Samir Amin, one of the most influential economists today, has produced another groundbreaking work. Spectres of Capitalism cuts through the current intellectual fashions that assume a global capitalist triumph, taking the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Marx and Engels’s classic tract, the Communist Manifesto, to focus upon the aspirations of the destitute millions of the post-Cold War era. | more…
Over the last few years, I have asked hundreds of college students, “When was the country we now know as the United States first settled?” | more…
After years of pro–market reforms, China faces a fundamental choice. Will it move toward private capitalism, or toward a renewal of the collective and socialist basis of its revolution? Red Cat, White Cat begins by examining the tensions growing within “market socialism.” Weil provides background on marketization, the class forces that produced it, and the polarization and social dislocation that it is generating. | more…
With unemployment surging to record levels and the economy in freefall, experts are looking to the Great Depression for lessons in stimulating job creation. Then, as now, the system was unable to provide the jobs and financial support desperately needed by millions of people. But then—in the 1930s—the state intervened to create massive employment programs that put people to work on socially useful projects in states, cities, and towns across the country. The scope of these programs was unprecedented and never repeated in the decades that followed. Today, as the severity of the economic crisis increasingly resembles that of the Great Depression, the time for a reappraisal of the New Deal employment programs has never been more necessary. | more…
Millions unemployed… fewer people working harder for less pay and shrinking benefits… the assets of the wealthiest one percent of the population growing as the population below the poverty line swells… the next generation facing an even more bitter future… Why? Most working people cannot answer this question. In this user-friendly book, Michael Yates explains how employment and unemployment are inextricably connected in an economic system where employers are driven by the search for profits. | more…
After thirty years of rapid economic growth, South Korea is widely promoted as demonstrating the superiority of free market capitalism. Along with Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, it is considered a great success story and model for third world development. | more…
This sequel to the author’s best-selling Columbus: His Enterprise provides, in ten short chapters, a brilliant account of the ongoing war waged by Europeans against the native peoples of the Americas in the five centuries after Columbus arrived. Ranging from the Spanish conquest to the colonization of North America, from the seizure of land from the native inhabitants to present-day military interventions, Koning’s provocative and readable history provides students with a different perspective on U.S. history and a framework for understanding U.S. policy toward indigenous and foreign peoples. | 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…
Most of us have been taught to think of Christopher Columbus as a single-minded, courageous visionary whose navigational skills led him to “discover” the Americas. In this beautifully written revisionist biography, accessible to people of all ages, Hans Koning gives us the true history of Columbus’ life and voyages. | 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…
The Great Reversal is the first critical study of the widely heralded reforms currently transforming China’s economy. From his long experience in Chinese agriculture, Hinton first examines the course of agricultural reform over the past decade, then looks at its consequences in different areas of the countryside and considers its implications for the country as a whole. He raises troubling questions about China’s capitalist future—the growing landlessness, increasing inequality, and above all, the destruction of the nation’s natural resources and the collectively built infrastructure that was the great achievement of the revolution. In so doing he sheds new light on the sources of discontent behind the demonstrations that culminated in the Tiananmen massacre of June 1989. | more…