What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality.Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality—the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth—today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again.A work of extraordinary ambition, originality, and rigor, Capital in the Twenty-First Century reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.

A strike is an everyday event. Pick up a newspaper anywhere in the world and you will find reports of strikes. By striking, workers call into question the relationship they have with their employer. It follows that the mass strike calls into questio the relationship between the working class and the employing class. Ultimately, therefore, it has revolutionary implications.The mass strike fuses together the struggle for reforms inside the capitalist system with the struggle for its revolutionary overthrow. It is a bridge between the here and now and the socialist future.This classic work by Rosa Luxemburg examines the mass strikes that came to their climax with the Russian Revolution of 1905.

Since the civil rights era, the doctrine of nonviolence has enjoyed near-universal acceptance by the US Left. Today protest is often shaped by cooperation with state authorities—even organizers of rallies against police brutality apply for police permits, and anti-imperialists usually stop short of supporting self-defense and armed resistance. How Nonviolence Protects the State challenges the belief that nonviolence is the only way to fight for a better world. In a call bound to stir controversy and lively debate, Peter Gelderloos invites activists to consider diverse tactics, passionately arguing that exclusive nonviolence often acts to reinforce the same structures of oppression that activists seek to overthrow.Contemporary movements for social change face plenty of difficult questions, but sometimes matters of strategy and tactics receive low priority. Many North American activists fail to scrutinize the role of nonviolence, never posing essential questions:• Is nonviolence effective at ending systems of oppression?• Does nonviolence intersect with white privilege and the dominance of North over South?• How does pacifism reinforce the same power dynamic as patriarchy?• Ultimately, does nonviolence protect the state?Peter Gelderloos is a radical community organizer. He is the author of Consensus: A New Handbook for Grassroots Political, Social, and Environmental Groups and a contributor to Letters From Young Activists. He is the co-facilitator of a workshop on the prison system, and is also involved in independent media, copwatching, anti-oppression work, and anarchist organizing.

"Richard Wolff is the leading socialist economist in the country. This book is required reading for anyone concerned about a fundamental transformation of the ailing capitalist economy."—Cornel West“Richard Wolff’s constructive and innovative ideas suggest new and promising foundations for a much more authentic democracy and sustainable and equitable development, ideas that can be implemented directly and carried forward. A very valuable contribution in troubled times.”—Noam Chomsky"Probably America's most prominent Marxist economist."—The New York TimesCapitalism as a system has spawned deepening economic crisis alongside its bought-and-paid-for political establishment. Neither serves the needs of our society. Whether it is secure, well-paid, and meaningful jobs or a sustainable relationship with the natural environment that we depend on, our society is not delivering the results people need and deserve.One key cause for this intolerable state of affairs is the lack of genuine democracy in our economy as well as in our politics. The solution requires the institution of genuine economic democracy, starting with workers directing their own workplaces, as the basis for a genuine political democracy.Here Richard D. Wolff lays out a hopeful and concrete vision of how to make that possible, addressing the many people who have concluded economic inequality and politics as usual can no longer be tolerated and are looking for a concrete program of action.Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is currently a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York. Wolff is the author of many books, including Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do About It. He hosts the weekly hour-long radio program Economic Update on WBAI (Pacifica Radio) and writes regularly for The Guardian, Truthout.org, and MRZine.

The Poverty of Philosophy criticizes the economic and philosophical arguments of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon set forth in The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty. Marx specifically accuses Proudhon of wanting to rise above the bourgeoisie. In the history of Marx's thought and Marxism, this work is pivotal in the distinction between the Marxist concepts of utopian socialism and scientific socialism.This Elibron Classics edition is a facsimile reprint of a 1920 edition by Charles H. Kerr &amp; Company, Chicago.

Chris Harman describes the shape and course of human history as a narrative of ordinary people forming and re-forming complex societies in pursuit of common human goals. Interacting with the forces of technological change as well as the impact of powerful individuals and revolutionary ideas, these societies have engendered events familiar to every schoolchild - from the empires of antiquity to the world wars of the twentieth century.In a bravura conclusion, Chris Harman exposes the reductive complacency of contemporary capitalism, and asks, in a world riven as never before by suffering and inequality, why we imagine that it can - or should - survive much longer. Ambitious, provocative and invigorating, A People's History of the World delivers a vital corrective to traditional history, as well as a powerful sense of the deep currents of humanity which surge beneath the froth of government.

Neoliberalism--the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action--has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. Through critical engagement with this history, he constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.

