Tracing five centuries of exploitation in Latin America, a classic in the field, now in its twenty fifth year

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.

Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe.

Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tapestry, Galeano fuses scientific analysis with the passions of a plundered and suffering people. An immense gathering of materials is framed with a vigorous style that never falters in its command of themes. All readers interested in great historical, economic, political, and social writing will find a singular analytical achievement, and an overwhelming narrative that makes history speak, unforgettably.
This classic is now further honored by Isabel Allende's inspiring introduction. Universally recognized as one of the most important writers of our time, Allende once again contributes her talents to literature, to political principles, and to enlightenment.

Césaire's essay stands as an important document in the development of third world consciousness--a process in which [he] played a prominent role.
--Library Journal

This classic work, first published in France in 1955, profoundly influenced the generation of scholars and activists at the forefront of liberation struggles in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Nearly twenty years later, when published for the first time in English, Discourse on Colonialism inspired a new generation engaged in the Civil Rights, Black Power, and anti-war movements and has sold more than 75,000 copies to date.

Aimé Césaire eloquently describes the brutal impact of capitalism and colonialism on both the colonizer and colonized, exposing the contradictions and hypocrisy implicit in western notions of progress and civilization upon encountering the savage, uncultured, or primitive. Here, Césaire reaffirms African values, identity, and culture, and their relevance, reminding us that the relationship between consciousness and reality are extremely complex. . . . It is equally necessary to decolonize our minds, our inner life, at the same time that we decolonize society. An interview with Césaire by the poet René Depestre is also included.

A contemporary look at Albert Einstein's classic call for socialism

First published more than seventy-five years ago in the inaugural issue of Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, Albert Einstein's Why Socialism? is an unheralded classic. Written during the McCarthyite witch-hunt in the United States, it constituted an act of defiance, making a case for socialism unrivaled in its time or ours. Yet, its very existence has been an embarrassment to an establishment which has continually sought to downplay the significance of his iconoclastic essay, together with Einstein's socialism itself.

This slim, elegant volume includes Einstein's essay along with a detailed commentary on his essay by Monthly Review editor, John Bellamy Foster. Foster's introduction tells the story of Einstein's life-long commitment to socialism and the events leading to the publication of Why Socialism? and contextualizes the importance of his essay as we enter a time of planetary crisis and new threats of world war. Over the three-quarters of century since its publication, Why Socialism? is one of those rare statements whose power has only grown, reaching untold numbers of readers over the years. It is of crucial importance that--for the sake of the future of humanity--Einstein's message continues to proliferate.

This widely acclaimed book, first published in 1974, was a classic from its first day in print. 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.

The economic boom of the 1990s created huge wealth for the bosses, but benefited workers hardly at all. At the same time, the bosses were able to take the political initiative and even the moral high ground, while workers were often divided against each other. This new book by leading labor analyst Michael D. Yates seeks to explain how this happened, and what can be done about it. Essential to both tasks is naming the system-the system that ensures that those who do the work do not benefit from the wealth they produce. Yates draws on recent data to show that the growing inequality-globally, and within the United States-is a necessary consequence of capitalism, and not an unfortunate side-effect that can be remedied by technical measures. To defend working people against ongoing attacks-on their working conditions, their living standards, and their future and that of their children-and to challenge inequality, it is necessary to understand capitalism as a system and for labor to challenge the political dominance of capitalist interests. Naming the System examines contemporary trends in employment and unemployment, in hours of work, and in the nature of jobs. It shows how working life is being reconfigured today, and how the effects of this are masked by mainstream economic theories. It uses numerous concrete examples to relate larger theoretical issues to everyday experience of the present-day economy. And it sets out the strategic options for organized labor in the current political context, in which the U.S.-led war on terrorism threatens to eclipse the anti-globalization movement.

A stinging critique of Western Marxism, counterposing its complicity with imperialist logic against a resurgent anti-imperialism

Western Marxism: How It Was Born, How It Died, How It Can Be Reborn is a paradigm-shifting book that provides a trenchant critique of the Western left intelligentsia. It reveals how its dominant ideological orientation--characterized by defeatism, utopianism, and anti-communism--is rooted in the political economy of imperialism. Internationally acclaimed theorist Domenico Losurdo thus provides a fresh and challenging perspective on purportedly radical thinkers who have been widely promoted in the imperial core, including those affiliated with the Frankfurt School, French Theory, and operaismo, as well as Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, and Slavoj Zizek, among others. His critique also has wide-reaching implications for trend-setting discourses inspired by this coterie of intellectuals, from postcolonial and decolonial theory to subaltern studies and beyond. Far from being a negative undertaking, however, this book is grounded in the positive project of reigniting anti-imperialist Marxism.

