Harry Magdoff

In the decades after 1945, as colonial possessions became independent states, it was widely-believed that imperialism as a historical phenomenon was coming to an end. The six essays collected in this volume demonstrate that a new form of imperialism was, in fact, taking shape-an imperialism defined not by colonial rule but by the global capitalist market. From the outset, the dominant power in this imperialism without colonies was the United States. Magdoff's essays explain how this imperialism works, why it generates ever greater inequality, repression, and militarism, and the essential role it plays in the development of U. S. capitalism. His concluding essay presciently points out the limits of any attempted reform of the global economy which does not directly challenge the framework of capitalism. Written in the 1960s and 70s, Magdoff's essays constituted a major contribution to Marxist theory and provided a model of rigorous argument in which theory is constantly checked against the economic reality. They provide an indispensable guide to the basic forces at work in the global politics of the twenty-first century.

Magdoff's analysis is the foundation upon which the work of an entire tradition of Monthly Review authors rests.

This is the fifth in the important series of essays by the former editors of Monthly Review analyzing the ongoing crisis of global capitalism. Following the multiple interconnected stock market crashes of October 1987, the economies of the capitalist world entered a new and dangerous phase of the crisis that began in the 1970s with the end of the post-WWII boom. Sweezy and Magdoff argue that far from being a temporary setback, the events of late 1987 are rooted in the nature of the capital accumulation process itself and therefore unlikely to be reversed. Their argument is especially prescient when viewed in light of the financial meltdown of 2008.

This is the fourth in a continuing series of collected essays by the former editors of "Monthly Review" on the state of the U. S. economy and its relation to the global system. Like its predecessors, this volume focuses on the most recent phase of the development of U. S. capitalism, stressing the profound contradictions of the underlying processes of capital accumulation and pointing the way to the fundamental reforms that are the essential precondition for a real economic revival.

This volume contains a series of essays aimed at illuminating the theory, history, and roots of imperialism, which extend the analysis developed in Magdoff's The Age of Imperialism.

This is the second in the series of four collections of essays in which Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, the editors of Monthly Review, set out as it took place the development of U. S. and global capitalism from the late 1960s to the "financial explosion" age of the early 1990s and after. This second set of essays constitute in their totality a probing analysis of the condition of the United States economy in the 1970s, immediately after the end of the "golden age" of capitalism. The authors concluded, correctly, that a new period had begun-"one of sluggish capitalist accumulation and unemployment in the advanced capitalist countries on a scale not seen since the 1930s."

This is the first of the series of four collections of essays in which Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, the editors of Monthly Review, chronicled, as it was taking place, the development of U. S. and global capitalism from the end of its "golden age" in the late 1960s to the full onset of the financial explosion of the early 1990s and after. With exceptional clarity, the authors explain basic economic principles and bring them to life with concrete examples drawn from the daily workings of the corporations and the financial markets, and the international monetary system.