Forewords
“Foreword” to Cheng Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectics (New York: International Publishers, 2021), vii-xiii.
For Western Marxists, what is likely to be most astonishing is the many-sided approach to Marxism displayed throughout this work. This reflects a strong emphasis on cultivating an open Marxism, drawing on different views and debates, and various movement vernaculars, in the continuing world struggle for socialism.
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.
“Foreword,” to Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams,” Creating an Ecological Society: Toward a Revolutionary Transofmration
(forthcoming, Monthly Review Press, 2017), 10 pp.
“Foreword,” to Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene (New York: Monthly Reviwe Press, 2016), 9-17.
The Anthropocene, viewed as a new geological epoch displacing the Holocene epoch of the last 10,000 to 12,000 years, represents what has been called an “anthropogenic rift” in the history of the planet.2 Formally introduced into the contemporary scientific and environmental discussion by climatologist Paul Crutzen in 2000, it stands for the notion that human beings have become the primary emergent geological force affecting the future of the Earth system. Although often traced to the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, the Anthropocene is probably best seen as arising in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Recent scientific evidence suggests that the period from around 1950 on exhibits a major spike, marking a Great Acceleration in human impacts on the environment, with the most dramatic stratigraphic trace of the anthropogenic rift to be found in fallout radionuclides from nuclear weapons testing.
“Foreword,” to Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene (New York: Monthly Reviwe Press, 2016), 9-17.
The Anthropocene, viewed as a new geological epoch displacing the Holocene epoch of the last 10,000 to 12,000 years, represents what has been called an “anthropogenic rift” in the history of the planet. Formally introduced into the contemporary scientific and environmental discussion by climatologist Paul Crutzen in 2000, it stands for the notion that human beings have become the primary emergent geological force affecting the future of the Earth System. Although often traced to the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, the Anthropocene is probably best seen as arising in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
“Foreword” to István Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control (New York: Monthly Review Press, forthcoming December 2014), 15 pp.
Reprinted as “Mészáros and the Critique of the Capital System,” Monthly Review 66, no. 7: 1-15.
István Mészáros is one of the greatest philosophers that the historical materialist tradition has yet produced. His work stands practically alone today in the depth of its analysis of Marx’s theory of alienation, the structural crisis of capital, the demise of Soviet-style post-revolutionary societies, and the necessary conditions of the transition to socialism. His dialectical inquiry into social structure and forms of consciousness—a systematic critique of the prevailing forms of thought—is unequaled in our time. No less a historical figure than Hugo Chávez referred to him as the “pathfinder” of twenty-first century socialism.… The role of this foreword is to help to put his system of thought as a whole, and this book in particular, in their historical contexts, while illuminating some of the distinctive concepts governing his analysis.
“Foreword” to Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014), pp. 7-13.
Reprinted as “Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature Fifteen Years After,” Monthly Review, vol. 66, no. 7 (December 2014), pp. 56-62.
Every book more than a few years old needs to be seen within the historical context in which it was written—works of social science most of all. Re-reading Paul Burkett’s Marx and Nature today, nearly a decade and a half after its first publication, reminds me of how different in some respects the historical context was then, at the end of the twentieth century, from what we face today, in the second decade of the twenty-first century.… A decade and a half ago the contribution of Marx and Marxism to the understanding of ecology was seen in almost entirely negative terms, even by many self-styled ecosocialists. Today Marx’s understanding of the ecological problem is being studied in universities worldwide and is inspiring ecological actions around the globe.… These changes are of course connected. As the environmental problems engendered by capitalist society have worsened, the necessary movements of ecological defense have radicalized and spread across the face of the planet.