Articles

The Emperor Has No Clothes But Still He Rules

by Michael D. Yates

June 1, 2011

Moshe Adler, Economics for the Rest of Us: Debunking the Science that Makes Life Dismal (New York: The New Press, 2009), 224 pages, $24.95, hardcover; David Orrell, Economyths: Ten Ways That Economics Get It Wrong (Mississauga, Ontario: John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd., 2010), 288 pages, $27.95, hardcover; Yanis Varoufakis, Joseph Halevi, and Nicholas J. Theocaratis, Modern Political Economics: Making Sense of the Post-2008 World (New York: Routledge, 2011, forthcoming), 536 pages, $165.00, hardcover, $65.00, paperback.
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Science is often thought to proceed from a theory to experiments that test its predictions. If new data are discovered that cannot be explained by the theory, eventually a new theory arises to replace it. If the new theory can explain everything the old one did plus the new phenomena, sooner or later every scientist will adhere to the new paradigm.… Neoclassical economics is taught in every college classroom in the United States and in almost every country in the world. Graduate students learn no other approach to economics. They are taught that neoclassical economics is a science, on a par with physics and the other natural sciences. There is even a joke that when good neoclassical economists die, they are reincarnated as physicists, but bad ones come back as sociologists.

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Notes from the Editors, May 2011

by The Editors

May 1, 2011

On March 15, 2011, we received the following letter from Robert W. McChesney, former coeditor of MR and Gutgsell Endowed Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana. Bob lives in Madison, Wisconsin, which in February and March, was the site of an intense class conflict over public-sector workers' rights to organize. We are reprinting his letter in full here, as we think it will be of interest to all MR readers.

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On the Laws of Capitalism

by John Bellamy Fosterand Paul M. Sweezy

May 1, 2011

In February 2011, while I was drafting what was to become "Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism," written with Robert W. McChesney and R. Jamil Jonna (Monthly Review, April 2011), I decided to take a look at Paul Sweezy's copy of the original 1942 edition of Joseph Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, which I had in my possession. In doing so, I came across a folded, two-page document, "The Laws of Capitalism," tucked into the pages. It was written in ink in Sweezy's very compact handwriting. In the upper-right-hand corner, Sweezy had jotted (clearly much later) in pencil: "(A debate with J.A.S. before the Harvard Graduate Students' Economics Club, Littauer Center, probably 1946 or 1947.)" The document consisted of a detailed outline, in full sentences, of a contribution to a debate. I immediately realized that this was Sweezy's opening talk in the now legendary Sweezy-Schumpeter debate. Until that moment, I, along with everybody else, assumed that no detailed records of the actual talks had survived.

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The Dialectic of Structure and History: An Introduction

by István Mészáros

May 1, 2011

The investigation of the dialectical relationship between structure and history is essential for a proper understanding of the nature and the defining characteristics of any social formation in which sustainable solutions are being sought to the encountered problems. This is particularly important in the case of capital's social formation, with its inexorable tendency toward an all-embracing, structurally embedded determination of all aspects of societal reproduction and the—feasible for the first time ever—global domination implicit in that form of development. It is therefore by no means accidental that, in the interest of the required structural change, Marx had to focus critical attention on the concept of social structure, in the historical period of crises and revolutionary explosions of the 1840s when he articulated his own—radically new—conception of history.

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Labor’s Love Lost: War Among the Unions

by Jon Flanders

May 1, 2011

Steve Early, Labor's Civil Wars (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011), 440 pages, $17.00, paperback.
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Leadership driven union density or membership driven mobilization? Labor activist and writer Steve Early chronicles the divisions that opened up in a labor movement desperate to curb decline during the first decade of the 21st century. Divisions that led to a split in the AFL-CIO and in the largest US union, SEIU. Early's detailed knowledge of the issues and players makes for a fascinating trip through labor politics, largely ignored in the mainstream media.