As a complement to the Italian edition of Western Marxism, this first-ever English translation also features the unprecedented publication of a major lecture that demystifies Western Marxism and its role in imperialists' efforts to denigrate the achievements of actually existing socialism. Raising the stakes of what it means to produce critical theory, Western Marxism will surely provoke wide debate and a reevaluation of hallowed canons.

A collection of personal stories, history, poetry, and art

A Land With a People is a book of stories, photographs and poetry which elevates rarely heard Palestinian and Jewish voices and visions. Eloquently framed with a foreword by the dynamic Palestinian legal scholar and activist, Noura Erakat, this book began as a storytelling project of Jewish Voice for Peace-New York City and subsequently transformed into a theater project performed throughout the New York City area.

Stories touch hearts, open minds, and transform our understanding of the other--as well as our comprehension of own roles and responsibilities-- and A Land With a People emerges from this reckoning. It brings us the narratives of secular, Muslim, Christian, and queer Palestinians who endure the particular brand of settler colonialism known as Zionism. It relays the transformational journeys of Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, queer, and Palestinian Jews who have come to reject the received Zionist narrative. Unflinching in their confrontation of the power dynamics that underlie their transformation process, these writers find the courage to face what has happened to historic Palestine, and to their own families as a result. Contextualized by a detailed historical introduction and timeline charting 150 years of Palestinian and Jewish resistance to Zionism, this collection will stir emotions, provoke fresh thinking, and point to a more hopeful, loving future--one in which Palestine/Israel is seen for what it is in its entirety, as well as for what it can be.

A look at how much, and how little, has changed about class in America

One century ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald invited us into the lives of the rotten crowd, Jazz Age Americans with far more money than morals. In A Rotten Crowd America, Wealth, and One Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby, John Marsh welcomes us back to Fitzgerald's world to examine the rich and their reckless approach to human relationships, their poor taste in friends, and the harm they cause. Marsh leads us to wonder: What kinds of waste--economic, environmental, emotional--accompany a culture of wealth? What kinds of relationships do the wealthy form with those they rely upon to maintain their power--and how does capitalism and the need for the accumulation of wealth influence the bonds the rest of us form? On a surface level, how do the clothes people wear signal their status--and how do those fashions trickle down to the rest of us? And on a deeper level, how does racism drive a wedge between those who might otherwise stand up to the rich? As we move between 2025 and 1925 to consider how much--or little--has changed in the interim, A Rotten Crowd helps us discover what we can do about the obscene concentration of wealth in America today.

A history of the modern world told through the multiple lives of rubber

Capital, as Marx once wrote, comes into the world dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. He might well have been describing the long, grim history of rubber. From the early stages of primitive accumulation to the heights of the industrial revolution and beyond, rubber is one of a handful of commodities that has played a crucial role in shaping the modern world, and yet, as John Tully shows in this remarkable book, laboring people around the globe have every reason to regard it as the devil's milk. All the advancements made possible by rubber--industrial machinery, telegraph technology, medical equipment, countless consumer goods--have occurred against a backdrop of seemingly endless exploitation, conquest, slavery, and war. But Tully is quick to remind us that the vast terrain of rubber production has always been a site of struggle, and that the oppressed who toil closest to the devil's milk in all its forms have never accepted their immiseration without a fight.

This book, the product of exhaustive scholarship carried out in many countries and several continents, is destined to become a classic. Tully tells the story of humanity's long encounter with rubber in a kaleidoscopic narrative that regards little as outside its range without losing sight of the commodity in question. With the skill of a master historian and the elegance of a novelist, he presents what amounts to a history of the modern world told through the multiple lives of rubber.

