Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce, with a foreword by Robert W. McChesney (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 160 pp.
Remember that metaphor about the frog that slowly cooks to death in the pot of increasingly warm water? Leftists have used it for years to describe how people can accept dwindling health care, fading job opportunities, eroding racial and gender equality—as long as the loss occurs gradually. Now, with Donald Trump having slouched off to Washington, most of the mainstream media are working overtime to convince us that we can still stand the heat. Leave it to John Bellamy Foster, one of the world’s outstanding radical scholars, to expose Trump for who and what he is: a neo-fascist. Just at the boiling point, Foster offers us cool logic to comprehend the system that created Trump’s moral and political emergency—and to resist it.
In Trump in the White House, John Bellamy Foster does what no other Trump analyst has done before: he places the president and his administration in full historical context. Foster reveals that Trump is merely the endpoint of a stagnating economic system whose liberal democratic sheen has begun to wear thin. Beneath a veneer of democracy, we see the authoritarian rule that oversees decreasing wages, anti-science and climate-change denialism, a dying public education system, and expanding prisons and military—all powered by a phony populism seething with centuries of racism that never went away.
But Foster refuses to end his book in despair. Inside his analysis is a clarion call to fight back. Protests, popular demands, coalitions: everyone is needed. Change can’t happen without radical, anti-capitalist politics, and Foster demonstrates that—even now, with the waters ever warming—it may yet be possible to stop the desecration of the Earth; to end endless war; to create global solidarity with all oppressed people. Could a frog do that?
By rejecting the term “populism” that is widely used to describe the Trump phenomenon and other similar ones around the globe at present, and using the term “neo-fascism” instead, John Bellamy Foster has done a great theoretical service to the Left. This shift in conceptual perspective prompts him to compare current developments to those in the 1930s, to examine their political economy roots, and to highlight the “destruction of reason” that characterizes all fascism, then and now. This book is a pioneering contribution that is extremely important and valuable.
Disdain for human rights, elections, democracy; hatred of intellectuals, artists and journalists; obsession with power and punishment, with being first and biggest and right; rampant corruption, corporate cronyism, runaway nationalism, racism, homophobia and sexism: the Trump White House is a neo-fascist project. Resistance is possible, but only if we name things for what they are and trace Trumpism to its neoliberal roots. “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle” said Orwell. Lucky for us, John Bellamy Foster is doing the work.
John Bellamy Foster’s Trump in the White House should be read by all those concerned not only about Trump but about the social conditions that produced this phenomenon. No doubt we have reached a stage where democracy has become antithetical to capitalism, where the bosses of the world would rather muffle democratic institutions than allow their property to be touched. JBF goes beneath the surface, demanding that we follow, asking for more radical change than merely the removal of Trump.
Informed and informative, thoughtful and thought-provoking, exceptionally well written, organized and presented, Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce is unreservedly recommended reading for every citizen and should be a part of every community and academic library Contemporary Political Science collection in general, and Donald Trump supplemental studies reading list in particular.
Praise for The Endless Crisis:
The authors carefully develop a powerful case that the normal state of ‘really existing capitalist economies,’ increasingly dominated by multinational megacorporations along with associated financialization, is not growth with occasional recession, but rather stagnation with occasional escapes that have diminishing prospects. Hence an ‘endless crisis.’… This valuable inquiry should be carefully studied and pondered, and should be taken as an incentive to action.
The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, coedited with Nicholas Baran (Foster listed second, introduction by Foster, 30 pp). New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017, 500 pp.
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.
The letters selected for this volume illuminate not only the development of the political economy that was to form the basis of Monopoly Capital, but also the historical context—the McCarthy Era, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis—in which these thinkers were forced to struggle. Not since Marx and Engels carried on their epistolary correspondence has there has been a collection of letters offering such a detailed look at the making of a prescient critique of political economy—and at the historical conditions from which that critique was formed.
The publication of The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, 1949-1964 is a major event. It will allow the public to see a fascinating discussion that clarifies the development of American society.
This collection of the Baran-Sweezy letters provides a timely window into their observations and analyses as they collaborated over fifteen years during the writing of Monopoly Capital. Now, fifty years later, this correspondence offers additional insights that make their political economy critique of monopoly capitalism ever more relevant today. Nicholas Baran, Paul’s son (aided by John Bellamy Foster), has made a wonderful contribution here to keeping his father’s legacy alive.
This rich collection of correspondence between the ‘two Pauls’—Baran and Sweezy—deserves high praise. On one level, it traces the shaping of their classic book, Monopoly Capital, ‘the single most influential book ever published by Marxian political economists in the United States.’ On another level, it is loaded with insights into early Cold War America regarding such topics as Castro’s Cuba, race relations, the dark influences of McCarthyism on academia, and the challenges of founding and maintaining a small, independent, socialist press, Monthly Review, which has provided a forum for such thinkers as Albert Einstein and I.F. Stone. This volume also attests to a remarkable friendship through which two quite different intellectuals traded ideas, always prodding and encouraging each other. The editors—Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster—have done a prodigious amount of work. The result is a model of editing that benefits from explanatory notes, a glossary of names, a meticulous index, and well-written introductions that provide important matters of context. It is exactly the kind of book that researchers will relish and gratefully use.
Informative, insightful, unique, The Age of Monopoly Capital is enhanced for academia with the inclusion of a Chronology, a Bibliography, a Glossary of Names, and an Index, making it an ideal and unreservedly recommended addition to both community and academic library Economics collections.