NEW! Until We Fall: Long Distance Life on the Left
Offers vivid first hand accounts of encounters with fellow socialists following the fall of the Soviet Union
Most westerners glimpsed the breakup of the Soviet Union at a great distance, through a highly distorted lens which equated the expansion of capitalism with the rise of global democracy. But there were those, like Helena Sheehan, who watched more keenly and saw a world turning upside down. In her new autobiographical history from below, Until We Fall, Sheehan shares what she witnessed first-hand and close-up, as hopes were raised by glasnost and perestroika, only to be swept away in the bitter and brutal counterrevolutions that followed.
In Until We
Degrowth—What’s in a Name? Assessing Degrowth’s Political Implications
“Degrowth” may often be associated with the left, but can also have conservative—even ecofascist—implications. What do proponents and critics mean by “degrowth”? How do these differences play out ideologically? Ying Chen writes that, for radicals, the answer is to place the economic system at the center of the degrowth narrative, thus naming the system that must be replaced with a more just and equitable socialist society. | more…
The Dynamics of Rural Capitalist Accumulation in Post-Land Reform Zimbabwe
Gregory Elich interviews George T. Mudimu, a Zimbabwe-based agrarian specialist, about present-day land struggles in Zimbabwe, two decades after the institution of the Fast Track Land Reform Program. | more…
Essays on The Political Economy of Africa
These essays, by two of the foremost scholars who worked in the Marxist tradition on African economic and social issues, offers an overview of socialism and economic development, and of nationalism and revolution in sub-Saharan Africa; of labor, peasantries, and populism. It includes case studies of Tanzania, Rhodesia, and Mozambique.
Return to the Source: Selected Texts of Amilcar Cabral, New Expanded Edition
A classic collection of essays calling for decolonization through self-liberation
“For us,” said Amilcar Cabral, “freedom is an act of culture.” Guided by the concrete realities of his people, he called for a Return to the Source, a process of decolonization through “re-Africanization.” With a system of thought rooted in an African reading of Marx, Cabral was a deep-thinking revolutionary who applied the principles of decolonization as a dialectic task, and in so doing became one of the world’s most profoundly influential and effective theoreticians of anti–imperialist struggle. He translated abstract theories into agile praxis and in under just ten years steered the liberation of three–quarters
A New Global Geometry? Socialist Register 2024
In its 60th volume!
Scrutinizes possibilities for an equalised global order, in light of recent conflicts between the world’s major powers
The “post-Cold War era is definitively over,” asserted US President Joe Biden as he launched the new National Security Strategy, warning in late 2022 that “a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next.” American leadership, the document declared, would be more necessary than ever to define “the future of the international order,” insisting that the US must marshal its unparalleled economic, military, and diplomatic resources to confront its rivals.
Socialist Register 2024: A New Global Geometry? takes stock of momentous changes
End Ecocidal Capitalism or Exterminate Life on Planet Earth: A South African Contribution to Ecosocialist Strategy
The South African climate justice movement presents a model for popular revolt against the ecofascist project. | more…
Africa Is on the Move
In 1975, Walter Rodney said, Africa is on the move. This line stays with me, digs deep into my sense of historical possibility. What did Rodney mean when he said that line? | more…
The United Fruit Co.
This poem was published in volume 18, number 4, of Monthly Review (September 1966). | more…
The South African Pandemic of Racial Capitalism
South Africa’s COVID-19 pandemic is one of racial capitalism, entangled with histories of imperial state formation, settler colonialism, and a hierarchical, global-neoliberal public policy architecture. | more…
Epidemic Response
The Legacy of Colonialism
The COVID-19 pandemic is at its root a crisis of globalization, racial capitalism, colonialism, the social organization of our public health system. It is a crisis of treatment and care versus demonization and wall building. And it is the latest pandemic in a long line of modern onesÑfrom SARS to swine flu to HIV to EbolaÑa predictable and predicted outcome, not the mysterious unforeseeable lightning strike as it is often portrayed. | more…
Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
Those who control the world’s commanding economic heights, buttressed by the theories of mainstream economists, presume that capitalism is a self-contained and self-generating system. Nothing could be further from the truth. In this pathbreaking book—winner of the Paul A. Baran-Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award—radical political economists Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik argue that the accumulation of capital has always required the taking of land, raw materials, and bodies from noncapitalist modes of production. They begin with a thorough debunking of mainstream economics. Then, looking at the history of capitalism, from the beginnings of colonialism half a millennium ago to today’s neoliberal regimes, they discover that, over the long haul, capitalism, in order to exist, must metastasize itself in the practice of imperialism and the immiseration of countless people. | more…