Chronicles how American culture - deeply rooted in white supremacy, slavery and capitalism - finds its origin story in the 17th century European colonization of Africa and North America, exposing the structural origins of American looting

Virtually no part of the modern United States--the economy, education, constitutional law, religious institutions, sports, literature, economics, even protest movements--can be understood without first understanding the slavery and dispossession that laid its foundation. To that end, historian Gerald Horne digs deeply into Europe's colonization of Africa and the New World, when, from Columbus's arrival until the Civil War, some 13 million Africans and some 5 million Native Americans were forced to build and cultivate a society extolling liberty and justice for all. The seventeenth century was, according to Horne, an era when the roots of slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism became inextricably tangled into a complex history involving war and revolts in Europe, England's conquest of the Scots and Irish, the development of formidable new weaponry able to ensure Europe's colonial dominance, the rebel merchants of North America who created these United States, and the hordes of Europeans whose newfound opportunities in this free land amounted to combat pay for their efforts as white settlers.

Centering his book on the Eastern Seaboard of North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and what is now Great Britain, Horne provides a deeply researched, harrowing account of the apocalyptic loss and misery that likely has no parallel in human history. The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism is an essential book that will not allow history to be told by the victors. It is especially needed now, in the age of Trump. For it has never been more vital, Horne writes, to shed light on the contemporary moment wherein it appears that these malevolent forces have received a new lease on life.

Since the 2016 upsurge in enthusiasm for electoral organizing and party-building, the terrain has shifted. It was not so long ago that a new wave of democratic socialist organizing exploded onto the scene. Quickly, the defeat of candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn had a deflating effect. This followed on the crumbling of the new parties in Europe: In Greece, Syriza buckled in the face of the iron straitjacket imposed by EU institutions; in Spain, Podemos fractured under the weight of its ideological and institutional weaknesses; and Bloco fared no better in Portugal. Meanwhile, the Chavez-inspired Bolivarian revolutions in Latin America hit an impasse, barely stumbling along. We find socialist strategy again at a crossroads, pressed by the urgent need to find new directions forward amidst mounting crises.

Some on the left searching for new paths forward saw little alternative but to support authoritarian neoliberal states in their coercive response to a rising tide of hard-right forces, as if the repressive and bloody campaigns launched by powerful states could constitute junior components of anti-fascist 'popular fronts'. Others in the left turned to the workplace, taking new approaches to union organizing, seeking to build a working-class base for radical politics--whose absence seemed directly responsible for another round of defeats. At this new conjuncture, what was left of the strategy, tactics, and organizations that had seemed so promising? Was the 'new socialist' left starting over, or moving on? This year's Socialist Register 2025 engages with the openings and closures of at the crossroads of Socialist strategy, with case studies from Britain, US, Pakistan, Argentina, Germany, Bolivia, Barcelona, and Turkey, engaging with topics such as social struggles over climate change, Palestine solidarity, public banks, re-municipalization of utilities, and unions.

The Haitian Revolution, the product of the first successful slave revolt, was truly world-historic in its impact. When Haiti declared independence in 1804, the leading powers--France, Great Britain, and Spain--suffered an ignominious defeat and the New World was remade. The island revolution also had a profound impact on Haiti's mainland neighbor, the United States. Inspiring the enslaved and partisans of emancipation while striking terror throughout the Southern slaveocracy, it propelled the fledgling nation one step closer to civil war. Gerald Horne's path breaking new work explores the complex and often fraught relationship between the United States and the island of Hispaniola. Giving particular attention to the responses of African Americans, Horne surveys the reaction in the United States to the revolutionary process in the nation that became Haiti, the splitting of the island in 1844, which led to the formation of the Dominican Republic, and the failed attempt by the United States to annex both in the 1870s.
Drawing upon a rich collection of archival and other primary source materials, Horne deftly weaves together a disparate array of voices--world leaders and diplomats, slaveholders, white abolitionists, and the freedom fighters he terms Black Jacobins. Horne at once illuminates the tangled conflicts of the colonial powers, the commercial interests and imperial ambitions of U.S. elites, and the brutality and tenacity of the American slaveholding class, while never losing sight of the freedom struggles of Africans both on the island and on the mainland, which sought the fulfillment of the emancipatory promise of 18th century republicanism.

