Is the Neo-Marxian monopoly capital framework still valid?: Reviewing Foster and McChesney’s The Endless Crisis

Abstract

This review essay examines John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney’s recent book, The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stag- nation and Upheaval from the U.S.A. to China (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012). The eruption of the global financial crisis and the ongoing ‘Great Recession’ worldwide requires a coherent Marxian theory that seeks to explain complex interactions between the real and financial sides of an economy in their historical and social contexts. Foster and McChesney suggest, in this connection, that Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran’s neo-Marxian analyses of American monopoly capitalism, initially proposed in the late 1940-1960s, are still valid for analyzing contemporary global economic phenomena. The two authors reappraise this neo-Marxian theme of monopoly capital and its prediction of the secular stagnation tendency in most advanced capitalist economies. They also claim that the increasing degree of financial bubble-bust cycles and various kinds of speculative activities that they call financialization is one of the most fundamental features of the monopoly stage of capitalism. After carefully reviewing their core arguments, however, the reviewer suggests that their theories of the relationship between monopoly capital and the secular stagnation tendency, the relationship between monopoly capital and the financialization, and the relationship between monopoly capital and changing nature of market competition still need further theoretical clarification and more empirical support.