The Taming of the American Crowd From Stamp Riots to Shopping Sprees
by Al Sandine
The history of the United States has been largely shaped, for better or for worse, by the actions of large groups of people. Rioters on a village green, shoppers lurching about a labyrinthine mall, slaves packed into the dark hold of a ship, strikers assembling outside the factory gates, all have their place in the rich and sometimes tragic history of the American crowd. This unique study traces that history from the days of anti-colonial revolt to today’s passive, ‘colonized crowds’ that fill our sports arenas, commercial centers, and workplaces. In clear and lively prose, Al Sandine argues for the progressive role crowds have played in securing greater democracy, civil rights, and free speech. But he also investigates crowds in their more dangerous forms, such as lynch mobs and anti-immigrant riots.
The ABCs of the Economic Crisis What Working People Need to Know
by Fred Magdoff and Michael D. Yates
The economic crisis has created a host of problems for working people: collapsing wages, lost jobs, ruined pensions, and the anxiety that comes with not knowing what tomorrow will bring. Compounding all this is a lack of reliable information that speaks to the realities of workers. Commentators and pundits seem more confused than anyone, and economists—the so-called “experts”—still cling to bankrupt ideologies that failed to predict the crisis and offer nothing to explain it. In this short, clear, and concise book, Magdoff and Yates explain the nature of the economic crisis in plain language. They demonstrate that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, this crisis is not some aberration from a normally benign capitalism but rather the normal and even expected outcome of a thoroughly irrational and destructive system.
The American Revolution Pages From a Negro Worker’s Notebook
New Edition
by James Boggs
Monthly Review Press is proud to present the new edition of this classic title, featuring an abundance of historical commentary and a new introduction by Grace Lee Boggs. Written in 1963, this book offers both a keen analysis of U.S. society and a passionate call for revolutionary struggle. James Boggs—an autoworker and radical activist—sees the growing trend toward automation, the decline of organized labor, the expansion of imperialism, and the deepening of racial strife as fundamentally rooted in the contradictions of U.S. capitalism. And he concludes that the only way forward is a new American revolution—one that, from his perspective writing in the 1960s, appeared to have already begun.
Embedded With Organized Labor Journalistic Reflections on the Class War at Home
by Steve Early
This valuable collection describes how union members have organized successfully, on the job and in the community, in the face of employer opposition now and in the past. The author has produced a provocative series of essays—an unusual exercise in “participatory labor journalism” useful to any reader concerned about social and economic justice. As workers struggle to survive and the labor movement tries to revive during the current economic crisis, this book provides ideas and inspiration for union activists and friends of labor alike.
Open Veins of Latin America Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
by Eduardo Galeano
Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx.
The Ecological Revolution Making Peace With The Planet
by John Bellamy Foster
The roots of the present ecological crisis, John Bellamy Foster argues in The Ecological Revolution, lie in capital’s rapacious expansion, which has now achieved unprecedented heights of irrationality across the globe. Foster compellingly demonstrates that the only possible answer for humanity is an ecological revolution: a struggle to make peace with the planet. Foster details the beginnings of such a revolution in human relations with the environment which can now be found throughout the globe, especially in the periphery of the world system, where the most ambitious experiments are taking place.
Why Unions Matter 2nd Edition, 10th Anniversary Update
by Michael D. Yates
In this second edition of Why Unions Matter, written ten years after the first, Michael D. Yates shows why unions still matter. Yates uses simple language, clear data, and engaging examples to show why workers need unions, how unions are formed, how they operate, how collective bargaining works, the role of unions in politics, and what unions have done to bring workers together across the divides of race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. This is simply the best introduction to unions on the market.
The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy
by Minqi Li
In recent years, China has become a major actor in the global economy, making a remarkable switch from a planned and egalitarian socialism to a simultaneously wide-open and tightly controlled market economy. Against the establishment wisdom, Minqi Li argues in this provocative and startling book that far from strengthening capitalism, China’s full integration into the world capitalist system will, in fact and in the not too distant future, bring about its demise. This is essential reading for those who still believe that there is no alternative.