Samir Amin has undertaken an ambitious task: nothing less than an analysis of the process of capital accumulation on a global level. Drawing on a wide range of empirical material from Africa and the Middle East, Amin attempts to demonstrate, through a critique of writings on underdevelopment, how accumulation in advanced capitalist countries prevents development, however that may be defined, within the peripheral social formations, usually referred to as underdeveloped countries. Samir Amin ranks among those who realize the necessity not merely to comprehend the growing crisis of world capitalism, as it manifests itself within individual nation states, but also at the world level.

A classic collection of essays calling for decolonization through self-liberation

For us, said Amilcar Cabral, freedom is an act of culture--and these were not just words. Guided by the concrete realities of his people, Cabral called for a process of re-Africanization, a Return to the Source. As a new imperialism has taken hold the world over, many have hearkened back to Return to the Source, but this time, our source of inspiration is Cabral himself. With a system of thought rooted in an African reading of Marx, Cabral was a deep-thinking revolutionary who applied the principles of decolonization as a dialectic task, and in so doing became one of the world's most profoundly influential and effective theoreticians of anti-imperialist struggle. Cabral and his fellow Pan-African movement leaders catalyzed and fortified a militant wave of liberation struggles beginning in Angola, moving through Cabral's homelands of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, and culminating in Mozambique and beyond. He translated abstract theories into agile praxis and in under just ten years steered the liberation of three-quarters of the countryside of Guinea Bissau from Portuguese colonial domination.

In this new, expanded edition of Return to the Source: Selected Texts of Amilcar Cabral we have access to Cabral's warm and humorous informal address to the Africa Information Service, and we revisit several of the principal speeches Cabral delivered during visits to the United States in the final years before his assassination in 1973, including his last written address to his people on New Year's Eve. Return to the Source is essential reading for all who understand that the erasure of historical continuity between social movements has disrupted our ability to make the revolutionary transformation we all desperately require.

A galvanizing history of how jazz and jazz musicians flourished despite rampant cultural exploitation

The music we call jazz arose in late nineteenth century North America--most likely in New Orleans--based on the musical traditions of Africans, newly freed from slavery. Grounded in the music known as the blues, which expressed the pain, sufferings, and hopes of Black folk then pulverized by Jim Crow, this new music entered the world via the instruments that had been abandoned by departing military bands after the Civil War. Jazz and Justice examines the economic, social, and political forces that shaped this music into a phenomenal US--and Black American--contribution to global arts and culture.

Horne assembles a galvanic story depicting what may have been the era's most virulent economic--and racist--exploitation, as jazz musicians battled organized crime, the Ku Klux Klan, and other variously malignant forces dominating the nightclub scene where jazz became known. Horne pays particular attention to women artists, such as pianist Mary Lou Williams and trombonist Melba Liston, and limns the contributions of musicians with Native American roots. This is the story of a beautiful lotus, growing from the filth of the crassest form of human immiseration.

This ambitious book argues that the ongoing American project to dominate the world through military force has its roots in European liberalism, but has developed certain features of liberal ideology in a new and uniquely dangerous form. Where European political culture since the French Revolution has given a central place to values of equality, the American state has developed to serve the interests of capital alone, and is now exporting this model throughout the world. American imperialism, Amin argues, will be far more barbaric than earlier forms, pillaging natural resources and destroying the lives of the poor. The Liberal Virus examines the ways in which the American model is being imposed on the world, and outlines its economic and political consequences. It shows how both citizenship and class consciousness are diluted in low-intensity democracy and argues instead for democratization as an ongoing process-of fundamental importance for human progress-rather than a fixed constitutional formula designed to support the logic of capital accumulation. In a panoramic overview, Amin examines the objectives and outcomes of American policy in the different regions of the world. He concludes by outlining the challenges faced by those resisting the American project today: redefining European liberalism on the basis of a new compromise between capital and labor, re-establishing solidarity among the people of the South, and reconstructing an internationalism that serves the interests of regions that are currently divided against each other.

A comprehensive blueprint for a new post-capitalist order-which values our collective future over immediate economic gains

The fate of all economic systems is written in the energy flows they obtain from the natural world. Our collective humanity very much depends on nature-for joy, for comfort, and for sheer survival. In his prescient new book, The Physics of Capitalism, Erald Kolasi explores the deep ecological physics of human existence by developing a new theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between economic systems and the wider natural world.

