Marcel van der Linden is a senior researcher at the International Institute of Social History. He is the author of Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates Since 1917 (2007) and Workers of the World: Essays toward a Global Labor History (2008).
The war industry has become a permanent fixture of US capitalism, channeling massive public subsidies to private corporations. The first writer to analyze this “Permanent War Economy” was Edward Sard, a brilliant Marxist economist working in the 1940s.
Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel popularized the term “late capitalism” to describe the way the system had changed in the postwar decades. Mandel’s work was a landmark in the study of capitalism, and we can still learn a lot from his analysis today.
There is no “end of the working class.”