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Marxism

Essays on The Political Economy of Africa

Essays on The Political Economy of Africa

These essays, by two of the foremost scholars who worked in the Marxist tradition on African economic and social issues, offers an overview of socialism and economic development, and of nationalism and revolution in sub-Saharan Africa; of labor, peasantries, and populism. It includes case studies of Tanzania, Rhodesia, and Mozambique.

Giovanni Arrighi (1937-2009) taught in Europe, Africa, and the United States. He was a member of the Zimbabwe African Peoples Union in 1966, and was deported from Rhodesia for his political activities. In 1979, Arrighi joined Immanuel Wallerstein and Terence Hopkins as a professor of sociology at the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton University.

The Iron Heel

Grand Theft Capital: The Increasing Exploitation and Robbery of the U.S. Working Class

The working class is being robbed, both through outright expropriation and the more hidden exploitation of countless workers who are struggling to make ends meet while capitalists pocket the surplus value they produce. Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster dissect the neoliberal assault on the working class that is spurring a new generation of labor organizing. | more…

Woman using a mobile phone

The Telecom Industry in India: Free Market or Monopoly-Finance Capital?

The success of the telecommunications industry in India has been heralded as a “miracle.” But a miracle for whom? The answer, Rahul Varman writes, has clearly been the capitalist class, who, over three decades, have amassed tremendous wealth and power through the machinations of large firms, in collusion with the Indian government. | more…

The Political Tragedy of Capitalist Rule

This article will be released in full online May 29, 2023.

In this prescient article from 1995, former MR editors Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy show that, through their own profligacy, the ruling classes have lost their capacity for political rule. The way forward, Magdoff and Sweezy write, is an “organized, militant struggle,” and with victory necessarily leading to the overthrow of capitalist rule. | more…

The Dialectics of Dependency: Ruy Mauro Marini

Superexploitation and the Imperialist Drive of Capitalism: How Marini’s ‘Dialectics of Dependency’ Goes beyond Marx’s ‘Capital’

Andy Higginbottom analyzes the influence of Ruy Mauro Marini on dependency theory and the concept of superexploitation. Marini, he explains, carried Marx’s legacy forward—but there is still work to be done in the twenty-first century. | more…

Return to the Source: Selected Texts of Amilcar Cabral, New Expanded Edition

A classic collection of essays calling for decolonization through self-liberation

“For us,” said Amilcar Cabral, “freedom is an act of culture.” Guided by the concrete realities of his people, he called for a Return to the Source, a process of decolonization through “re-Africanization.” With a system of thought rooted in an African reading of Marx, Cabral was a deep-thinking revolutionary who applied the principles of decolonization as a dialectic task, and in so doing became one of the world’s most profoundly influential and effective theoreticians of anti–imperialist struggle. He translated abstract theories into agile praxis and in under just ten years steered the liberation of three–quarters

The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis: McCarthyism, Communism, and the Myth of Academic Freedom

The Prosecution of Professor Chandler Davis tells the true tale of a mathematician who found himself taking an involuntary break from chalking equations to sit opposite a row of self-righteous anti-Communist congressmen at the height of the McCarthy era. Courageously asserting the First Amendment to confront a system rapidly descending into fascism, Davis testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He became one of a small number of left wingers who served time for contempt of Congress. | more…