Products

Millions of words have been written about the Cuban Revolution, which, to both its supporters and detractors, is almost universally understood as being won by a small band of guerillas. In this unique and stimulating book, Stephen Cushion turns the conventional wisdom on its head, and argues that the Cuban working class played a much more decisive role in the Revolution’s outcome than previously understood. Although the working class was well-organized in the 1950s, it is believed to have been too influenced by corrupt trade union leaders, the Partido Socialist Popular, and a tradition of making primarily economic demands to have offered much support to the guerillas. Cushion contends that the opposite is true, and that significant portions of the Cuban working class launched an underground movement in tandem with the guerillas operating in the mountains.
Developed during five research trips to Cuba under the auspices of the Institute of Cuban History in Havana, this book analyzes a wealth of leaflets, pamphlets, clandestine newspapers, and other agitational material from the 1950s that has never before been systematically examined, along with many interviews with participants themselves. Cushion uncovers widespread militant activity, from illegal strikes to sabotage to armed conflict with the state, all of which culminated in two revolutionary workers’ congresses and the largest general strike in Cuban history. He argues that these efforts helped clinch the victory of the revolution, and thus presents a fresh and provocative take on the place of the working class in Cuban history.

Scrutinizes possibilities for an equalised global order, in light of recent conflicts between the world’s major powers

The “post-Cold War era is definitively over,” asserted US President Joe Biden as he launched the new National Security Strategy, warning in late 2022 that “a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next.” American leadership, the document declared, would be more necessary than ever to define "the future of the international order,” insisting that the US must marshal its unparalleled economic, military, and diplomatic resources to confront its geopolitical rivals. Socialist Register 2024: A New Global Geometry? takes stock of momentous changes on the horizon: Even if these geopolitical shifts do not spell the end of globalization, how might they alter its historical trajectory? While it is it premature to speak of the end of the liberal economic order, let alone the development of a multipolar international system, can we begin to assess the dimensions of a new global geometry? And, how might we assess the potential vulnerabilities of socialist movements worldwide, alongside the potential resistance our movements might manage to present, grounded in our historical demands for a democratic and equalizing world order?

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 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.

A comprehensive history of the National Civil Liberties Bureau's role in the anti-war movement during the First World War

World War I, given all the rousing “Over-There” songs and in-the-trenches films it inspired, was, at its outset, surprisingly unpopular with the American public. As opposition increased, Woodrow Wilson’s presidential administration became intent on stifling antiwar dissent. Wilson effectively silenced the National Civil Liberties Bureau, forerunner of the American Civil Liberties Union. Presidential candidate Eugene Debs was jailed, and Deb’s Socialist Party became a prime target of surveillance operations, both covert and overt. Drastic as these measures were, more draconian measures were to come.

In his absorbing new book, Free Speech and the Suppression of Dissent During World War I, Eric Chester reveals that out of this turmoil came a heated public discussion on the theory of civil liberties – the basic freedoms that are, theoretically, untouchable by any of the three branches of the U.S. government. The famous “clear and present danger” argument of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the “balance of conflicting interest” theory of law professor Zechariah Chafee, for example, evolved to provide a rationale for courts to act as a limited restraint on autocratic actions of the government. But Chester goes further, to examine an alternative theory: civil liberties exist as absolute rights, rather than being dependent on the specific circumstances of each case. Over the years, the debate about the right to dissent has intensified and become more necessary. This fascinating book explains why, a century after the First World War – and in the era of Trump – we need to know about this.

“The societies of the dominated periphery no longer can wait,” said the great Egyptian economist Samir Amin, over half a century ago in the lively and readable book, Imperialism and Unequal Development. “With every passing year, the material conditions of their vast masses becomes more intolerable, which the palliatives of capitalist integration becomes increasingly worthless,” he continued, while noting that, in response to this acute and prolonged suffering, the renaissance of Marxism also characterized the very same years in which he wrote. This Marxist renaissance originated in those parts of the world, he showed, have been and continue to be the scene of decisive revolutionary struggles—that is, in the exploited and oppressed periphery of the world capitalist system, primarily, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

With the freshness and originality that readers came to expect from Amin Imperialism and Unequal Development dealt with an extraordinarily wide range of topics, from “Historical Materialism: Capitalism and Socialism” and “Imperialism and Underdevelopment,” to “Problems of Transition and the Construction of Socialism.” Pointing to the relationship between regions at the frontlines of capitalist and neocolonial degradation, and the renaissance in Marxist thought, Amin argued that Marxism has always been “neither an economic theory, a sociological theory, nor a philosophy, but the social science of revolutionary socialist praxis.”

