A Critique of Current Intellectual Fashions
Samir Amin, one of the most influential economists today, has produced another groundbreaking work. Spectres of Capitalism cuts through the current intellectual fashions that assume a global capitalist triumph, taking the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Marx and Engels’s classic tract, the Communist Manifesto, to focus upon the aspirations of the destitute millions of the post-Cold War era.… | more |
Employment and Unemployment in the United States
Millions unemployed… fewer people working harder for less pay and shrinking benefits… the assets of the wealthiest one percent of the population growing as the population below the poverty line swells… the next generation facing an even more bitter future… Why? Most working people cannot answer this question. In this user-friendly book, Michael Yates explains how employment and unemployment are inextricably connected in an economic system where employers are driven by the search for profits. … | more |
How the Indian Nations Lost Their Continent
This sequel to the author’s best-selling Columbus: His Enterprise provides, in ten short chapters, a brilliant account of the ongoing war waged by Europeans against the native peoples of the Americas in the five centuries after Columbus arrived. Ranging from the Spanish conquest to the colonization of North America, from the seizure of land from the native inhabitants to present-day military interventions, Koning’s provocative and readable history provides students with a different perspective on U.S. history and a framework for understanding U.S. policy toward indigenous and foreign peoples. … | more |
New Studies in the Politics and Culture of U.S. Communism
This pathbreaking collection of essays recasts the prevailing conceptions of the historical roots and role of the U.S. Communist Party and its social setting. The contributors focus on the movement that formed around the party and the popular culture it expressed, particularly in the period from 1930 to 1960. They look at the impact of the part and its followers in the areas of education, literature, and the arts, in the African-American community, and on the women’s and labor movements. … | more |
Economic History As It Happened (Vol IV): Stagnation and the Financial Explosion
This is the fourth in the magisterial series of essays by the former editors of Monthly Review on the state of the U.S. economy and its relation to the global system. Like its predecessors, this volume focuses on the development of U.S. capitalism as it takes place, and covers the 1980s. The authors stress the profound contradictions of the underlying processes of capital accumulation and identify, before any other economic commentators, the immense implications of the use of the explosion of debt to attempt to solve the problems presented by the underlying stagnation in the real economy.… | more |
Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars
Life and Culture on the Lower East Side, 1890–1925
At the turn of the century, millions of European women set sail with their families for the United States. Behind them stood a world of peasant agriculture and small town life. Ahead lay the concrete metropolis, swept by the winds of industrial development. Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars tells the story of the Jewish and Italian women who came to inhabit New York’s Lower East Side during this period of massive migration. By looking at two generations — mothers born in the Old World, and daughters born in the new — and making extensive use of oral histories, Elizabeth Ewen presents the compelling tale of a metamorphosis in life and in perception. … | more |
A Contribution to the History of the Puerto Rican Community in New York
When Bernardo Vega arrived in New York from Puerto Rico in 1916, he was at the forefront of a migrant stream that was soon to become a flood. His memoirs—perceptive, lively, and politically aware—provide us with a unique and often humorous firsthand account of the life of an immigrant, as well as of the concerns and activities of the Puerto Rican community in New York in the period between the wars.… | more |
New York City and the Urban Fiscal Crisis
Classic study of the fiscal crisis that gripped New York City — and much of urban America — in the 1970s.… | more |
Economic History As It Happened (Vol III): The Deepening Crisis of U.S. Capitalism
This is the third book of essays on the United States and the world economy produced by the fruitful collaboration of Monthly Review editors Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff. In these essays, written between 1977 and 1981, the authors assess the results of efforts taken to stabilize the economy after the epochal changes of the early 1970s, the end of capitalism’s “golden age,” by attempts to counteract the effects of inflation, debt dependence, speculation, and financial instability.… | more |
Economic History As It Happened (Vol II): The End of Prosperity
This is the second in the series of four collections of essays in which Paul M. Sweezy and Harry Magdoff, the editors of Monthly Review, set out as it took place the development of U.S. and global capitalism from the late 1960s to the “financial explosion” age of the early 1990s and after.… | more |