Download or read book Capitalism and Theory Selected Writings of Michael Kidron written by Michael Kidron and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2018-09-11 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inspiring speaker and brilliantly sophisticated theorist, Michael Kidron was a leading figure in the International Socialist tradition from the 1950s until his death in 2003. Never satisfied with merely restating the assumed tenets of Marxism, Kidron insisted that theory must evolve alongside a changing world &mdash an iconoclastic orientation which led him to clash with others on the left, including the British Communist Party and, later, the Socialist Workers Party itself under the leadership of Kidron's long-time comrade Tony Cliff. This undoctrinaire commitment to theoretical openness was also evident in Kidron's period as an editor with Pluto Books in the 1970s and 1980s, when the publisher became a crucial forum for developing socialist ideas and bringing them to a wider audience. Selected Writings collects a number of Kidron's most important essays: 'Reform and Revolution' offers a critique of post-war social democracy, written several decades before its collapse into neoliberalism; 'The Permanent Arms Economy' succinctly lays out what is perhaps Kidron's best-known theoretical contribution; 'Black Reformism' both provides an analysis of the imperialism of Kidron's day, and attacks the then-common assumption that Third World revolutions opened a road to world socialism. In recognition of Kidron's commitment to constantly re-examining theory, this volume also includes his 1977 essay 'Two Insights Don't Make a Theory', in which he criticises and updates his own earlier work in light of historical developments. Edited and introduced by Richard Kuper, who worked alongside Kidron at Pluto, this volume is the best introduction to one of the most original Marxist thinkers of recent times.
Download or read book The Border Crossed Us written by Justin Akers Chacón and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aggressive exploitation of labor on both sides of the US-Mexico border has become a prominent feature of capitalism in North America. Kids in cages, violent ICE raids, and anti-immigrant racist rhetoric characterize our political reality and are everyday shaping how people intersect at the US-Mexico border. As activist-scholar Justin Akers Chacón carefully demonstrates, however, this vicious model of capitalist transnationalization has also created its own grave-diggers. Contemporary North American capitalism relies heavily on an inter-connected working class which extends across the border. Cross-border production and supply chains, logistics networks, and retail and service firms have aligned and fused a growing number of workers into one common class, whether they live in the US or Mexico. While money moves without restriction, the movement of displaced migrant workers across borders is restricted and punished. Transborder people face walls, armed agents, detention camps, and a growing regime of repressive laws that criminalize them. Despite the growth and violence of the police state dedicated to the repression of transborder populations—the migra-state—migrant workers have been at the forefront of class struggle in the United States. This timely book persuasively argues that labor and migrant solidarity movements are already showing how and why, in order to fight for justice and re-build the international union movement, we must open the border.
Download or read book What Was Neoliberalism written by Neil Davidson and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eminent scholar-activist Neil Davidson’s brilliance is on full display in this posthumous work, a timely and prescient introduction to the neoliberal era. While it is widely agreed that neoliberalism arose in the wake of the global economic crisis of the 1970s, there remains much debate about how to understand its significance and even how to define it. Is it best seen as an ideology of free market fundamentalism, a series of policy decisions gutting the public sector and breaking unions, or as an era of capitalist development with its own logic Bringing his considerable intellectual breadth and characteristic generosity to bear on this question, Neil Davidson shows that to truly appreciate what is unique about neoliberalism, and what marks it out as a continuation of capitalism more generally, it is necessary to examine its social dimensions. What Was Neoliberalism? holds fast to Davidson’s conviction that thoroughly understanding the past means being better prepared for the struggles of the future.
Download or read book Selected Essays of Nigel Harris written by Nigel Harris and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-10-02 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nigel Harris’s Selected Essays: From National Liberation to Globalisation presents an encompassing overview of the work of one of the most prolific and insightful Marxist economists of the second half of the twentieth century. It starts off with a new interview in which Harris reflects on the development of his thought over the more than half a century separating the death of Stalin from the latest developments in globalisation and capitalist restructuring. The collected essays deal with topics ranging from imperialism and the state to the political economy of development and migration, and offer an ample selection from Harris’s political journalism. Together the work constitutes at once a personal journey through the history of the British revolutionary left and a trenchant commentary on some of the most fundamental problems facing a renewed Marxist theory.