The story of a political prisoner’s coming of age as a student activist in India

Keeping Up the Good Fight is the story of a young man’s political coming of age and his experience as a student activist and scientist incarcerated by two authoritarian regimes in India, half a century apart.

On September 25, 1975, the students of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi called for a strike to protest the expulsion of Ashoklata Jain, an elected student union member. Three months earlier, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had declared a state of Emergency. It was the second day of the strike and the campus was tense. A black car rolled up near a group of students. A few plainclothes cops got out, and abducted one of them: The student spent the next year in jail. Almost fifty years later, on February 9, 2021, the founder of an online news portal saw his home and offices raided for 113 hours straight, ransacked by officers from the Enforcement Directorate. Nearly two years later, on October 3, 2023, the Delhi Police Special Cell reappeared. The founder of the news portal and his colleague were remanded to custody under the dreaded Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).

That student journalist and scientist, Prabir Purkayastha, tells his own story with wit and humor, as he engages with some of India’s most pressing social, political and economic issues across the decades—and remains committed to “keeping up the good fight.”

A powerful contribution to the debate on intellectual property

Knowledge as Commons traces the historical path towards the privatization of knowledge, situating science, technology and the emergence of modern nations in a larger historical framework. Author Prabir Purkayastha asks: Do the needs of society drive science and technology? Or do developments in science and technology provide the motor force of history? Has this relationship changed over time? Purkayastha shows us that, with profit as its sole aim, capital claims to own human knowledge and its products, fencing them in with patents and intellectual property rights. Neoliberal institutions and policy diktats from the West have installed a global system in which knowledge, that limitless resource, is made artificially scarce—while limited resources such as water and clean air are treated as though they were infinite.

Arguing that rapid technological change, from pharmaceuticals to electronics, should be an opportunity to deliver quicker cures, affordable access, and global cooperation in the production of knowledge, Purkayastha examines the consequences of this privatization for universities, healthcare, distributive justice, the domestic politics of developing countries, and their prospects vis-à-vis the West.

A contemporary interrogation of Marx’s masterwork

Karl Marx saw the ruling class as a sorcerer, no longer able to control the ominous powers it has summoned from the netherworld. Today, in an age spawning the likes of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, our society has never before been governed by so many conjuring tricks, with collusions and conspiracies, fake news and endless sleights of the economic and political hand. And yet, contends Andy Merrifield, as our modern lives become ever more mist-enveloped, the works of Marx can help us penetrate the fog.

In Marx, Dead and Alive—a book that begins and ends beside Marx’s recently violated London graveside—Merrifield makes a spirited case for a critical thinker who can still offer people a route toward personal and social authenticity. Bolstering his argument with fascinating examples of literature and history, from Shakespeare and Beckett, to the Luddites and the Black Panthers, Merrifield demonstrates how Marx can reveal our individual lives to us within a collective perspective—and within a historical continuum. Who we are now hinges on who we once were—and who we might become. This, at a time when our value-system is undergoing core “post-truth” meltdown.

The first biography of Helena Sheehan, Irish-American Marxist feminist activist

Why would an American girl-child, born into a good, Irish-Catholic family in the thick of the McCarthy era – a girl who, when she came of age, entered a convent – morph into an atheist, feminist, and Marxist? The answer is in Helena Sheehan’s fascinating account of her journey from her 1940s and 1950s beginnings, into the turbulent 1960s, when the Vietnam War, black power, and women’s liberation rocked her bedrock assumptions and prompted a volley of life-upending questions – questions shared by millions of young people of her generation. But, for Helena Sheehan, the increasingly radicalized answers deepened through the following decades.

Beginning by overturning such certainties as America-is-the-world’s-greatest-country and the-Church-is-infallible, Sheehan went on to embrace existentialism, philosophical pragmatism, the new left, and eventually Marxism. Migrating from the United States to Ireland, she became involved with Irish republicanism and international communism in the 1970s and 1980s. Sheehan’s narrative vividly captures the global sweep and contradictions of second-wave feminism, antiwar activism, national liberation movements, and international communism in Eastern and Western Europe – as well as the quieter intellectual ferment of individuals living through these times. Navigating the Zeitgeist is an eloquently articulated voyage from faith to enlightenment to historical materialism that informs as well as entertains. This is the story of a well-lived political and philosophical life, told by a woman who continues to interrogate her times.

