in 1966, two years after Baran’s death, was in many respects the culmination of fifteen years of correspondence between the two, from 1949 to 1964. During those years, Baran, a professor of economics at Stanford, and Sweezy, a former professor of economics at Harvard, then co-editing Monthly Review in New York City, were separated by three thousand miles. Their intellectual collaboration required that they write letters to one another frequently and, in the years closer to 1964, almost daily. Their surviving correspondence consists of some one thousand letters. | more…

Terrace field in Yunnan China

Ecology and Revolution

A Letter to Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, July 31, 1974

In the early 1970s, MR editors Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy increasingly introduced ecological themes into the magazine, and began to question the viability of unlimited, exponential economic growth in a limited biosphere. Sweezy, in particular, was deeply interested in ecological problems, a topic he began to write on in this period, in essays such as “Cars and Cities”…, and to which he returned on various occasions until the end of his life.… [In this 1974 letter to the influential ecological economist, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Sweezy outlined] the revolutionary implications of ecology, and the break that these necessitated with pure “economism”—a rupture that only a truly revolutionary socialism could bring about.

Theses on Advertising

Confronted with a progressive deterioration and an increasing “Americanization” of mass media in Britain, the British Labor Party appointed a Commission under the Chairmanship of Lord Reith the assignment of which is “to consider the role of commercial advertising in present day society and to recommend whether reforms are required; if so, what?” This Advertising Commission solicited oral and written testimony from various workers in that field, submitting to them a questionnaire covering the principal points on which comments were invited. Having also been asked for our reflections on the matter, we prepared the following statement the purpose of which is not so much to answer all the questions posed in the questionnaire, as to present a more or less integrated view on this, most important, subject. | more…

The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society: Culture and Communications

This is a hitherto unpublished chapter of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966). The text as published here has been edited and includes notes by John Bellamy Foster. The style conforms to that of their book. Part of the original draft chapter, dealing with mental health, was still incomplete at the time of Baran’s death in 1964, and consequently has not be included in this published version. For the larger intellectual context see the introduction to this issue.