The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village
by Dongping Han, preface by Fred Magdoff
The Unknown Cultural Revolution challenges the established narrative of China’s Cultural Revolution, which assumes that this period of great social upheaval led to economic disaster, the persecution of intellectuals, and senseless violence. Dongping Han offers a powerful account of the dramatic improvements in the living conditions, infrastructure, and agricultural practices of China’s rural population that emerged in this period.
Critique of Intelligent Design Materialism versus Creationism from Antiquity to the Present
by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York
A critique of religious dogma historically provides the basis for rational inquiry into the physical and social world. Critique of Intelligent Design is a key to understanding the forces of irrationalism that seek to undermine the natural and social sciences. This book illuminates the historical evolution of the materialist critique—that is, explaining the world in terms of itself—from antiquity to the present through engaging the work of Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Lucretius, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Stephen Jay Gould, among others.
The World We Wish To See: Revolutionary Objectives in the Twenty First Century
by Samir Amin, translated by James Membrez
The World We Wish to See presents a sweeping view of twentieth-century political history and a stirring appeal to take political organization seriously. Amin offers provocative analysis of contemporary resistance to neoliberalism,while boldly calling for a new global movement, “an internationalism of peoples,” to challenge the current order and fashion a better world.
On The Global Waterfront: The Fight to Free the Charleston 5
by Suzan Erem and E. Paul Durrenberger
On the Global Waterfront tells the story of how longshoremen in South Carolina confronted attempts to wipe out the state's most powerful black organization. When a Danish shipping company began to shift their transportation to a nonunion firm in 1999, Local 1422 in Charleston, South Carolina, mobilized to protect their hard-won rights. What followed culminated in a protest in which 660 riot police arrayed against fifty dockworkers, a group that grew to 150 before the night was over. Four black and one white longshoreman — subsequently known as the Charleston 5 — were held for twenty months under house arrest on trumped-up felony charges of inciting a riot.
Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village
by William Hinton, new preface by Freg Magdoff
More than forty years after its initial publication, Fanshen remains the essential volume for those interested in Chinas revolutionary process of rural reform and social change. William Hintons pioneering work is a marvelous and revealing look into life in the Chinese countryside, where tradition and modernity have had both a complementary and caustic relationship since the Chinese Communist Party first came to power. It is a rare, concrete record of social struggle and transformation, as witnessed by a participant. Fanshen continues to offer profound insight into the lives of peasants and Chinas complex social processes. Rediscover this classic volume, which includes a new preface by Fred Magdoff.
Global Flashpoints: Reactions to Imperialism and Neoliberalism
Socialist Register 2008
edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys
Since 1964, the Socialist Register has brought together leading writers on the left to investigate aspects of a common theme.
Global Flashpoints: Reactions to Imperialism and Neoliberalism examines the distinguishing features of neoliberalism today as well as the prospects for the left in the Islamic world, in Latin America, and in the capitalist North.
More Unequal: Aspects of Class in the United States
Essays by John Bellamy Foster, William K. Tabb, David Roediger, Stephanie Luce, Mark Brenner, and others.
Edited by Michael D. Yates
“The shocking data about wealth, income, home ownership, access to health care, education, and political influence cry out for analysis which is driven by the desire not only to understand but also to transform. Fortunately, the scholars and activists who have contributed to More Unequal offer such analysis, and they do so clearly and succinctly. This book will prove useful to teachers, students, researchers, and activists as we struggle to understand how class is working in the twenty-first century United States.” —Peter Rachleff, professor of history, Macalester College, and President, Working Class Studies Association
Inside Lebanon: Journey to a Shattered Land with Noam and Carol Chomsky
edited by Assaf Kfoury
Inside Lebanon describes Noam Chomsky's journey and situates it within the tragically altered context of Lebanon and Palestine before and after the war of 2006. Chomsky's essays provide a framework for understanding the role of U.S. politics, power, and policies in these conflicts by examining how the United States wages war and imposes world domination while presenting itself as the righteous protector of democracy. Ironically, U.S. efforts at imperial control generate conflict and crises within the region while undermining democracy.
Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War
by Jean Bricmont
Translated by Diana Johnstone
Since the end of the Cold War, the idea of human rights has been made into a justification for intervention by the world's leading economic and military powers-above all, the United States-in countries that are vulnerable to their attacks. The criteria for such intervention have become more arbitrary and self-serving, and their form more destructive, from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Iraq. Until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the large parts of the left was often complicit in this ideology of intervention-discovering new “Hitlers” as the need arose, and denouncing antiwar arguments as appeasement on the model of Munich in 1938. Timely, topical, and rigorously argued, Jean Bricmont’s book establishes a firm basis for resistance to global war with no end in sight.
Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: An Economist’s Travelogue
by Michael D. Yates
Michael Yates and his wife Karen have traveled around the country, often spending months at a time on the road. This book is a penetrating examination of life in contemporary America and at the same time a lively and entertaining narrative. Michael Yates recounts their travels and experiences in a distinctive voice—with humor, always down to earth, and without apology or pretense.
Coming to Terms With Nature: Socialist Register 2007
edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys
Since 1964, the Socialist Register has brought together leading writers on the left to investigate aspects of a common theme. Coming to Terms with Nature: Socialist Register 2007 examines whether capitalism can come to terms with today's ecological challenges and whether socialist thought has developed sufficiently to help us do so.
Through a Glass Darkly: American Views of the Chinese Revolution
by William Hinton
William Hinton brings everyday life in revolutionary China graphically to life. In a time when the distorted views first developed by U.S. critics of the Chinese Revolution are often propagated by the new Chinese elite themselves, Through a Glass Darkly has more than just historical relevance. For anyone wishing to understand present-day rivalries between the United States and China, Hinton shows how these began. This is a fitting completion of the work of a great scholar and revolutionary.
The Cold War and the New Imperialism: A Global History, 1945–2005
by Henry Heller
The Cold War and the New Imperialism is an account of global history since 1945, which ties together the narrative of the Cold War to that of neoliberalism and the new imperialism in ways that illuminate and clarify the dilemmas of the present moment. Written for the general reader, it draws together scholarly research on a huge range of events, countries, and topics into an intelligible whole.
Faces of Latin America
Updated Edition by Duncan Green
Faces of Latin America celebrates the vibrant history and culture of Latin America’s people. Duncan Green takes the reader beyond the conventional media coverage of the drug trade, corrupt politicians and military leaders, death squads, or guerrilla movements familiar to us on the nightly news. Faces of Latin America examines some of the key forces—from conquest and the growth of the commodity trade, military rule, land distribution, industrialization and migration to civil wars, the debt crisis, neoliberalism and NAFTA —shaping the region’s political and social history.
Build It Now: Socialism for the 21st Century
by Michael A. Lebowitz
Build It Now puts forward a clear and innovative vision of a socialist future, and at the same time shows how concrete steps can be taken to make that vision a reality. It shows how the understanding of capitalism can itself become a political act-a defense of the real needs of human beings against the ongoing advance of capitalist profit.
Religion and the Human Prospect
by Alexander Saxton
“Religion and
the Human Prospect is a work of amazing originality and profound
scholarship that is an urgent tract for our time. Saxton brings us face to face
with the massive worldwide religious revival of the past quarter century and
the flight of major social scientists from Enlightenment values and scientific
conquests. In response, he offers huge, and disconcerting, analyses of the
universality of religion in human societies, of its historical role in
sustaining the species, of its capacity to circumvent the most devastating
intellectual criticisms, and of its current potential for accelerating
environmental destruction and bringing on war. Saxton has, in previous
incarnations, given us the classic proletarian novel, The Great Midland and
path-breaking studies of working-class racism. His new, rigorously argued book
might be his most important contribution yet. None of us can afford to ignore
it.”
