On October 20, 2012, less than two weeks after being reelected to his fourth term as Venezuelan president and only months before his death, Hugo Chávez delivered his crucial El Golpe de Timón (“Strike at the Helm”) speech to the first meeting of his ministers in the new revolutionary cycle. Chávez surprised even some of […]
Crossing the River of Fire
Naomi Klein’s new book, This Changes Everything [argues that the source of the looming crisis from climate change] is not the planet, which operates according to natural laws, but rather the economic and social system in which we live, which treats natural limits as mere barriers to surmount. It is now doing so on a planetary scale, […]
“Foreword” to István Mészáros, The Necessity of Social Control
“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.
Mathusianism
“Mathusianism” in Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch Des Marximus, 7/II ((Berlin: Argument-Verlag, forthcoming 2015). 3500 words.
“Foreword” to Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature
“Foreword” to Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature (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.
Piketty and the Crisis of Neoclassical Economics
Not since the Great Depression of the 1930s has it been so apparent that the core capitalist economies are experiencing secular stagnation, characterized by slow growth, rising unemployment and underemployment, and idle productive capacity. Consequently, mainstream economics is finally beginning to recognize the economic stagnation tendency that has long been a focus in these pages, […]
Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class
The fortieth anniversary of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital is the occasion here for a reassessment of his work as a whole. Braverman’s analysis of the degradation of work is shown to have been only a part of a much larger argument he was developing on the structure of the U.S. working class. Building on his […]
“Foreword” to Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization
“Foreword” to Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization (forthcoming: Zed Press, second edition, 2014).
Surveillance Capitalism
The United States came out of the Second World War as the hegemonic power in the world economy. The war had lifted the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression by providing the needed effective demand in the form of endless orders for armaments and troops. Real output rose by 65 percent between 1940 and […]
Stagnation and Financialization
More than six years after the beginning of the Great Recession in the United States, and nearly five years since it was officially declared over in this country, the core economies of the capitalist world system remain crisis-ridden. The jobs lost in the downturn in the United States have not yet been fully recovered and […]