Nature is full of complex and dynamic systems that are constantly interacting with our societies. The collective physical interactions of the natural world guide and forge many fundamental features of human societies and civilizations. Humanity does not exist on a magical pedestal above the rest of reality; we are just one slice in a grand continuum of physical systems that interact, combine, and transform over time. We too belong to the natural world. And it's this critical fact that controls the long-term fate of our economies and civilizations. Among all the living organisms that have called this blue marble home, humans are a very recent species. In that short period of time, we have managed to become one of the most dominant life forms in the history of the planet, creating powerful civilizations with elaborate cultures, large populations, and extensive trade networks. We have been nomads and farmers, scientists and lawyers, nurses and doctors, welders and blacksmiths. Our achievements are both astonishing and unprecedented, but they also carry great risks.

Throughout history, economic growth has depended heavily on people converting more energy from their natural environments and concentrating the resulting energy flows towards the application of specific tasks. The economic and demographic growth of human civilization over the last ten thousand years has profoundly impacted natural ecosystems throughout the planet, triggering major instabilities across the biosphere that threaten to reverberate on civilization and to destabilize its long-term trajectory. Swamped with multiple ecological challenges of historic proportions, global civilization now stands at a critical tipping point that deserves closer scrutiny. If we are to have any hope of addressing the difficult challenges we face, then we must begin by understanding them and appreciating their complexity. And then, we must act. This book offers a comprehensive blueprint for our collective future, pointing the way to a new post-capitalist order that can provide long-term viability and stability for human civilization on a global scale.

Reveals the ideal of a sustainable ecosocialist world in Marx's writings

Karl Marx, author of what is perhaps the world's most resounding and significant critique of bourgeois political economy, has frequently been described as a Promethean. According to critics, Marx held an inherent belief in the necessity of humans to dominate the natural world, in order to end material want and create a new world of fulfillment and abundance--a world where nature is mastered, not by anarchic capitalism, but by a planned socialist economy. Understandably, this perspective has come under sharp attack, not only from mainstream environmentalists but also from ecosocialists, many of whom reject Marx outright.

Kohei Saito's Karl Marx's Ecosocialism lays waste to accusations of Marx's ecological shortcomings. Delving into Karl Marx's central works, as well as his natural scientific notebooks--published only recently and still being translated--Saito also builds on the works of scholars such as John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett, to argue that Karl Marx actually saw the environmental crisis embedded in capitalism. It is not possible to comprehend the full scope of [Marx's] critique of political economy, Saito writes, if one ignores its ecological dimension.

Saito's book is crucial today, as we face unprecedented ecological catastrophes--crises that cannot be adequately addressed without a sound theoretical framework. Karl Marx's Ecosocialism shows us that Marx has given us more than we once thought, that we can now come closer to finishing Marx's critique, and to building a sustainable ecosocialist world.

Near Fine; see scans and description. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970. Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization, by Kwame Nkrumah. ISBN 0853451362. Octavo, printed perfect-bound wraps, 122 pp. Near Fine, with no salient flaws whatsoever; some light cover rubbing and touch edgewear. Sharp, handsome. Nkrumah's effort to translate parts of traditional European socialist philosophy into terms relevant to circumstances in Africa at the time. LT18

The global economic crisis and recession that began in 2008 had at least one unexpected outcome: a surge in sales of Karl Marx's Capital. Although mainstream economists and commentators once dismissed Marx's work as outmoded and flawed, some are begrudgingly acknowledging an analysis that sees capitalism as inherently unstable. And of course, there are those, like Michael Heinrich, who have seen the value of Marx all along, and are in a unique position to explain the intricacies of Marx's thought.

Heinrich's modern interpretation of Capital is now available to English-speaking readers for the first time. It has gone through nine editions in Germany, is the standard work for Marxist study groups, and is used widely in German universities. The author systematically covers all three volumes of Capital and explains all the basic aspects of Marx's critique of capitalism in a way that is clear and concise. He provides background information on the intellectual and political milieu in which Marx worked, and looks at crucial issues beyond the scope of Capital, such as class struggle, the relationship between capital and the state, accusations of historical determinism, and Marx's understanding of communism. Uniquely, Heinrich emphasizes the monetary character of Marx's work, in addition to the traditional emphasis on the labor theory of value, this highlighting the relevance of Capital to the age of financial explosions and implosions.