Download or read book Radical Chains written by Chris Nineham and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2023-05-26 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time of almost unimaginable inequality, the mainstream still tries to ignore class. Radical Chains: Why Class Matters argues that denial of class is no coincidence but in fact central to the system's survival. Exploring largely ignored histories of struggle and challenging the many myths about class today, Radical Chains puts forward the case that it is time to place class once again at the centre of emancipatory politics.
Download or read book Making History written by Alex Callinicos and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2004-07-01 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making History is about the question - central to social theory - of how human agents draw their powers from the social structures they are involved in. Drawing on classical Marxism, analytical philosophy, and a wide range of historical writing, Alex Callinicos seeks to avoid two unacceptable extremes - dissolving the subject into an impersonal flux, as poststructuralists tend to - and treating social structures as the mere effects of individual action (for example, rational-choice theory). Among those discussed are Althusser, Anderson, Benjamin, Brenner, Cohen, Elster, Foucault, Giddens, Habermas, and Mann. Callinicos has written an extended introduction to this new edition that reviews developments since Making History was first published in 1987. This republication gives a new generation of readers access to an important intervention in Marxism and social theory.
Download or read book The Robbery of Nature written by John Bellamy Foster and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2020-02-24 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bridges the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, inspired by the German chemist Justus von Liebig, argued that capitalism’s relation to its natural environment was that of a robbery system, leading to an irreparable rift in the metabolism between humanity and nature. In the twenty-first century, these classical insights into capitalism’s degradation of the earth have become the basis of extraordinary advances in critical theory and practice associated with contemporary ecosocialism. In The Robbery of Nature, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, working within this historical tradition, examine capitalism’s plundering of nature via commodity production, and how it has led to the current anthropogenic rift in the Earth System. Departing from much previous scholarship, Foster and Clark adopt a materialist and dialectical approach, bridging the gap between social and environmental critiques of capitalism. The ecological crisis, they explain, extends beyond questions of traditional class struggle to a corporeal rift in the physical organization of living beings themselves, raising critical issues of social reproduction, racial capitalism, alienated speciesism, and ecological imperialism. No one, they conclude, following Marx, owns the earth. Instead we must maintain it for future generations and the innumerable, diverse inhabitants of the planet as part of a process of sustainable human development.
Download or read book Capital as Power written by Jonathan Nitzan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-06-02 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book presents a radically new framework for understanding capital as a mode of power. Challenging the liberal and Marxist approaches, it articulates a new theory of accumulation, develops new empirical methods of research and offers a new history of capitalism.
Download or read book Capitalism in the Anthropocene written by John Bellamy Foster and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-08-23 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last 11,700 years, during which human civilization developed, the earth has existed within what geologists refer to as the Holocene Epoch. Now science is telling us that the Holocene Epoch in the geological time scale ended, replaced by the onset of a new, more dangerous Anthropocene Epoch, which began around 1950. The Anthropocene Epoch is characterized by an “anthropogenic rift” in the biological cycles of the Earth System, marking a changed reality in which human activities are now the main geological force impacting the earth as a whole, generating at the same time an existential crisis for the world’s population. What caused this massive shift in the history of the earth? In this comprehensive study, John Bellamy Foster tells us that a globalized system of capital accumulation has induced humanity to foul its own nest. The result is a planetary emergency that threatens all present and future generations, throwing into question the continuation of civilization and ultimately the very survival of humanity itself. Only by addressing the social aspects of the current planetary emergency, exploring the theoretical, historical, and practical dimensions of the capitalism’s alteration of the planetary environment, is it possible to develop the ecological and social resources for a new journey of hope.
Download or read book Late Capitalism written by Ernest Mandel and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2024-07-30 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Late Capitalism is the first major synthesis to have been produced by the contemporary revival of Marxist economics. It represents, in fact, the only systematic attempt so far ever made to combine the general theory of the 'laws of motion' of the capitalist mode of production developed by Marx with the concrete history of capitalism in the twentieth century. A landmark in Marxist economic literature, Late Capitalism is specifically designed to explain the international recession of the 1970s and is an invaluable guide to understanding the nature of the world economy today. This edition includes a new introduction by Cdric Durand assessing the book's continued relevance.
