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Political Economy

The Rise of the Working Class and the Future of the Chinese Revolution

In July 2009, workers at the state-owned Tonghua Steel Company in Jilin, China organized a massive anti-privatization protest. Then, in the summer of 2010, a wave of strikes swept through China’s coastal provinces. These events may prove to be a historic turning point. After decades of defeat, retreat, and silence, the Chinese working class is now re-emerging as a new social and political force.… How will the rise of the Chinese working class shape the future of China and the world? Will the Chinese capitalist class manage to accommodate the working-class challenge while maintaining the capitalist system? Or will the rise of the Chinese working class lead to a new Chinese socialist revolution that could, in turn, pave the way for a global socialist revolution? The answers to these questions will, to a large extent, determine the course of world history in the twenty-first century. | more…

Three Poems by Marilyn Buck

Marilyn Buck (1947-2010) spent over twenty-five years in prison for politically motivated actions against U.S. government policies and in support of the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. She wrote these poems behind bars, as a way to comprehend the reality of prison and continue her fight as a white woman against injustice, particularly U.S.-generated white supremacy. Paroled in July 2010, she died of cancer twenty days after her release. | more…

The Emperor Has No Clothes But Still He Rules

Moshe Adler, Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science that Makes Life Dismal (New York: The New Press, 2009), 224 pages, $24.95, hardcover; David Orrell, Economyths: Ten Ways That Economics Get It Wrong (Mississauga, Ontario: John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd., 2010), 288 pages, $27.95, hardcover; Yanis Varoufakis, Joseph Halevi, and Nicholas J. Theocaratis, Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World (New York: Routledge, 2011, forthcoming), 536 pages, $165.00, hardcover, $65.00, paperback.

Science is often thought to proceed from a theory to experiments that test its predictions. If new data are discovered that cannot be explained by the theory, eventually a new theory arises to replace it. If the new theory can explain everything the old one did plus the new phenomena, sooner or later every scientist will adhere to the new paradigm.… Neoclassical economics is taught in every college classroom in the United States and in almost every country in the world. Graduate students learn no other approach to economics. They are taught that neoclassical economics is a science, on a par with physics and the other natural sciences. There is even a joke that when good neoclassical economists die, they are reincarnated as physicists, but bad ones come back as sociologists. | more…

On the Laws of Capitalism

In February 2011, while I was drafting what was to become “Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism,” written with Robert W. McChesney and R. Jamil Jonna (Monthly Review, April 2011), I decided to take a look at Paul Sweezy’s copy of the original 1942 edition of Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, which I had in my possession. In doing so, I came across a folded, two-page document, “The Laws of Capitalism,” tucked into the pages. It was written in ink in Sweezy’s very compact handwriting. In the upper-right-hand corner, Sweezy had jotted (clearly much later) in pencil: “(A debate with J.A.S. before the Harvard Graduate Students’ Economics Club, Littauer Center, probably 1946 or 1947.)” The document consisted of a detailed outline, in full sentences, of a contribution to a debate. I immediately realized that this was Sweezy’s opening talk in the now legendary Sweezy-Schumpeter debate. Until that moment, I, along with everybody else, assumed that no detailed records of the actual talks had survived. | more…

Monthly Review Volume 62, Number 11 (April 2011)

April 2011 (Volume 62, Number 11)

This year marks the forty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s classic work, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic Order (Monthly Review Press, 1966). Three years before the publication of their book, in the July 1963 issue of Monthly Review, Baran and Sweezy published two chapters of Monopoly Capital in MR, together with an introduction. (The publication of the actual book was delayed by Baran’s death in 1964.) Today MR editor John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney are currently completing a book, entitled Monopoly-Finance Capital: Politics in an Era of Economic Stagnation and Social Decline, to be published by Monthly Review Press early next year. The purpose of this new work is to bring the analysis of Monopoly Capital up to date, addressing the changes that have occurred in the capitalist system in the last half-century. We have therefore decided to follow the example of Baran and Sweezy and publish a number of the core chapters of this book, in early form in the magazine, in advance of the book itself. The March 2011 Review of the Month, “The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism,” was one such chapter. This issue’s Review of the Month, “Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism“…is another. | more…

Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism

A striking paradox animates political economy in our times. On the one hand, mainstream economics and much of left economics discuss our era as one of intense and increased competition among businesses, now on a global scale. It is a matter so self-evident as no longer to require empirical verification or scholarly examination. On the other hand, wherever one looks, it seems that nearly every industry is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Formerly competitive sectors like retail are now the province of enormous monopolistic chains, massive economic fortunes are being assembled into the hands of a few mega-billionaires sitting atop vast empires, and the new firms and industries spawned by the digital revolution have quickly gravitated to monopoly status. In short, monopoly power is ascendant as never before. | more…

Cluster Munitions and State Terrorism

For decades, major global and regional powers have waged war against those they accuse of fighting immorally—that is, those who use terrorism to harm civilians at home and abroad. Paradoxically, these righteous “wars on terror” are being fought in an era in which the distinction between war waged only against soldiers, and war against soldiers as well as civilians has virtually collapsed. The technological development, stemming from the Industrial Revolution, of aerial bombardment and weapons of mass destruction has made it more difficult to separate citizen from soldier.… [but] it is imperative that this distinction hold. In waging wars on terror, [upholding the soldier/citizen distinction] permits globally powerful nations to rally public opinion under the assertion that what separates us (self) from them (other) is that civilian life is paramount for us and not for “the terrorists.” | more…

Not Naming Names

Julius Rosenberg’s Decidedly Political Decision

I would like to expand on a couple of areas from Staughton Lynd’s thought-provoking essay (“Is There Anything More to Say About the Rosenberg Case?MR, March 2011) on the case of my parents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Though Staughton is too modest to “have a go” at the validity of the analysis presented in Walter Schneir’s Final Verdict, I think it is important to note that unlike the authors of Venona, whose work is quoted in the article, Schneir is the first writer to take the most recently released materials from the former Soviet Union and subject them to a close analysis in comparison to what we had always “believed” we knew about the case. | more…

Asia and the Great Financial Crisis

Michael Lim Mah Hui and Lim Chin, Nowhere to Hide: The Great Financial Crisis and Challenges for Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2010), 200 pages, $39.90, paperback.

Nowhere to Hide by Michael Lim Mah Hui and Lim Chin is another book on the financial crisis, although with added attention to Asia. In addition to the regional implications of the crisis for Asia, what makes this volume different from so many others is its critical perspective.… The book thus reflects an insider’s view of the banking system that is informed by a critical, political-economic perspective. As such, Nowhere to Hide makes a good companion to Monthly Review’s own The Great Financial Crisis by John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff. Indeed, there is a close connection between these works, symbolized by the incorporation of Foster and Magdoff’s title into the subtitle of Nowhere to Hide. | more…

Monthly Review Volume 62, Number 10 (March 2011)

March 2011 (Volume 62, Number 10)

In the United States, it is now three years since the “Great Recession” began, and twenty-one months since it officially ended. Whether or not the end of the Great Recession means that the economy is now on the way to sustained recovery is another matter. Wall Street has rebounded dramatically, as have corporate—and especially financial sector—profits, but for ordinary men and women, circumstances are nearly as troubling today as they were at the bottom of the downturn in June 2009. | more…

The Internet’s Unholy Marriage to Capitalism

The United States and the world are now a good two decades into the Internet revolution, or what was once called the information age. The past generation has seen a blizzard of mind-boggling developments in communication, ranging from the World Wide Web and broadband, to ubiquitous cell phones that are quickly becoming high-powered wireless computers in their own right.… The full impact of the Internet revolution will only become apparent in the future, as more technological change is on the horizon that can barely be imagined and hardly anticipated. But enough time has transpired, and institutions and practices have been developed, that an assessment of the digital era is possible, as well as a sense of its likely trajectory into the future. | more…

Structural Crisis in the World-System

Where Do We Go from Here?1

I have written repeatedly on the structural crisis in the world-system, most recently in New Left Review in 2010. So, I shall just summarize my position, without arguing it in detail. I shall state my position as a set of premises. Not everyone agrees with these premises, which are my picture of where we are at the present time. On the basis of this picture, I propose to speak to the question, where do we go from here? | more…

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