Great read, my edition (plain beige colored cover originally printed in the PRC) included letters from Engels after release which are worth checking out if you can find them online. I won't repeat most of Marx's critiques here, but he does a thorough breakdown of each of the points in the Gotha program. Some memorable points for me: 1) Marx repeatedly stresses for a total change of how production is organized, as opposed to the Lassalleans who focus on "fair distribution" of the "proceeds of labor". Aside from the question of what is "fair distribution" and what should we define as the "proceeds of labor", Marx hammers home an important point: "Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. ... Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution". Arguing in the name of socialism based on distribution is a mistake I've made before and I see many still do so. We can recognize the contradiction between the bourgeoisie &amp; proletariat all we want but if we mainly focus on showing how the redistribution of capitalist society would be better, we not only send the wrong msg but also end up along the path of social democracy (and there's obviously the issue of a 'social democrstic' country that relies on redistribution of wealth internally while being an imperialist power) This is Marxism 101 but it helps to see Marx clearly spell it out. 2) Marx is REALLY clear and deliberate in his critique. It's a mistake to simply emulate the style of communist writing in the past, but the quality of Marx's critiques is something to aspire to. He dissects each point of the Gotha program and shows how it's not only incorrect, but horribly defined and vague (making critiquing it that much more annoying). Funny how that remains an issue today too 3) Marx's criticism of the Bourgious concept of "equal rights" is fantastic and goes beyond where many do where they only discuss the issues of 'equal right' between the bourgiosie and proletariat. I can't summarize it with a few quotes so I leave the ending for those who lie and state that Marx believed those who can't work should starve: "In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"

This book is our attempt to answer the idea that socialism is dead and buried after the demise of the Soviet Union.The core of the book consists of a series of chapters spelling out what we believe would be efficient and democratic methods for planning a complex economy. We also examine issues of inequality and its elimination, systems of payment for labour, a democratic political constitution for a socialist commonwealth, the commune as a set of arrangements for living, and property relations under socialism.

The fourth in AK Press’ Working Classics series, The Conquest of Bread is Peter Kropotkin’s most extensive study of human needs and his outline of the most rational and equi-table means of satisfying them. A combination of detailed historical analysis and far-reaching utopian vision, this is a step-by-step guide to social revolution: the concrete means of achieving it, and the world that humanity’s “constructive genius” is capable of creating. Includes a new introduction that historically situates and discusses the contemporary relevance of Kropotkin’s ideas.

In his "Secret Speech" of February 1956 Nikita Khrushchev accused Joseph Stalin of immense crimes. Khrushchev's speech was a body blow from which the worldwide communist movement never recovered. It changed the course of history.Grover Furr has spent a decade studying the flood of documents from formerly secret Soviet archives published since the end of the USSR. In this detailed study of Khrushchev's speech he reveals the astonishing results of his research: Not a single one of Khrushchev's "revelations" is true! The most influential speech of the 20th century-if not of all time-a dishonest swindle? The very thought is monstrous; the implications for our understanding of Left history-immense. Basing their work on Khrushchev's lies, Soviet and Western historians, including Trotskyists and anticommunists, have effectively falsified Soviet history. Virtually everything we thought we knew about the Stalin years turns out to be wrong. The history of the USSR, and of the communist movement of the 20th century, must be completely rewritten.

Blackshirts &amp; Reds explores some of the big issues of our time: fascism, capitalism, communism, revolution, democracy, and ecology—terms often bandied about but seldom explored in the original and exciting way that has become Michael Parenti’s trademark.Parenti shows how “rational fascism” renders service to capitalism, how corporate power undermines democracy, and how revolutions are a mass empowerment against the forces of exploitative privilege. He also maps out the external and internal forces that destroyed communism, and the disastrous impact of the “free-market” victory on eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He affirms the relevance of taboo ideologies like Marxism, demonstrating the importance of class analysis in understanding political realities and dealing with the ongoing collision between ecology and global corporatism.Written with lucid and compelling style, this book goes beyond truncated modes of thought, inviting us to entertain iconoclastic views, and to ask why things are as they are. It is a bold and entertaining exploration of the epic struggles of yesterday and today."A penetrating and persuasive writer with an astonishing array of documentation to implement his attacks."—The Catholic Journalist"Blackshirts &amp; Reds discusses the great combat between fascism and socialism that is the defining feature of the Twentieth Century, and takes every official version to task for its substitution of moral analysis for critical analysis, for its selectivity, and for its errata. By portraying the struggle between fascism and Communism in this century as a single conflict, and not a series of discrete encounters, between the insatiable need for new capital on the one hand and the survival of a system under siege on the other, Parenti defines fascism as the weapon of capitalism, not simply an extreme form of it. Fascism is not an aberration, he points out, but a "rational" and integral component of the system."—Stan Goff, The PrismMichael Parenti, PhD Yale, is an internationally known author and lecturer. He is one of the nation's leadiing progressive political analysts. He is the author of over 275 published articles and twenty books. His writings are published in popular periodicals, scholarly journals, and his op-ed pieces have been in leading newspapers such as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. His informative and entertaining books and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad.

If you're familiar with Wolff's writings or lectures, this book will be a snappy recap of his core concepts. It will also be a bit redundant. If you're new to Wolff, or Socialism in general, this is an essential work to start with. It answers many questions, and dispels plenty of myths regarding Marx, Socialism, Communism, and Capitalism. Our future in a post-capitalist world is clearly laid out here like an instruction manual. We should all be learning and discussing how to participate in that future.

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