“With its 2016 edition, “The Politics of the Right,” the Socialist Register has once again demonstrated why, after 52 years, it remains one of the premier international academic journals of the left. This year’s issue brings together a collection of nineteen essays by scholars from around the world engaging with the pivotal challenges presented by the advance of the political right on every continent. For American readers facing record turnout numbers for Donald Trump during the primaries, the growth of billionaire-funded “grassroots” organizations, and the resurgence of racist extremism, this focus on the right danger and its connection to international trends is especially timely | more…
John Smith’s book is a powerful and searing indictment of the exploitation of billions of people in what used to be called the Third World and is now called the ‘emerging’ or ‘developing’ economies by mainstream economics (and is called ‘the South’ by Smith). But the book is much, much more than that. After years of research including a PhD thesis, John has made an important and original contribution to our understanding of modern imperialism, both theoretically and empirically. | more…
On this occasion, we dealing a study that covers a very topical subject of interest to our country and for the Latin American context: the pertinence and existing possibilities for the development of socialism with a correct understanding of the process of socialist transition.
In this book Lebowitz continues the work that he has been doing for years in his criticism of capitalism and the human alienation that accompanies it, together with the contribution of interesting reflections about the unsuccessful experiences of so-called real socialism and the factors that led to its collapse. | more…
Henry A. Giroux, author of America’s Addiction to Terrorism, talks to Leslie Thatcher about terrorism, addition, and, of course, America:
“When I wrote this book, one of the things I was very concerned about was the way the United States since 9/11 was appropriating the notion of terrorism in a very limited and self-serving, if not dangerous, way. Terrorists were officially defined as people who target and attack Western societies. In this case, a terrorist is an outsider, generally imagined as a Muslim, who poses a threat or commits an act of violence associated with a foreign enemy. What was lost in this definition,
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My interests cluster around understanding and exposing both global power structures and alternatives to the existing system. I approach this from the point of view of someone who wants to help create a socio-economic and political system worthy of humanity’s best inclinations. This would be a society and civilization without racial, class, sexual and gender divisions and conflicts, one based on authentic democracy, equality, civil freedoms, respect for the natural world, generous social arrangements, empathy, peace, social justice, and solidarity. | more…
Far-right forces are on the move in and out of the US. Socialist Register 2016: The Politics of the Right, edited by Leo Panitch and Greg Albo, delivers crisp analyses of this trend…. A recurring theme in the book is the process of political centrism drifting to the right. This move enhances authoritarianism, a cultural feature of modern politics in the post Sept. 11 era…. Hard right politics dovetails with policing of national minorities. Lesley Wood outlines three related trends: “intelligence-led policing, community policing and strategic incapacitation protest policing,” which confront movements such as Black Lives Matter, pushing back for public control over this state function. | more…
The working class of Cuba played a much more decisive role in the Revolution than previously understood. Steve Cushion contends that significant portions of the Cuban working class launched an underground movement in tandem with the guerrillas operating in the mountains. From illegal strikes to sabotage to armed conflict with the state, workers’ efforts helped clinch the Revolution’s victory. A fresh and provocative take on the place of the working class in Cuban history. | more…
Left Forum is the largest annual gathering of the broad Left in the United States. Each year thousands of conference participants come together to discuss pressing local, national, and global issues; to better understand commonalities and differences, and alternatives to current predicaments; or to share ideas to help build social and political movements to transform the world. Left Forum 2015 drew 4,000 participants for 400 panels and events. Recent speakers include Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Harry Belafonte, Arundhati Roy, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, Bolivian Vice President Álvaro García Linera, Slavoj Zizek, Marina Sitrin, Amy Goodman, Immortal Technique, and Grace Lee Boggs. | more…
Compared to other world-shaking revolutions of the modern era, the Haitian Revolution and its impact have largely been invisible to many in the West.
Confronting the Black Jacobins, Gerald Horne’s new book, revisits the revolt and the period immediately after. A historian who has written numerous works about colonialism and slavery, Horne dives deep into the decades after the revolution — up to 1874 in fact, to more clearly demonstrate the far-reaching reverberations of the revolution from the United States to Europe to the formation of the Dominican Republic, with which Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola and a long and troubled history. | more…
By John Smith Winner of the first Paul A. Baran–Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award
John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis is a seminal examination of the relationship between the core capitalist countries and the rest of the world in the age of neoliberal globalization. Deploying a sophisticated Marxist methodology, Smith begins by tracing the production of certain iconic commodities—the T-shirt, the cup of coffee, and the iPhone—and demonstrates how these generate enormous outflows of money from the countries of the Global South to transnational corporations headquartered in the core capitalist nations of the Global North. Meticulously researched and
Many environmentalists disdain the ideas of Karl Marx. Some tout the spiritual virtues of environmental ‛ideals.’ Some argue for individual solutions like recycling, reduced consumption and “going back to the land.” Anti-communists claim that the ecological crimes of the Stalinist-era USSR flowed from Marxism itself. John Bellamy Foster’sMarx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature counters all these ideas. It is a dense and intricate analysis of Marxist theory, its historical and scientific foundations, and how central ecological concerns are to it. | more…