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Labor Revolts in the 1970s

by Elly Leary

May 1, 2011

Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Winslow, editors, Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and the Revolt from Below During the Long Seventies (New York: Verso, 2010), 472 pages, $29.95, paperback.
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Rebel Rank and File is a collection of articles that surveys the building, heydey, and decline of rank and file workers' movement in the fields, mines, auto plants, schools, trucking and phone companies in the late 1960s through the 1970s. What makes this book so valuable is that the first half is devoted to detailing the context of these struggles—the political economy in which they were set. It begs the reader to look deeper into the basis of the book—bureaucratized unions, with leaders hell bent on maintaining power no matter the cost, who serve as buck privates in the Democratic Party army, and who need a compliant base every bit as much as the employers. The authors develop a number of interconnected themes: the single minded union strategy based on endless capitalist growth, parochialism, the private welfare state, pragmatism, anti-communism, influence of anti-war, black power and women's movements—all of which then help the reader to see similarities of the different rank and file experiences, no matter the work or union.

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The Jack O’Dell Story

by Paul Buhle

May 1, 2011

Nikhil Pal Singh, editor, Climbin' Jacob's Ladder: The Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O'Dell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 298 pages, $34.95, hardcover.
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The story Jack O'Dell is one of the least understood but most important stories in the last half-century of the American Left; important because O'Dell, in his organizing and his writing for Freedomways magazine, contributed in crucial ways to the struggle against racism. But also little understood because the taboo on American Communism and Communists has prevented individual stories from the surrounding milieux to be appreciated and understood. This review-essay brings O'Dell back to light.

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Woody Guthrie: Redder than Remembered

by Scott Borchert

May 1, 2011

Will Kaufman, Woody Guthrie, American Radical (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2011) 264 pages, $29.95, hardcover.
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Will Kaufman's new book, Woody Guthrie, American Radical, describes how Guthrie's life-long radicalism shaped his music and evolved over time—from the Great Depression to the Second World War, from the Popular Front to the McCarthyite witch hunts, and into the folk music revival of the 1960s. Kaufman argues that Guthrie's work must be understood in the context of its time, but also in light of Guthrie's commitment to socialist politics and his unrelenting opposition to capitalism and fascism.

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Notes from the Editors, April 2011

Notes from the Editors, April 2011

by The Editors

April 1, 2011

This year marks the forty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy's classic work, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic Order (Monthly Review Press, 1966). Three years before the publication of their book, in the July 1963 issue of Monthly Review, Baran and Sweezy published two chapters of Monopoly Capital in MR, together with an introduction. (The publication of the actual book was delayed by Baran's death in 1964.) Today MR editor John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney are currently completing a book, entitled Monopoly-Finance Capital: Politics in an Era of Economic Stagnation and Social Decline, to be published by Monthly Review Press early next year. The purpose of this new work is to bring the analysis of Monopoly Capital up to date, addressing the changes that have occurred in the capitalist system in the last half-century. We have therefore decided to follow the example of Baran and Sweezy and publish a number of the core chapters of this book, in early form in the magazine, in advance of the book itself. The March 2011 Review of the Month, "The Internet's Unholy Marriage to Capitalism," was one such chapter. This issue's Review of the Month, "Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism"…is another.

Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism

by John Bellamy Foster, R. Jamil Jonnaand Robert W. McChesney

April 1, 2011

A striking paradox animates political economy in our times. On the one hand, mainstream economics and much of left economics discuss our era as one of intense and increased competition among businesses, now on a global scale. It is a matter so self-evident as no longer to require empirical verification or scholarly examination. On the other hand, wherever one looks, it seems that nearly every industry is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Formerly competitive sectors like retail are now the province of enormous monopolistic chains, massive economic fortunes are being assembled into the hands of a few mega-billionaires sitting atop vast empires, and the new firms and industries spawned by the digital revolution have quickly gravitated to monopoly status. In short, monopoly power is ascendant as never before.

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