—Robert Brenner, director, Center for Social Theory and Comparative
History, UCLA, author of The Economics of Global Turbulence
A History of World Agriculture:
From the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis
by Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart
A History of World Agriculture is a path-breaking and panoramic work, beginning with the emergence of agriculture after thousands of years in which human societies had depended on hunting and gathering, showing how agricultural techniques developed in the different regions of the world, and how this extraordinary wealth of knowledge, tradition, and natural variety is endangered today by global capitalism, as it forces the unequal agrarian heritages of the world to conform to the norms of profit.
Naked Imperialism: The U.S. Pursuit of Global Dominance
by John Bellamy Foster
John Bellamy Foster's Naked Imperialism shows the political and economic roots of the new militarism and its consequences both in the global and local context. Foster shows how U.S.-led global capitalism is preparing the way for a new age of barbarism and demonstrates the necessity for resistance and solidarity on a global scale.
Railroading Economics: The Creation of the Free Market Mythology
by Michael Perelman
Most economic theory assumes a pure capitalism of perfect competition. This book is a penetrating critique of the rhetoric and practice of conventional economic theory. It explores how even in the United States-the most capitalist of countries-the market has always been subject to numerous constraints.
Understanding the
Venezuelan Revolution: Hugo Chavez Talks to Marta Harnecker
by Hugo Chavez and Marta Harnecker
» Read Excerpt
“Marta Harnecker’s important book helps clarify the challenges facing Venezuela’s ongoing revolutionary process. The bourgeoisie still controls the economy, the media, the judiciary, and many elected bodies. Additionally, the middle classes which formerly enjoyed an orgy of spending financed by oil money, have now converted from previous nationalist attitudes into allies of imperialism. The decisive role played by Hugo Chavez in initiating that revolutionary process and the immense support he continues to receive from the popular classes makes this book necessary reading for understanding the forces at work in what may well become a stage in the long run transformation of the global system.”—SAMIR AMIN
The Language
of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American Media
by Lila Rajiva
» Read Excerpt
“With a calmness and clarity of purpose worthy of Virgil, Lila Rajiva leads us step-by-step into a darkness none of us want to confront. But face it we must, if we have any hope of derailing the mad machinery of death and torture unleashed on the world by the Bush Imperium. The horror chambers of Abu Ghraib have become a stomach-turning symbol of the official sadism of the Iraq War. A tragic excess, say some; the work of a demented few, say others. But Rajiva looks deeper, exposing how the perverse logic of torture has infected the language and psychology of the American imperial project, from its sycophants in the press and its evangelists in the pulpit. Her book is an unsettling expedition into the political consciousness of cruelty.” —JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, coeditor of CounterPunch and author of Grand Theft Pentagon
Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education by Joe Berry
“Reclaiming the Ivory Tower would be worth reading if it consisted only of the last two chapters, which could stand alone as an organizer's toolkit. It is doubly valuable for its scholarly insights into the history and sociology of the contingent faculty movement. Buy it by the dozen and share it with your colleagues.” —JANE BUCK, National President, American Association of University Professors
The Next Liberation Struggle: Capitalism, Socialism,
and Democracy in Southern Africa
by John S. Saul
» Read Excerpt
“John Saul's book is as much the fruit of many decades of struggle and commitment to the cause of the working class in Africa as it is of careful scholarly research. Both as a scholar and an activist he has taught and inspired many revolutionaries, myself included, and has been part of bold practical efforts to go beyond capitalism.” —TREVOR NGWANE, chair, Anti-Privatization Forum, South Africa
Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean
by Polly Pattullo
Last Resorts examines the real impact of tourism on the people and landscape of the Caribbean. It explores the structure of ownership of the industry and shows that the benefits it brings to the region do not live up to its claims.
