Richard B. Du Boff

Mergers, Concentration, and the Erosion of Democracy

A new surge of corporate concentration is in process in the United States and abroad, driven in large measure by a restructuring of global markets through mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Announced worldwide merger deals reached

The Telegraph in Nineteenth-Century America: Technology and Monopoly

3.4 trillion in 1999, an amount equivalent to 34 percent of the value of all industrial capital (buildings, plants, machinery and equipment) in the United States in 1999. Of this total, nearly a third were cross-border transactions that involved companies based in different countries, up from an average of one-fourth of all mergers during most of the 1990s.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

A History of the Great Bust—Still With Us

In the United States, the technological optimism that accompanied the birth and diffusion of the magnetic telegraph between 1844 and 1880 had few predecessors-if any. Commercial telegraphy was barely a year old in 1847 when the telegraph was seen as “facilitating Human Intercourse and producing Harmony among Men and Nations\….[I]t may be regarded as an important element in Moral Progress.” “The telegraph system is invaluable,” a business journalist declared twenty years later, “and when the missing links shall have been completed of the great chain that will bring all civilized nations into instantaneous communication with each other, it will also be found to be the most potent of all the means of civilization, and the most effective in breaking down the barriers of evil prejudice and custom that interfere with the universal exchange of commodities.”

Economics Paul A. Baran. The Longer View: Essays Toward a Critique of Political Economy. Edited by John O'Neill. Pp. xxviii, 444. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970.

Michael Perelman, The Confiscation of American Prosperity. From Right-Wing Extremism and Economic Ideology to the Next Great Depression (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 239 pages,

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30.00 hardcover.Yves Smith, Econned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 362 pages,

The Introduction of Electric Power in American Manufacturing

30 hardcover.Some forty years ago, the American business empire viewed itself as under siege as a result of government interventions threatening its freedom of action, demands for annual wage increases in the face of declining corporate profitability, import penetration of its home markets, as well as by loss of global hegemony symbolized by defeat in Vietnam. The empire struck back. A conglomerate of right-wing forces proceeded to declare war on the social reforms and institutions that had taken shape since the 1930s under the wing of an expanding federal governmentThis article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Promotional-Financial Dynamic of Merger Movements: A Historical Perspective

university either. For many years until his death in 1964, Paul Baran was the only avowedly Marxist social scientist employed by a major university; his trials and tribulations have been described in Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman’s Paul Baran: A Collective Portrait. Now, at long last, his most significant &dquo;nonbook&dquo; essays have been collected and edited by John O’Neill, whose own introduction is itself an important part of this book. O’Neill weaves together the many strands of Baran’s writings, which covered economics-his home discipline-sociology, politics, and psychology; and in the process illustrates how Marxian analysis at its best becomes