Let Them Eat Ketchup! — the title comes from a Reagan administration decision to classify ketchup as a vegetable in federal school lunch programs — explains: how governments define and measure poverty, how and why official definitions of poverty fall short, and the failure to deal with the real suffering and inequality in our “class-free” society. | more…
Ernst Fischer has crafted a brief, clear, and faithful exposition of Marx's main premises, with particular emphasis on historical context. This new edition of the English translation of Was Marx wirklich sagte (1968) includes new contributions by John Bellamy Foster that sharpen Fischer's focus for today's readers. Also included are a biographical chronology, extracts from major works of Marx, and “Marx's Method,” a valuable essay by the political economist Paul Sweezy. | more…
Since the 1994 uprisings in the Mexican state of Chiapas, the spokesman of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, a masked rebel who calls himself Subcomandante Marcos, has become a symbol of revolt in the post-cold war era. Here are the words of Marcos—letters, stories for children, military communiqués, demands, poems, descriptions of colonial exploitation, travelogues, history lessons, spoofs of magic realism, subtle jokes, and inspiring anecdotes—which recast Mexican politics and revived rebel imaginations everywhere. They look backward to the traditions of Indian resistance and the dominant ideals of the Mexican revolution; they look forward to political strategies, styles, and theories that challenge the dominance of capitalism. The wit, anger, irony, and eloquence of these letters and communiqués document how history is being made after “the end of history.” | more…
That there are good and honorable people who believe that the Democratic Party can be turned around. I don’t. Our major task is to change the entire nature of political discussion in the country. In my view that’s just not going to happen within the Democratic Party. | more…
In Out of the Shadows, author Jo Fisher interviews women in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay to show how they have moved into the vacuum left by the military’s destruction of the male-dominated left. Chapters describe how women have organised—in communal kitchens in Chile’s shantytowns, as trade unionists in Uruguay, peace activists in Paraguay, mothers of the disappeared and self-help groups in Argentina, as grassroots feminists in Chile—ending the isolation of home life. | more…
This pathbreaking collection of essays recasts the prevailing conceptions of the historical roots and role of the U.S. Communist Party and its social setting. The contributors focus on the movement that formed around the party and the popular culture it expressed, particularly in the period from 1930 to 1960. They look at the impact of the part and its followers in the areas of education, literature, and the arts, in the African-American community, and on the women’s and labor movements. | more…
The poor and forgotten nations of the world can blame their downward spiral on an emerging world order that Samir Amin in this brilliant essay calls the “empire of chaos.” Comprised of the United States, Japan, and Germany, and backed by a weakened USSR and the comprador classes of the third world, this is an empire that will stop at nothing in its campaign to protect and expand its capitalist markets. | more…
West, professor of religion and director of the Afro-American studies program at Princeton University, shows that not only was ethics an integral part of the development of Marx’s own thinking throughout his career, but that this crucial concern has been obscured by such leading and influential interpreters as Engels, Kautsky, Lukács, and others who diverted Marx’s theory into narrow forms of positivism, economism, and Hegelianism. | more…
In bourgeois society a violation of property rights is the supreme injustice. Hybrids provided a solution in agriculture. Commercial hybrids decrease the yield of the following generation. This means that farmers have to renew their seed every year. Hence, hybrids create a perpetual market for seed. | more…
In this successor volume to the widely read Dynamics of Global Crisis, the authors engage in a provocative discussion of the history and contemporary dilemmas facing the movements that are variously described as antisystemic, social, or popular. The authors believe that these movements, which have for the past 150 years protested and organized against the multiple injustices of the existing system, are the key locus of social transformation. | more…
Much of Karl Marx’s most important work came out of his critique of other thinkers, including many socialists who differed significantly in their conceptions of socialism. The fourth volume in Hal Draper’s series looks at these critiques to illuminate what Marx’s socialism was, as well as what it was not. Some of these debates are well-known elements in Marx’s work, such as his writings on the anarchists Proudhon and Bakunin. Others are less familiar, such as the writings on “Bismarckian socialism” and “Boulangism,” but promise to become better known and understood with Draper’s exposition. He also discusses the more general ideological tendencies of “utopian” and “sentimental” socialisms, which took various forms and were ingredients in many different socialist movements. | more…
To understand the complex phenomenon of fascism and its success in Germany requires an integrated analysis of the economic, class, and power dimensions that led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the ascension to power of the Nazi party. The contributors to this volume, including a number of scholars from East and West Germany whose works appear in English for the first time, collectively construct such an analysis. | more…