Category: Edited

Edited Books

  • Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism?”: The Enduring Legacy of His Classic Essay

    Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism?”: The Enduring Legacy of His Classic Essay

    Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism?”: The Enduring Legacy of His Classic Essay

    Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism”: The Enduring Relevance of His Classic Essay, edited and introduced by John Bellamy Foster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2025).

    First published more than seventy-five years ago in the inaugural issue of Monthly Review: An Independent Socialism Magazine, Albert Einstein’s “Why Socialism?” is an unheralded classic. Written during the McCarthyite witch-hunt in the United States, it constituted an act of defiance, making a case for socialism unrivaled in its time or ours. Yet, its very existence has been an embarrassment to an establishment which has continually sought to downplay the significance of his iconoclastic essay, together with Einstein’s socialism itself.

    This slim, elegant volume includes Einstein’s essay along with a detailed commentary on his essay by Monthly Review editor, John Bellamy Foster. Foster’s introduction tells the story of Einstein’s life-long commitment to socialism and the events leading to the publication of “Why Socialism?” and contextualizes the importance of his essay as we enter a time of planetary crisis and new threats of world war. Over the three-quarters of century since its publication, “Why Socialism?” is one of those rare statements whose power has only grown, reaching untold numbers of readers over the years. It is of crucial importance that—for the sake of the future of humanity—Einstein’s message continues to proliferate.

    Albert Einstein was the world-famous theoretical physicist.

    John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review.

  • Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State

    Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State

    Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State

    István Mézáros Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State, edited and introduced by John Bellamy Foster (forthcoming, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022), 512 pp.

    István Mészáros was one of the greatest political theorists of the twentieth century. Left unfinished at the time of his death, Beyond Leviathan is written on the magisterial scale of his previous book, Beyond Capital, and meant to complement that work. It focuses on the transcendence of the state, along with the transcendence of capital and alienated labor, while traversing the history of political theory from Plato to the present. Aristotle, More, Machiavelli, and Vico are only a few of the thinkers discussed in depth.

    The larger objective of this work is no less than to develop a full-fledged critique of the state, in the Marxian tradition, and set against the critique of capital. Not only does it provide, for the first time, an-all-embracing Marxian theory of the state, it gives new political meaning to the notion of “the withering away of the state.” In his definitive, final work, Mészáros seeks to illuminate the political preconditions for a society of substantive equality and substantive democracy.

    In his scholarly and personal introduction, John Bellamy Foster traces the gestation of this masterwork and its place in the history of political theory.

     

    “The pathfinder of socialism.”
    Hugo Chávez, former Venezuelan President and a leader of the Bolivarian revolution

     

    “Posthumously edited by Professor John Bellamy Foster, “Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State” by Istvan Meszaros is a seminal work that will be an enduringly appreciated and valued addition to college and university library Political Economy and Religious Philosophy collections in general, and Communism/Marxism political science studies lists in particular.”
    Midwest Book Review

  • The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy

    The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy

    The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, 1949-1964

    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.

    —Howard Sherman, economist, Professor Emeritus, University of California-Riverside; author, with E.K. Hunt, of Economics: An Introduction to Traditional and Radical Views

    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.

    —John Donnelly, Professor of Economics, Emeritus, Washington State University

    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.

    —LeRoy Ashby, Regents Professor Emeritus, Washington State University

    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.

    Midwest Book Review

  • Pox Americana

    Pox Americana

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    Pox Americana: Exposing the American Empire,” co-edited with Robert W. McChesney (Foster listed first) (New York: Monthly Review Press/London: Pluto Press, 2004), 192 pp.

    This volume brings together the work of leading Marxist analysts of imperialism to examine the burning question of our time—the nature and prospects of the U.S. imperial project currently being given shape by war and occupation in the Middle East.

    Notes/Reprints

    • Revised and expanded version of July-August 2003 special issue of Monthly Review with new material. (Contains an article co-authored by Foster and a preface and another article co-authored by Foster).
    • “Editors’ Preface” reprinted in Monthly Review, vol. 56, no. 4 (September 2004), pp. 1-4—under the title “The American Empire: Pax Americana or Pox Americana?”

    Translations

  • Hungry for Profit

    Hungry for Profit

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    Hungry for Profit: The Agribusiness Threat to Food Farmers and the Environment,” (co-edited with Fred Magdoff and Fred Buttel (Foster listed second) (NewYork: Monthly Review Press, 2000). Revised and expanded version of July-August 1998 issue of Monthly Review. (Contains two essays co-authored by Foster.)

