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The Politics of U.S. Labor: From the Great Depression to the New Deal

The Politics of U.S. Labor: From the Great Depression to the New Deal

The alliance of the industrial labor movement with the Democratic Party under Franklin D. Roosevelt has, perhaps more than any other factor, shaped the course of class relations in the United States over the ensuing forty years. Much has been written on the interests that were thereby served, and those that were co-opted. In this detailed examination of the strategies pursued by both radical labor and the capitalist class in the struggle for industrial unionism, David Milton argues that while radical social change and independent political action were traded off by the industrial working class for economic rights, this was neither automatic nor inevitable. Rather, the outcome was the result of a fierce struggle in which capital fought labor and both fought for control over government labor policy. | more…

Scenes From the Anti-Nazi War

Scenes From the Anti-Nazi War

In this lively and instructive memoir of his experience with the anti-Nazi underground in Italy and Yugoslavia during World War II, Basil Davidson has thrown needed light on a much-neglected part of European history. Sent to the area as a representative of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), he is able to recount at first hand the intense determination of the revolutionary partisans, who hoped that their sacrifices would lead to a new society, and the equally determined policy of the Allies to suppress them. As the London Review of Books stated, “The true purpose of this marvelously original book is to remind us that [for the underground] the Second World War was above all a political, even a revolutionary, experience, in which liberation was not simply a matter of driving out the Germans but also involved a radical restructuring of whole societies… which had permitted the growth of appeasement, defeatism, and indigenous fascism. | more…

Bureaucracy and the Labor Process: The Transformation of U.S. Industry, 1860–1920

Bureaucracy and the Labor Process: The Transformation of U.S. Industry, 1860–1920

This book makes the argument, supported by rich and extensive historical research into original sources, that it is possible to revolutionize work so that it can be, in the author’s words, “satisfying, creative, and stimulating at the same time that it is materially productive: we can have material abundance along with interesting work.” | more…

Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment

Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment

Why, while Europe, North America, and Australia have developed, have Africa, much of Asia, and Latin America remained underdeveloped? Andre Gunder Frank sets out to answer this basic question by showing how world capital accumulation has led to the differentiation of these regions within the single world-embracing economic system. Unequal exchange between regions, combined with the differential transformation of productive, social, and political relations within regions, has led to the capitalist development of some areas and to the underdevelopment of others. | more…

The Sugarmill: The Socio-Economic Complex of Sugar in Cuba 1760–1860

The Sugarmill: The Socio-Economic Complex of Sugar in Cuba 1760–1860

This extraordinary work deserves to be called monumental for its scrupulous and exhaustive analysis of the development of the sugar industry in Cuba, for the imposing originality of its approach, and for the unsentimental but no less passionate vision of history it embodies. The product of twenty years of historical research combined with ten years of economic and technical work in the industry, The Sugarmill is a landmark in post-revolutionary Cuban scholarship. | more…