In this reprise from 1992, former MR editors Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy look toward the end of the recession then plaguing the United States, seeing choice looming on the horizon: Will the progressive left attempt to reform capitalism, or replace it entirely? Capital’s inexorable thirst for growth beyond natural limits, they write, means we must choose the latter—”if we care about the future of the human species…we had better listen to the ecologists.” | more…
In this remarkable reprise reprinted from Monthly Review‘s October 1992 issue, Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy look ahead to the ecological crisis that has continued to unfold into the twenty-first century. Presaging the critical juncture at which we find ourselves today, they write that “only a change in the in the nature of power structures on a global scale could bring a realistic hope for the long-term continuation of human civilization…. If you think that is true, what do you think are the implications?” | more…
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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…
In this reprise from October 1993, Henry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy ask: “Isn’t there anyone around here who understands how this capitalist system works?” | more…
In this reprint of the February 1994 “Notes from the Editors,” former MR editors Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy ask: “The United States could not have won a more decisive victory in the Cold War. Why, then, does it continue to act as though the Cold War is still on?” | more…
Monthly Review was started in 1949 and is now in its forty-fourth year of publication, so you could say that MR‘s existence is pretty much coterminous with the second half of the twentieth century. What have been the most important characteristics of this half century? | more…
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
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…
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…
The Manifesto‘s analysis of the capitalist crises that “put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society” remains central to any attempt to predict the events of the coming years. | more…
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…
