Cohen's masterful application of advanced philosophical techniques in an uncompromising defense of historical materialism commanded widespread admiration. In the ensuing twenty years, the book has served as a flagship of a powerful intellectual movement--analytical Marxism. In this expanded edition, Cohen offers his own account of the history, and the further promise, of analytical Marxism. He also expresses reservations about traditional historical materialism, in the light of which he reconstructs the theory, and he studies the implications for historical materialism of the demise of the Soviet Union.

    E.P. Thompson shows how the working class took part in its own making & recreates the whole life experience of people who suffered loss of status & freedom, who underwent degradation & who yet created a culture & political consciousness of great vitality. "Thompson's book has been called controversial, but perhaps only because so many have forgotten how explosive England was during the Regency & the early reign of Victoria. Without any reservation, The Making of the English Working Class is the most important study of those days since the classic work of the Hammonds."--Commentary "Mr Thompson's deeply human imagination & controlled passion help us to recapture the agonies, heroisms & illusions of the working class as it made itself. No one interested in the history of the English people should fail to read his book."--Times Literary Supplement

    Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide.Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development.Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that set the tone for future studies.In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.

    Wilde argues that under capitalism the majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism-are forced, indeed, so to spoil them: instead of realizing their true talents, they waste their time solving the social problems caused by capitalism, without taking their common cause away. Thus, caring people seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see in poverty, but their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it because, the proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.

    Technological advances during the 20th century have expanded production in the pursuit of corporate profit at the expense of human need and ecological sustainability. New possibilities for human freedom must combine an ecological outlook with the dissolution of hierarchical social relations, capitalism and canonical political orientation. Bookchin’s utopian vision, rooted in the realities of contemporary society, remains refreshingly pragmatic. “Book-chin makes a trenchant analysis of modern society and offers a pointed, provocative discussion of the ecological crisis.”—Library JournalMurray Bookchin has been an active voice in the ecology and anarchist movements for more than 40 years.In Oakland, California on March 24, 2015 a fire destroyed the AK Press warehouse along with several other businesses. Please consider visiting the AK Press website to learn more about the fundraiser to help them and their neighbors.

    Whether they realize it or not, scientists always choose sides. The Dialectical Biologist explores this political nature of scientific inquiry, advancing its argument within the framework of Marxist dialectic. These essays stress the concepts of continual change and codetermination between organism and environment, part and whole, structure and process, science and politics. Throughout, this book questions our accepted definitions and biases, showing the self-reflective nature of scientific activity within society.

    Globalization had appeared to be the natural outcome of this unstoppable process. But today, with global markets roiling and increasingly reliant on state intervention to stay afloat, it has become clear that markets and states aren’t straightforwardly opposing forces.In this groundbreaking work, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin demonstrate the intimate relationship between modern capitalism and the American state, including its role as an “informal empire” promoting free trade and capital movements. Through a powerful historical survey, they show how the US has superintended the restructuring of other states in favor of competitive markets and coordinated the management of increasingly frequent financial crises.The Making of Global Capitalism, through its highly original analysis of the first great economic crisis of the twenty-first century, identifies the centrality of the social conflicts that occur within states rather than between them. These emerging fault lines hold out the possibility of new political movements transforming nation states and transcending global markets.

    The response was tremendous — clearly she articulated something many women had sensed for years: the problem is with capitalism, not with us.Ghodsee, an acclaimed ethnographer and professor of Russian and East European Studies, spent years researching what happened to women in countries that transitioned from state socialism to capitalism. She argues here that unregulated capitalism disproportionately harms women, and that we should learn from the past. By rejecting the bad and salvaging the good, we can adapt some socialist ideas to the 21st century and improve our lives.She tackles all aspects of a woman's life - work, parenting, sex and relationships, citizenship, and leadership. In a chapter called "Women: Like Men, But Cheaper," she talks about women in the workplace, discussing everything from the wage gap to harassment and discrimination. In "What To Expect When You're Expecting Exploitation," she addresses motherhood and how "having it all" is impossible under capitalism.Women are standing up for themselves like never before, from the increase in the number of women running for office to the women's march to the long-overdue public outcry against sexual harassment. Interest in socialism is also on the rise -- whether it's the popularity of Bernie Sanders or the skyrocketing membership numbers of the Democratic Socialists of America. It's become increasingly clear to women that capitalism isn't working for us, and Ghodsee is the informed, lively guide who can show us the way forward.

    He argues that the only feasible explanations of scientific successes are historical explanations, and that anarchism must now replace rationalism in the theory of knowledge.

    Written in a direct, inviting way by Harry Braverman, whose years as an industrial worker gave him rich personal insight into work, Labor and Monopoly Capital overturned the reigning ideologies of academic sociology.This new edition features an introduction by John Bellamy Foster that sets the work in historical and theoretical context, as well as two rare articles by Braverman, The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (1975) and Two Comments (1976), that add much to our understanding of the book.

    For the authors of this work, however, it instead represented the disappearance of a counterweight to colonialism and imperialism. They ask whether the Soviet demise was indeed inevitable, as the triumphalist right has claimed, suggesting that without the policies of Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s the answer is "no." They examine the policies of Gorbachev as the product of ideological debates that had been continuing in the Communist Party since Lenin's time and as a response to the development of a second private economy within the overall socialist framework. Gorbachev's reforms of 1987, seen as comparable to policies pushed by Kruschev during 1954-1963 and advocated by Bukharin in the 1920s, discarded central tenets of Marxism-Leninism and prompted the collapse of the Soviet order. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

    It is a book of fluent and readable stories, full of detail about US imperialism, but never letting the minutiae obscure the larger political point. It is a book that could easily have been a song of despair – a lament of lost causes; it is, after all, a roll call of butchers and assassins; of plots against people’s movements and governments; of the assassinations of socialists, Marxists, communists all over the Third World by the country where liberty is a statue.Despite all this, Washington Bullets is a book about possibilities, about hope, about genuine heroes. One such is Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso – also assassinated – who said: ‘You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future. It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future.’Washington Bullets is a book infused with this madness, the madness that dares to invent the future.

    The marketplace now operates through every hour of the clock, pushing us into constant activity and eroding forms of community and political expression, damaging the fabric of everyday life.Jonathan Crary examines how this interminable non-time blurs any separation between an intensified, ubiquitous consumerism and emerging strategies of control and surveillance. He describes the ongoing management of individual attentiveness and the impairment of perception within the compulsory routines of contemporary technological culture. At the same time, he shows that human sleep, as a restorative withdrawal that is intrinsically incompatible with 24/7 capitalism, points to other more formidable and collective refusals of world-destroying patterns of growth and accumulation.

    Mill's passionate advocacy of spontaneity, individuality, and diversity, along with his contempt for compulsory uniformity and the despotism of popular opinion, has attracted both admiration and condemnation.

    A provocative new view of Marx stressing his humanist philosophy and challenging both Soviet distortion and Western ignorance of his basic thinking.