Monthly Review Press

NEW! The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China by John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney

NEW! The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China by John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney

The days of boom and bubble are over, and the time has come to understand the long-term economic reality. Although the Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, hopes for a new phase of rapid economic expansion were quickly dashed. Instead, growth has been slow, unemployment has remained high, wages and benefits have seen little improvement, poverty has increased, and the trend toward more inequality of incomes and wealth has continued. It appears that the Great Recession has given way to a period of long-term anemic growth, which Foster and McChesney aptly term the Great Stagnation.

Imperialism in the 21st Century reviewed by Science & Society

Imperialism in the 21st Century reviewed by Science & Society

Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis
384 pp, $28 pbk, ISBN 9781583675779
By John Smith
Reviewed by J. Z. Garrod in Science and Society, pp 148-51, vol. 82, no. 1, January 2018

The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism reviewed in Sacramento News & Review

The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism reviewed in Sacramento News & Review

Michael Perelman, economics professor at CSU Chico, uses the Greek legend of Procrustes, who sadistically shortened or stretched unwary travelers to fit them on his iron bed, as a metaphor for a system that cruelly disciplines workers. In The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism: How Market Tyranny Stifles the Economy by Stunting Workers, Perelman shows how economic theory marginalizes workers and makes a robust case against the idea that competitive markets create freedom.

Watch: On NYT’s ‘ransom of Haiti’ (Horne on ‘Democracy Now!’)

Watch: On NYT’s ‘ransom of Haiti’ (Horne on ‘Democracy Now!’)

Says Horne: The New York Times series, “The Ransom,” will “hopefully cause us to reexamine the history of this country and move away from the propaganda point that somehow the United States was an abolitionist republic when actually it was the foremost slaveholder’s republic….”

Marx & Philosophy Review of Books on the work of Samir Amin

On 3 September 2011 Samir Amin celebrated his 80th birthday. Amin is a consistent and irrepressible exponent of the development of Marxism in his chosen discipline, International Political Economy. His long and fruitful career of intellectual struggle has been marked by a series of publications and re-publications, including the five books under review.

E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left reviewed in Radical Ruminations

Winslow produced an excellent book. The essays hang together as proposals for, and responses to, the first New Left and as evidence of the intimate connection between Thompson’s historical writing and his politics. They provide a twofold intellectual history of those dramatic years. Thompson is powerful and elegant; Winslow is as passionate about intellectuals in socialist politics as Thompson was when he wrote these indispensable essays. But we need to understand what they built on.

Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness reviewed in International Socialism

Karl Marx wrote, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” With this in mind, István Mészáros uses this two-volume work to locate the philosophy and political economy of the past few centuries within the capitalist mode of production. Capitalist relations of production produce ideological imperatives that are expressed by bourgeois intellectuals, who Marx called the “hired prize fighters” of the bourgeoisie.