Paul A. Baran (1910–1964) and Paul M. Sweezy (1910–2004) were two of the most creative and influential Marxist economists of the last century. The Age of Monopoly Capital collects hundreds of letters between Baran and Sweezy, written between 1949 and Baran’s death in 1964. The correspondence contains numerous interesting, important, and unanticipated ideas. Nuggets of wisdom about economic theory, socialist history, dialectical method, academic politics, and many other topics are scattered throughout. | more…
Instead of theory, early U.S. radicals excelled in reportage, like John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, or fiction, like Upton Sinclair’s packing-house shocker The Jungle. To Europeans American thought seemed impermeable to the difficult ideas of Marxism. That changed with the founding of Monthly Review in 1949, which marked a newly realized if not entirely new trend in American Marxist thought. | more…
Against attempts to characterize Marx as a dogmatic and deterministic thinker, it is precisely the open-endedness of his criticism that accounts for historical materialism’s staying power. This openness has allowed Marxism to continually reinvent itself, expanding its empirical and theoretical content and embracing ever larger aspects of historical reality. | more…
Revolution is still on the agenda for the global periphery. Restorations in the course of socialist transition are not irrevocable—and in the weak links of the center, breaks in the imperialist front are not inconceivable. | 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…
Jane Lazare has written a fascinating, intensely personal book about history, family, and the Communist Party in the United States. She knows this story well: her father was an active Communist organizer, and the memoir recounts his life and hers, and the connections between them. | more…
The Marxian critique of political economy is inseparable from the “labor theory of value.” But what exactly does this theory mean? This article considers Marx’s value theory from five perspectives: as a monetary value theory, a theory of exploitation, a macro-monetary theory of capitalist production, a theory of individual prices, and a theory of crises. | more…
Considered by many to be the most innovative British Marxist writer of the twentieth century, Christopher Caudwell was killed in the Spanish Civil War at the age of 29. Although already a published writer of aeronautic texts and crime fiction, he was practically unknown to the public until reviews appeared of Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry, which was published just after his death. A strikingly original study of poetry’s role, it explained in clear language how the organizing of emotion in society plays a part in social change and development. Culture as Politics introduces Caudwell’s work through his most accessible and relevant writing. Material will be drawn from Illusion and Reality, Studies in a Dying Culture and his essay, “Heredity and Development.” | more…
Unlike such obvious forms of oppression as feudalism or slavery, capitalism has been able to survive through its genius for disguising corporate profit imperatives as opportunities for individual human equality and advancement. But it was the genius of Karl Marx, in his masterwork, Capital, to discover the converse law of surplus value: behind the illusion of the democratic, supply-and-demand marketplace, lies the workplace, where people trying to earn a living are required to work way beyond the time it takes to pay their wages. Leave it to the genius of Samir Amin to advance Marx’s theories—adding to them the work of radical economists such as Michal Kalecki, Josef Steindl, Paul Baran, and Paul Sweezy—to show how Marxian theory can be adapted to modern economic conditions. | more…
To understand the present ecological crisis, it is necessary to dig much deeper into capitalism’s logic of expropriation, as first delineated by Marx during the Industrial Revolution. At the root of the problem is a spoliation of the natural environment—the expropriation of the earth itself. | more…
An expanded Marxist understanding of capitalist exploitation is long overdue. There are many pathways of surplus extraction beyond the wage form, and understanding them is a task with profound implications for anticapitalist movements around the world. | more…
In his timely new book, David Gilbert addresses a subject that could not be more relevant: the white working class in the United States. He brings a much-needed historical perspective to current debates around the politics and identity of white workers, then and now. | more…
The state cannot be other than Leviathan in imposing its structurally entrenched power on overall societal decision-making. Yet a way must be found to extricate humanity from the ever more dangerous, arbitrary, and alienated form of the Leviathan state. Indeed, the survival of humanity depends on it. | more…
Sara Farris’s In the Name of Women’s Rights is a brave monograph that analyzes the way that the discourses of Europe’s right-wing nationalists, government agencies, and liberal feminists converge in their representations of Muslim and non-western immigrant women, relegating these communities to commodified spheres of social reproductive work. | more…
One of the horrors of the capitalist system is that slave labor, which was central to the formation and growth of capitalism itself, is still fully able to coexist alongside wage labor. But, as Karl Marx pointed out, it is the fact of being paid for one's work that validates capitalism as a viable socio-economic structure. Beneath this veil of “free commerce”—where workers are paid only for a portion of their workday, and buyers and sellers in the marketplace face each other as “equals”—lies a foundation of immense inequality. Yet workers have always rebelled. They've organized unions, struck, picketed, boycotted, formed political organizations and parties—sometimes they have actually won and improved their lives. In his timely and innovative book, Michael D. Yates asks if the working class can, indeed, change the world. | more…
For years, intellectuals have argued that, with the triumph of capitalist, liberal democracy, the Western World has reached “the end of history.” Recently, however, there has been a rise of authoritarian politics in many countries. Concepts of post-democracy, anti-politics, and the like are gaining currency in theoretical and political debate. Now that capitalist democracies are facing seismic and systemic challenges, it becomes increasingly important to investigate not only the inherent antagonism between liberalism and the democratic process, but also socialism. Is socialism an enemy of democracy? Could socialism develop, expand, even enhance democracy? | more…
The recent rise of social reproduction theory represents one of the most remarkable attempts to extend historical materialism in our time. The Review of the Month in this issue, “Women, Nature, and Capital in the Industrial Revolution,” is intended as a contribution to this rapidly growing body of work. | more…
Examining the historical specificity of women’s lives and labor in England during the Industrial Revolution allows us to better analyze the assumptions regarding gender, family, and work that informed the writings of Marx and Engels—and ultimately to understand how capital as a system threatens the social and ecological bases of human life. | more…
István Mészáros, who died on October 1 at the age of eighty-six, was a leading Marxist theorist and a frequent contributor to MR. No political philosopher of our age has reached nearly so far in joining philosophy with political-economic critique, or in systematically addressing the question of the movement toward socialism. | more…
The political ineffectuality of Marxism in the United States is the consequence most importantly of the nature and history of U.S. capitalism. But also important in explaining this feebleness is what Marxists have and have not done, who they are, and their “style.” | more…
