This article will be released in full online August 14, 2023. As the impending planetary crisis looms ever-closer, Martin Hart-Landsberg proposes a new focus on…
Martin Hart-Landsberg revisits the history of the industrial re-organization of the U.S. economy during the Second World War. What can we learn from our past…
The Planning and Politics of Transformation newpol.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from newpol.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
John Bellamy Foster is the editor of
Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. R. Jamil Jonna is associate editor for communications and production at
Monthly Review. Brett Clark is associate editor of
Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Utah.
The authors thank John Mage, Craig Medlen, and Fred Magdoff for their assistance.
The U.S. economy and society at the start of 2021 is more polarized than it has been at any point since the Civil War. The wealthy are awash in a flood of riches, marked by a booming stock market, while the underlying population exists in a state of relative, and in some cases even absolute, misery and decline. The result is two national economies as perceived, respectively, by the top and the bottom of society: one of prosperity, the other of precariousness. At the level of production, economic stagnation is diminishing the life expectations of the vast majority. At the same time, financializatio
December 11, 2020
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Reports from the Economic Front This is the first in a series of posts that aim to describe and evaluate the World War II mobilization experience in the United States in order to illuminate some of the economic and political challenges we can expect to face as we work for a Green New Deal.
This post highlights the successful government directed wartime reorientation of the U.S. economy from civilian to military production, an achievement that both demonstrates the feasibility of a rapid Green New Deal transformation of the U.S. economy and points to the kinds of organizational capacities we will need to develop. The post also highlights some of the strategies employed by big business to successfully stamp the wartime transformation as a victory for “market freedom,” an outcome that strengthened capital’s ability to dominate the postwar U.S. political economy and suggests the kind