Given the renewed attention to Karl Marx since the financial crisis of 2008, this biography will help us understand how his life and thought evolved…. | more…
Ukraine’s newly elected comedian president Volodymyr Zelensky called the prisoner exchange a “first step” in ending the war in Eastern Ukraine, which has killed an estimated 13,000 civilians… | more…
The first book I wrote was published in East Berlin and talked about my life in the United States right up until the first days of my defection to the GDR in 1952. It was called The Way Across the Border. The funny thing is, some people in the GDR bought it thinking that I was talking about going in the other direction—they thought it would help them jump the Wall from East to West… | more…
From Commune to Capitalism disputes the long-established claim that the decollectivization of Maoist-era peasant communes was better for the economy and an initiative wholly championed by the peasantry… | more…
Much of Harris’s early political history is obscure, but we do know that she was an unknown 29-year-old lawyer in the early 1990s when her career was kick-started through a romantic relationship with master politico Willie Brown… | more…
Sanders specifically advocated for the reinvigoration of an economic bill of rights, which would guarantee a livable wage, free health care, and affordable education. ¶ This latter program is honorable; however, the boldness of Roosevelt and Wallace’s platform rested as much with their foreign as their domestic policies…. | more…
Winner of the 2018 Paul M. Sweezy – Paul A. Baran Memorial Award for original work regarding the political economy of imperialism, Intan Suwandi’s Value Chains examines the exploitation of labor in the Global South. Focusing on the issue of labor within global value chains—vast networks of people, tools, and activities needed to deliver goods and services to the market and controlled by multinationals—Suwandi offers a deft empirical analysis of unit labor costs that is closely related to Marx’s own theory of exploitation. | more…
One point to make about Helena Sheehan’s political odyssey—from a conservative Catholic upbringing, through the radicalism of the US left in the 1960s and early 70s, on to Official Sinn Fein and the Communist Party of Ireland, and then into the Irish Labour Party—is that it demonstrates the importance of the theory of state capitalism for revolutionary politics…. | more…
Gerald Coles’ Miseducating for the Global Economy takes a critical look at what we are told by people who hardly ever enter a classroom but are called educational experts or educational policy makers, and politicians, the corporate media, and state officials… And then there are right-wing think tanks, CEOs, businesspeople, and rafts of capitalism’s little helpers…. | more…
Certainly, being a ‘jazz’ musician in the first decades of the 20th century was probably the most dangerous profession in the arts and, along with coal mining, one of the most dangerous jobs of all. Inhaling cigarette smoke in dank clubs, being plied with alcohol and other controlled substances by unscrupulous bosses of clubs and record labels alike, being attacked violently by racist ‘fans’ | more…
Michael Heinrich’s biography of Karl Marx captures what most biographies reduce merely to a background mention: contemporary conflicts, struggles and disputes that engaged Marx at the time when he was writing as well as his complex relationships with a varied range of friends and opponents…. | more…