Download or read book The New Age of Catastrophe written by Alex Callinicos and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2023-04-05 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world is entering a new age of catastrophe. The exceptional is becoming normal. The last such crisis, between 1914 and 1945, witnessed two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Holocaust. Now humankind faces fresh existential threats – the COVID-19 pandemic, wildfires, floods and other extreme weather events caused by accelerating climate change, and the danger of nuclear war in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. These threats, argues Alex Callinicos, have their common source in a multidimensional crisis of the capitalist system, which is hitting the buffers, hurling us towards societal collapse. It embraces the increasing destruction of nature and the degradation of labour, a world economy stagnant since the global financial crisis, and escalating inter-imperialist conflicts between the United States, China, and Russia. So far, the main political beneficiary has been the far right, which may capture the White House again. But the new age of catastrophe is also an age of revolt. Following on from Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo protests, and the revolts in Sudan, Sri Lanka, and Iran, multiple faultlines in the system will provoke still more mass movements that can challenge myriad forms of oppression and open the way to a just and sustainable world.
Download or read book Development and Underdevelopment written by Geoffrey Kay and published by Springer. This book was released on 1982-06-18 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Politics of Che Guevara written by Samuel Farber and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2016-05-18 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This reexamination of Ernesto "Che" Guevara's thoughts on socialism, democracy, and revolution is a must-read for today's activists—or anyone longing to fight for a better world. Fifty years after his death, Guevara remains a symbol to legions of young rebels and revolutionaries. This unique book provides a way to critically engage with Guevara's economic views, his ideas about revolutionary agency, and his conduct as guerrilla commander and government administrator in Cuba. Samuel Farber was born and raised in Cuba. He has written extensively on Cuba and the Cuban Revolution and is author of Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959.
Download or read book Stolen written by Grace Blakeley and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A must-read polemic about why the 'recovery' from the 2007-08 crash mostly benefited the 1%, and how democratic socialism can save us from a new crash and climate catastrophe. For decades, it has been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. In the decade leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, booming banks, rising house prices and cheap consumer goods propped up living standards in the rich world. Thirty years of rocketing debt and financial wizardry had masked the deep underlying fragility of finance-led growth, and in 2008 we were forced to pay up. The decade since has witnessed all kinds of morbid symptoms, as all around the rich world, wages and productivity are stagnant, inequality is rising, and ecological systems are collapsing. Stolen is a history of finance-led growth and a guide as to how we might escape it. We've sat back as financial capitalism has stolen our economies, our environment and even the future itself. Now, we have an opportunity to change course. What happens next is up to us.
Download or read book Holding Fast to an Image of the Past written by Neil Davidson and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2014-05-05 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Davidson explores classic themes in historical materialism as he explains: the moments of transition from the dominance of one mode of production to another; the process of social revolution which accompany these transitions; and the problem of nationalism, both as a theoretical challenge to Marxism's capacity for historical explanation and as a practical obstacle to socialist consciousness.
Download or read book Zombie Capitalism written by Chris Harman and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We've been told for years that the capitalist free market is a self-correcting perpetual growth machine in which sellers always find buyers, precluding any major crisis in the system. Then the credit crunch of August 2007 turned into the great crash of September–October 2008, leading one apologist for the system, Willem Buiter, to write of "the end of capitalism as we knew it." As the crisis unfolded, the world witnessed the way in which the runaway speculation of the "shadow" banking system wreaked havoc on world markets, leaving real human devastation in its wake. Faced with the financial crisis, some economic commentators began to talk of "zombie banks"–financial institutions that were in an "undead state" and incapable of fulfilling any positive function but a threat to everything else. What they do not realize is that twenty-first century capitalism as a whole is a zombie system, seemingly dead when it comes to achieving human goals.
Download or read book MacIntyre s After Virtue at 40 written by Tom Angier and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-25 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its publication in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue has been recognised as a classic. Primarily a work of moral philosophy, it also draws on sociology, classics, political science and theology to effect a unique intellectual synthesis, and its combination of erudition and challenging, even provocative argument has made a significant impact throughout the humanities disciplines. This volume of new essays unpacks the influence of After Virtue on ethical and political theory, sociology and theology, and offers a multi-faceted exploration of its significance. The essays offer a way into MacIntyre's philosophy, and demonstrate how, rather than waning in influence over the past forty years, his most seminal text has found an ever-wider audience and continues to inspire controversy and debate in the humanities.
