Bob McChesney, that prescient seer on the subject of media consolidation and much more, died last month. In addition to acting as coeditor of Monthly Review from 2000-2024, he was one of Monthly Review’s greatest, longest, friends, writing many of Monthly Review Press’ book prefaces, co-editing and co-writing several books with MR editor John Bellamy Foster, and authoring numerous articles for Monthly Review Magazine long after his tenure as coeditor. See below an array of his most well-known Monthly Review titles below:
In 1998, Bob published, together with Monthly Review coeditors Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster, Capitalism and the Information Age: The Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution. Choice wrote at the time:
Anyone concerned about the direction the information revolution is taking should read this book. The subjects covered are far-ranging… [The] essays are clearly written, making the book accessible to a broad range of readers. In short, highest recommendation…
In endorsement of The Political Economy of Media: Enduring Issues, Emerging Dilemmas (2008), the great social historian Howard Zinn, wrote:
Robert McChesney follows in the great tradition of Upton Sinclair, George Seldes, I.F. Stone, and Ben Bagdikian in exposing the ruthless hold of corporate power on the nations media.
At the time, PBS anchor Bill Moyers commented about The Problem of the Media (2004):
If Thomas Paine were around, he would have written this book.
Around the same time he coedited, with John Bellamy Foster, the book Pox Americana: Exposing the American Empire (2004). The volume brought together the work of leading Marxist analysts of imperialism to examine the nature and prospects of the U.S. imperial project currently being given shape by war and occupation in the Middle East. Immanuel Wallerstein, Peter Gowan, and others discussed the dynamics at work behind the “War on Terrorism,” while essays by Barbara Epstein, Amiya Kumar Bagchi and others examined the prospects for the resistance to imperialism in the United States and globally. Their analyses located recent developments within a longer historical arc, and set out the central questions for research and debate: Is U.S. unilateralism and militarism a sign of the increasing strength of the world’s only remaining superpower? Or a desperate response to the erosion of the strategy it developed for ensuring its leadership over the advanced capitalist world during the Cold War?
About a decade later, Noam Chomsky reviewed his book, The Endless Crisis (2012):
The authors carefully develop a powerful case that the normal state of ‘really existing capitalist economies,’ increasingly dominated by multinational megacorporations along with associated financialization, is not growth with occasional recession, but rather stagnation with occasional escapes that have diminishing prospects. Hence an ‘endless crisis,’ endless in both time and space, including China. And a crisis that is heading towards disaster unless there is a radical change of course. This valuable inquiry should be carefully studied and pondered, and should be taken as an incentive to action.
A couple years later, his next book, Blowing the Roof Off the Twenty-First Century: Media, Politics, and the Struggle for Post-Capitalist Democracy (2014), was reviewed by the likes of Bernie Sanders, Noam Chomsky, and Cornell West, as well as Bill Fletcher, Henry Giroux and Janine Jackson, as well as a former FCC Commissioner, the former Washington Bureau Chief for The New York Times, and Publishers Weekly.
McChesney wrote prolifically in MR Magazine, often in the most prophetic terms. In 2012, in an article entitled “This Isn’t What Democracy Looks Like“, he quoted Aristotle:
“Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers,” and concluded:
Capitalist democracy, which has always been more about capitalism than democracy, has been a formidable tool for ensuring stability in a society dominated by those with substantial property. But the historical high-water mark of the union of property, legitimacy, and stability in the name of “democracy” is now in the past. The carefully cultivated belief that we live in a society governed by the demos (the popular classes) is patently absurd in the face of the reality of Dollarocracy.
At the same time he observed, alongside Foster: “for those on the left, addressing the role of communication in achieving social change and then maintaining popular rule in the face of reactionary backlash is now a primary concern.” That was 2013–and clearly together they saw what was coming a decade or less hence. We will miss him sorely as we move what appear to be some very the dark times ahead.