“Monopoly-Finance Capital“, Monthly Review, vol. 58, no. 7 (December 2006), pp. 1-14. DOI: 10.14452/MR-058-07-2006-11_1
The year now ending marks the fortieth anniversary of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s classic work, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (Monthly Review Press, 1966). Compared to mainstream economic works of the early to mid-1960s (the most popular and influential of which were John Kenneth Galbraith’s New Industrial State and Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom), Monopoly Capital stood out not simply in its radicalism but also in its historical specificity. What Baran and Sweezy sought to explain was not capitalism as such, the fundamental account of which was to be found in Marx’s Capital, but rather a particular stage of capitalist development. Their stated goal was nothing less than to provide a brief “essay-sketch” of the monopoly stage of capitalism by examining the interaction of its basic economic tendencies, narrowly conceived, with the historical, political, and social forces that helped to shape and support them.
Translations:
- Chinese translation by Research Center on Marxism, Yunnan Normal University, Foreign Theoretical Trends (China), no. 3, 2007.
- Turkish translation in http://www.sendika.org, October 16, 2008.
- Arabic translation by Thamer Al-Saffar in Civilized Dialogue 1925, May 24, 2007, http://www.ahewar.org/debat/show.art.asp?aid=97582
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