John Bellamy Foster

Tag: Reprinted

  • The Age of Monopoly-Finance Capital

    The Age of Monopoly-Finance Capital

    “The Age of Monopoly-Finance Capital“, Monthly Review, vol. 61, no. 9 (February 2010), pp.1-13. DOI: 10.14452/MR-061-09-2010-02_1

    Three years ago, in December 2006, I wrote an article for Monthly Review entitled “Monopoly-Finance Capital.” The occasion was the anniversary of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, published four decades earlier in 1966.…The article…[discussed] “the dual reality” of stagnant growth (or stagnation) and financialization, characterizing the advanced economies in this phase of capitalism. I concluded that this pointed to two possibilities: (1) a major financial and economic crisis in the form of “global debt meltdown and debt-deflation,” and (2) a prolongation of the symbiotic stagnation-financialization relationship of monopoly-finance capital. In fact, what we have experienced in the last two years, I would argue, is each of these sequentially: the worst financial-economic crisis since the 1930s, and then the system endeavoring to right itself by returning to financialization as its normal means of countering stagnation. It is thus doubly clear today that we are in a new phase of capitalism. In what follows, I shall attempt to outline the logic of this argument, as it evolved out of the work of Baran, Sweezy, and Harry Magdoff in particular, and how it relates to our present economic and social predicament.

    Reprints:

    • Reprinted in John Barkdull, ed., Public Policy and Global Change (Cogneta, 2012)

    Translations:

     

  • Sweezy, Paul Marlor

    “Sweezy, Paul Marlor,” in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economic Theory and Doctrine (New York: Stockton Press, 1987), vol. 4 (Q-Z), pp. 580-82. DOI: 10.1057/978-1-349-95121-5.

    Harvard-trained economist and co-editor of Monthly Review, Paul Sweezy was among the most influential economists and Marxist intellectuals of the 20th century. His contributions extended over six decades from the early 1930s to the early 1990s. He played a role in the development of imperfect-competition analysis and in debates surrounding the Great Depression. His Theory of Capitalist Development (1942) provided the premier exposition of Marxian economics, after Marx. Monopoly Capital (1966, with Paul Baran) was the most influential economic analysis emanating from the US New Left. With Harry Magdoff he extended this analysis into the 1970s, ’80s and early ’90s.

    Reprints

    • Reprinted in John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman, ed., Marxian Economics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), pp. 350-55. Revised, expanded and updated for second edition of New Palgrave, 2007.