In this fact-filled, sweeping treatment, George Winslow takes on every aspect of the topic, from the streets to the suites. Unlike conventional accounts, Capital Crimes locates the problem within the context of the global economy from the Burmese heroin trade to homicide in the United States, from the capital flight that has generated crime in inner cities to corporate money-laundering schemes revealing how the occurrence, extent, and type of crime committed, as well as society’s response to the problem, are largely determined by economic forces shaped by elite interests. | more…
First published in London in 1848, the Communist Manifesto is one of the most important books of all time: a document which helped to define the emerging socialist movement, altered the course of world history, and is universally acknowledged to be a cornerstone of modern social thought. | more…
“Globalization” has come to define our age. Stock market fluctuations, the fortunes of political administrations, and conditions for working people—all rise and fall with the tide of global capital flow. | more…
Big changes in the global economy and world politics have put new questions on the table for labor movements around the world. Can workers regain the initiative against the tidal wave of corporate downsizing and government cutbacks? Can unions revive their ranks and reignite the public imagination? Is labor rising from the ashes? | more…
Not a day goes by that we don’t see a news clip, hear a radio report, or read an article heralding the miraculous new technologies of the information age. The communication revolution associated with these technologies is often heralded as the key to a new age of “globalization.” How is all of this reshaping the labor force, transforming communications, changing the potential for democracy, and altering the course of history itself? Capitalism and the Information Age presents a rigorous examination of some of the most crucial problems and possibilities of these novel technologies. | more…
Science fascinates us, with popularizations of it regularly heading the bestseller lists, and more people feeling comfortable with the technological applications of science which surround us. Why is it then that in the late twentieth century, “back to nature” has replaced “progress through science” in the popular imagination? | more…
Are we now in an age of “postmodernity”? Even as some on the right have proclaimed the “end of history” or the final triumph of capitalism, we are told by some left intellectuals that the “modern” epoch has ended, that the “Enlightenment project” is dead, that all the old verities and ideologies have lost their relevance, that the old principles of rationality no longer apply, and so on. Yet what is striking about the current diagnosis of postmodernity is that it has so much in common with older pronouncements of death, both radical and reactionary versions. What has ended, apparently, is not so much another, different epoch but the same one all over again. | more…
Ernst Fischer has crafted a brief, clear, and faithful exposition of Marx's main premises, with particular emphasis on historical context. This new edition of the English translation of Was Marx wirklich sagte (1968) includes new contributions by John Bellamy Foster that sharpen Fischer's focus for today's readers. Also included are a biographical chronology, extracts from major works of Marx, and “Marx's Method,” a valuable essay by the political economist Paul Sweezy. | more…
The poor and forgotten nations of the world can blame their downward spiral on an emerging world order that Samir Amin in this brilliant essay calls the “empire of chaos.” Comprised of the United States, Japan, and Germany, and backed by a weakened USSR and the comprador classes of the third world, this is an empire that will stop at nothing in its campaign to protect and expand its capitalist markets. | more…
For all those interested in the relationship between the memories that permeate the built forms of the past and the pressures exerted by modern life, Harris Stone offers a richly illustrated examination of the seemingly irreconcilable opposition between action (hands-on) and scholarship (hands-off) — between those who want to preserve the past as a museum of dead relics and those who want to treat it as a part of contemporary life. | more…
West, professor of religion and director of the Afro-American studies program at Princeton University, shows that not only was ethics an integral part of the development of Marx’s own thinking throughout his career, but that this crucial concern has been obscured by such leading and influential interpreters as Engels, Kautsky, Lukács, and others who diverted Marx’s theory into narrow forms of positivism, economism, and Hegelianism. | more…
