Ebook: Paul Sweezy and American Marxism

Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Department of Political Science, York University, April 2004. — 14 p.
North American radicalism had a lot to account for through the 20th century. The United States (and Canada) moved to the centre of world capitalism, in the process producing a society of unprecedented wealth and consumption that has remained unfathomable for the majority of the world’s population. The U.S. emerged in the first half of the1900s as the greatest financial, military and imperialist power the world had yet seen. In the second half of the century, the U.S.’s ‘informal empire’ continued to expand, through American dominance of the international economic institutions and its military bases and alliances spanning the globe, allowing it to exert control over the entire world market. The power of U.S. imperialism became an immediate, necessary calculation for all Left movements taking government, whether via revolutions or parliaments. Yet, despite the spectacular accumulation of wealth and power, American capitalism consistently produced great swaths of structural poverty and unemployment for American workers, deep racial divisions, ecological devastation at every turn in the ceaseless pursuit of profit, and peripherilization of societies outside its territorial boundaries in defence of U.S. foreign investment and interests.Contents:.
American Radical.
Contributions.
Capitalist Development and Stagnation.
Monopoly Capital.
Financial Explosion.
Imperialism and Dependency.
American Socialism.
Political Impasse.
Endnotes.