This article is István Mészáros’s introduction to the 1998 Farsi edition of Beyond Capital, the English version of which appeared in the February 1998 edition of Monthly Review.
—Eds.
The Iranian diaspora is an extraordinary community, but one not often noted in the Western press. This community can be compared to the Russian diaspora of the 1890s, or the German of the 1930s. That is to say, an exiled community of an often revolutionary intelligentsia with a potential for affecting the world far beyond the borders of the land they left. A sign of this vigor is the forthcoming in Farsi of Istvan Mészáros’ important book Beyond Capital (published by Monthly Review Press, 1996) translated by the close friend of Monthly Review, Dr. Morteza Mohit. For this edition Istvan Mészáros wrote a special introduction.
—The Editors
We live in an age of unprecedented historical crisis. Its severity can be gauged by the fact that we are not facing a more or less extensive cyclic crisis of capitalism as experienced in the past, but the deepening structural crisis of the capital system itself. As such this crisis affects—for the first time ever in history—the whole of humankind, calling for quite fundamental changes to the way in which the social metabolism is controlled if humanity is to survive.
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