Archive | Monthly Review Essays

Something unusual has just happened. The current Economic Report of the President (March 2019)has devoted one full chapter to attacking socialism, under the title “Markets versus Socialism.”

Historically, capitalism develops institutions and ideologies that justify surplus extraction and capital accumulation. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the financialization of capitalism initiated a new era of accumulation which is known in academic contexts as finance-capital-driven neoliberalism.

Monopoly capitalism emerged from “laissez-faire” capitalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, allowing giant corporations to dominate the accumulation process.

This previously unpublished essay is taken from volume 1 of Mészáros’s Beyond Leviathan: Critique of the State, which remained incomplete at the time of his death in October 2017. —The Editors