There is considerable interest in the history and characterization of China’s economy. This overview of the evolution of the renminbi from the late Qing dynasty to the present, shows how China’s political and economic changes in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are reflected in the development of its highly contested modern currency system. | more…
In the 1960s and the context of mushrooming popular movements across the globe, the brutality of U.S. imperialism, the unreliability of the Soviet Union as an ally, and the Latin American Communist Parties’ focus on the urban working class, Cuban leaders felt beckoned to help revolutionary projects in Africa. While Cuba sent soldiers, they also sent doctors. By the end of the 1960s, when the Cuban revolutionary government had been in power for only ten years, doctors had been involved in four different African political projects. Cuba’s deployment of military doctors to Africa left profound impacts, both on the host countries and on the Cuban doctors, who were bound to secrecy and only began sharing their stories decades later. | more…
This issue is dedicated to remembering the life and work of Samir Amin (1931–2018), the greatest single theorist of imperialism of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, and one of the leading world activists and organizers in today’s anti-imperialist struggle. | more…
There is considerable debate within China about the nature of the economy, including recognition of tendencies toward state capitalism. Consequently, most writers focus theorization of the many possible paths the economy could take—whether toward or away from capitalism. The present article takes a step further, arguing that the Chinese system today still contains some key components of socialism and is compatible with a market, or market-based, socialism that is clearly distinct from capitalism. | more…
In his review of Hardboiled Activist: The Work and Politics of Dashiell Hammett by Ken Fuller, Albert Ruben debunks popular arguments about Hammett’s consistent radicalism. Instead, he highlights Fuller’s research to point to Hammett’s process of radicalization—from nihilism to communism—and the events that shaped his life and work. | more…
is a criminal defense attorney practicing in San Juan, Puerto Rico. | more…
In the early 1980s, China undertook a massive reform that dismantled its socialist rural collectives and divided the land among millions of small peasant families. Known as the decollectivization campaign, it is one of the most significant reforms in China's transition to a market economy. From the beginning, the official Chinese accounts, and many academic writings, uncritically portray this campaign as a huge success, both for the peasants and the economy as a whole. This mainstream history argues that the rural communes, suffering from inefficiency, greatly improved agricultural productivity under the decollectivization reform. It also describes how the peasants, due to their dissatisfaction with the rural regime, spontaneously organized and collectively dismantled the collective system. A closer examination suggests a much different and more nuanced story. By combining historical archives, field work, and critical statistical examinations, From Commune to Capitalism argues that the decollectivization campaign was neither a bottom-up, spontaneous peasant movement, nor necessarily efficiency-improving. | more…
When scientists describe the increase of Dust Bowl-like conditions under climate change, they signal a particular kind of violent ecological and social change. But equally violent are the social forces, historical developments, policies, and practices that produce such massive socioecological crises in the first place. | more…
The accumulation of human excrement in nineteenth-century cities, particularly London, precipitated a historic environmental crisis—an aspect of the metabolic rift mostly overlooked in ecosocialist analysis. The solution that was finally adopted only shifted the problem out of sight, setting the stage for even greater crises in our time. | more…
During the 1960s, Cuban medicine experienced changes as tumultuous as the civil rights and antiwar protests in the United States. While activists, workers, and students in western Europe and the United States confronted existing institutions of capitalism and imperialism, Cuba faced the even greater challenge of building a new society. | more…
Paul A. Baran (1910–1964) and Paul M. Sweezy (1910–2004) were two of the most creative and influential Marxist economists of the last century. The Age of Monopoly Capital collects hundreds of letters between Baran and Sweezy, written between 1949 and Baran’s death in 1964. The correspondence contains numerous interesting, important, and unanticipated ideas. Nuggets of wisdom about economic theory, socialist history, dialectical method, academic politics, and many other topics are scattered throughout. | more…