    The agribusiness/food sector is the second most profitable industry in the United States — following pharmaceuticals — with annual sales over $400 billion. Contributing to its profitability are the breathtaking strides in biotechnology coupled with the growing concentration of ownership and control by food’s largest corporations. Everything, from decisions on which foods are produced, to how they are processed, distributed, and marketed is, remarkably, dictated by a select few giants wielding enormous power. More and more farmers are forced to adopt new technologies and strategies with consequences potentially harmful to the environment, our health, and the quality of our lives. The role played by trade institutions like the World Trade Organization, serves only to make matters worse.

    Through it all, the paradox of capitalist agriculture persists: ever-greater numbers remain hungry and malnourished despite an increase in world food supplies and the perpetuation of food overproduction.

     

    Editions:

    • Japanese edition, (Tokyo, Otsuki Shoten, 2004).

     

  • Capitalism in the Information Age

    Capitalism in the Information Age

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    Capitalism in the Information Age,” (co-edited with Robert McChesney and Ellen Meiksins Wood (Foster listed third) (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), 254 pp.
     Expanded version of July-August 1996 issue of Monthly Review. (Contains one essay co-authored by Foster.)

    Not a day goes by that we don’t see a news clip, hear a radio report, or read an article heralding the miraculous new technologies of the information age. The communication revolution associated with these technologies is often heralded as the key to a new age of “globalization.” How is all of this reshaping the labor force, transforming communications, changing the potential for democracy, and altering the course of history itself? Capitalism and the Information Age presents a rigorous examination of some of the most crucial problems and possibilities of these novel technologies. Taken together, the essays reveal how the new information technologies have been grafted onto a global capitalist system characterized by vast and growing inequality, economic stagnation, market saturation, financial instability, urban crisis, social polarization, graded access to information, and economic degradation.

    Editions:

    • Indian edition, (Kharagpur, India: Cornerstone Publications, 1998).
    Translations:
    • Turkish translation, (Ankara: EPOS, 2003).
    • Vietnamese translation, Hanoi, May 2001.

  • In Defense of History

    In Defense of History

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    In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda,” co-edited with Ellen Meiksins Wood (Foster listed second) (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), 204 pp. Expanded version of July-August 1995 special issue of Monthly Review. (Contains two essays, including an afterword, authored by Foster.)

    Are we now in an age of “postmodernity”? Even as some on the right have proclaimed the “end of history” or the final triumph of capitalism, we are told by some left intellectuals that the “modern” epoch has ended, that the “Enlightenment project” is dead, that all the old verities and ideologies have lost their relevance, that the old principles of rationality no longer apply, and so on. Yet what is striking about the current diagnosis of postmodernity is that it has so much in common with older pronouncements of death, both radical and reactionary versions. What has ended, apparently, is not so much another, different epoch but the same one all over again.

    In response, the best of today’s new intellectuals on the left are returning to historical materialism, to class analysis. This collection reflects that move, pinning postmodernism in its place and time. It exposes the erroneous bases of “pomo” premises, by identifying the real problems to which the current intellectual fashions offer false or no solutions. In doing so, the contributors challenge the limits imposed on action and resistance by those who see liberating “new times” in the contradictions of contemporary capitalism. What is being celebrated in the postmodern agenda, argues Ellen Meiksins Wood, is the prosperity of the consumerist 1960s reflected in a distorting mirror. The instability and economic polarization of the 1990s demand a solid critique of the conditions of capitalism, not endless reexaminations of their “meanings” this is the standard and goal of In Defense of History.

    Editions:

    • Indian edition, (Delhi: Aakar Books, 2006).
    Translations:
    • Chinese translation by Hao Mingwei. (Beijing: Social Science Academic Press, 2009).
    • Portuguese translation published in Rio de Janeiro in 1999.
    • The afterword to this book by Foster, entitled “In Defense of History,” was translated into Farsi and published in the Iranian journal Negah, September 2000.

     

  • The Faltering Economy

    The Faltering Economy

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    The Economy: The Problem of Accumulation Under Monopoly Capitalism,” (co-edited with Henryk Szlajfer (Foster listed first) (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), 357 pp. (Contains three essays authored and one co-authored by Foster.)

    The essays in this volume, by veteran economists as well as younger scholars, are part of a radical attempt to grapple with the problems of advanced capitalist development without discarding the real theoretical breakthroughs made by Keynes. The contributors argue that Keynes was correct in pointing to the economic contradictions stemming from unemployment, incoming inequality, and speculative finance, but failed to consider the class composition of social output, the macroeconomic effects of the modern firm, and the atrophy of investment under conditions of capitalist maturity. They thus seek to uncover the sources of stagnation under monopoly capitalism by building on the work of three of the great economists of modern times: Marx, Keynes, and Kalecki.