In this extraordinary book, Jeb Sprague has laid bare how paramilitarism has crushed the Haitian people’s experiment in popular democracy, which began in the last quarter of the twentieth century. This makes the book an essential read for anyone interested in Haitian politics as well as anyone concerned by how capital seeks to subvert democracy to its own ends through political destabilization and the disempowerment of the popular classes. | more…

Faces of Latin America has sold more than 50,000 copies since it first appeared in 1991, and is widely considered to be the best available introduction in English to the economies, politics, demography, social structures, environment and cultures of Latin America. This fourth edition updates the book for 2012 and covers the most pressing issues facing Latin America today. | more…

Michael A. Lebowitz is the author, most recently, of The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: The Conductor and the Conducted. This lecture was recorded at the Critical Social Research Collaborative (CSRC) Fourth Annual Conference in Critical Social Research: Faultlines of Revolution!, May 4th, 2012, Carleton University. | more…

It isn’t enough to blame the tragedy on the inadequate development of productive forces or on the belligerence of imperialism (what, after all, do we expect from imperialism?) Nor is a formulaic response sufficient, to simply decry 20th Century socialism as “state capitalism” or even “deformed and degenerated workers states.” What is needed instead is a serious Marxist analysis of the social relations that pertained in ‘real socialism’. In writing this book Lebowitz has made an important contribution to developing such an analysis, and one that deserves to be read and discussed widely on the left. | more…

The Great Recession has ended, unlike slow/no growth. For a deeper sense of why, get a copy of The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China by John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney. The duo of scholars and professors connect the dots in a radical critique of modern-day capitalism. Theirs is a rigorous analysis, empirical and theoretical, of the twin trends of slowing growth and growing tumult. | more…

Drawing upon first-hand interviews with both paramilitaries, elites and their victims, and with corroboration provided by thousands of U.S. State Department documents (obtained through Freedom of Information Act document requests), Sprague’s incisive contribution to the historical record makes it all too clear how the U.S. government and a collection of local elites have consistently undermined democracy in Haiti – from the nineteenth century right through to the present day. | more…

Join Clairmont Chung, editor of the new book Walter A. Rodney: A Promise of Revolution and director of the documentary W.A.R. Stories: Walter A. Rodney, for a book launch and film screening on Sunday, Dec. 2nd, 7:30pm, at the Maysles Institute in New York City. | more…

The ABCs of the Economic Crisis by Fred Magdoff and Michael D. Yates, despite its small size, is packed with direct, concise and simple facts as the cause of the United States’ recession in 2007. Written with the academic audience in mind, Magdoff and Yates have produced a read that is essential to all those confused by the rhetoric of economists, the media and politicians. | more…

Join MR Press author Steve Brouwer as he discusses his book, Revolutionary Doctors: How Venezuela and Cuba are Changing the World’s Conception of Health Care, in Ithaca, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Madison. | more…

There are an increasing number of helpful introductions to Capital to make it more accessible for those reluctant to jump in feet first. The German Marxist Michael Heinrich wrote this introduction in 2004, and it is very welcome that it is now available in English. One aspect of Capital that could well seem daunting is the number of terms with quite precise meanings, such as the various concepts of value, their distinction from price, or surplus value, which is not quite the same thing as profit, or even further, the various specific forms of capital. An understanding of these is not in fact difficult to acquire and Heinrich’s short book is a crisp and clear introduction to all the relevant concepts, and the very exact ways in which Marx uses them. | more…

Watch Jeb Sprague, author of Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti, interviewed by David Zlutnick in San Francisco for Upheaval Productions. The conversation focuses on paramilitarism and its consequences in Haiti, but also touches on the roles of outside powers and their influence, Haiti’s vibrant social movements, and the country’s most recent developments. | more…

The increasing trend of monolithic companies taking over large shares of industry has created a “financialization-stagnation trap” that’s negatively affecting economies across the world, particularly in the Global South. That’s John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney’s argument in The Endless Crisis: How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval from the USA to China (Monthly Review Press, 2012). In this excerpt from the book’s introduction, Foster and McChesney explain how understanding the rise of financialization stagnation is essential to understanding global class struggle. | more…