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 first-ever English translation of one of the legends of the Latin American left

Rafael Barrett was born into the Spanish elite, but in the six intense years that he spent in Paraguay, he shed his past to become one of the most notable voices speaking out against the rampant imperialism gripping Latin America. Arriving in a nation constructed upon a foundation of bones following the Triple Alliance War of 1864-1870, Barrett was thrown by chance into the “Paraguayan sorrow” that haunted that landlocked nation in the heart of Latin America. More than half the population had been wiped out in the merciless conflict. A ferocious pattern of capitalist imperialism had taken hold. The apocalyptic war had ended a period of relative economic independence, and—as competing elites allied with foreign interests squabbled over rulership—Paraguay’s poor workers entered a long descent into utter degradation. All that Barrett witnessed prompted him to discard the vestiges of his past as an upper-class liberal dandy in Madrid, shifting his politics rapidly to the left and becoming a key ally of the growing Paraguayan anarcho-syndicalist movement.

As skirmishes between Paraguay’s national elites pushed the country from one military uprising to the next, Barrett’s prolific articles in the capital city’s press broke the silence on deep social, economic, and political problems playing out in urban and rural areas. Barrett transformed into one of Paraguay’s most vivid commentators, denouncing private property and the state, and one of the most vocal defenders of the heavily marginalized culture, language, and landscapes of the Paraguayan popular classes. He paid the ultimate price for his metamorphosis, ultimately facing banishment from the nation’s intelligentsia, poverty, exile, and a tuberculosis infection that would soon end his life.

Despite Barrett’s position as a legendary figure in Paraguayan, Uruguayan, and Argentinian leftist circles, especially among anarchists, his work has endured long periods of relative obscurity since his death. Among Barrett’s wide-ranging texts, he is often remembered for a brave exposé of the horrors committed against Paraguayan workers by powerful international companies that extracted the leaf of the yerba mate tree from the depths of enormous enclaves of forest they controlled. Barrett’s attack on this state-backed system of debt slavery would position him as a forerunner of anti-neocolonial writing in Latin America. This edition of his striking book Paraguayan Sorrow (1911), which includes his writing on the yerba mate forests, forms part of a wave of renewed interest in a striking body of writing covering an enormous number of disciplines and geographical regions. With its vivid landscapes, precise analysis, and bold denouncements, this first-ever English translation of Paraguayan Sorrow brings us a relevant and inspiring resource for the analysis of imperialism in Paraguay, Latin America, and across the globe.

One hundred years ago, “October 1917” galvanized leftists and oppressed peoples around the globe, and became the lodestar for 20th century politics. Today, the left needs to reckon with this legacy—and transcend it. Social change, as it was understood in the 20th century, appears now to be as impossible as revolution, leaving the left to rethink the relationship between capitalist crises, as well as the conceptual tension between revolution and reform.

Populated by an array of passionate thinkers and thoughtful activists, Rethinking Revolution reappraises the historical effects of the Russian revolution—positive and negative—on political, intellectual, and cultural life, and looks at consequent revolutions after 1917. Change needs to be understood in relation to the distinct trajectories of radical politics in different regions. But the main purpose of this Socialist Register edition—one century after “Red October”—is to look forward, to what might happen next.

Acclaimed authors interrogate and explore compelling issues, including:

• Greg Albo: New socialist strategies—or detours?

• Jodi Dean: Are the multitudes communing? Revolutionary agency and political forms today.

• Adolph Reed: Are racial minorities revolutionary agents?

• Zillah Eisenstein: Revolutionary feminisms today.

• Nina Power: Accelerated technology, decelerated revolution.

• David Schwartzman: Beyond global warming: Is solar communism possible?

• Andrea Malm: Revolution and counter-revolution in an era of climate change.

“As a revolutionary theoretician Cabral has few equals anywhere in the world.”—The Tribune (London)

The success of the liberation movement of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde in the 1960s and ’70s was due in considerable measure to the political genius of Amilcar Cabral. Engineer turned guerilla, he followed no “school” imported from abroad. The speeches, writings, and interviews in this volume show a distinctive strategy based upon meticulous study of conditions in his own country and they summarize the principles of the PAIGC---the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde.

A remarkable personal journey through the life and writings of the great Sardinian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci

In June 2023, author Andy Merrifield and his partner and their daughter moved from the UK to Rome, she to take a new job, he to get his creative juices flowing again, and both to begin a new life. A short time later, he visited Gramsci’s grave at the Non-Catholic Cemetery, home as well to the great Romantics, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Soon he took a volunteer position helping to maintain the cemetery and as it turned out, to keep a watchful eye on Gramsci’s tombstone, admiring the roses and notes that visitors left, talking to some of them and communing with the sentinel cat that kept watch near the gravesite. Thus began Merrifield’s deep dive into Gramsci’s life.

The result is a stunning portrait that offers fresh insights into nearly every aspect of Gramsci’s often tortured existence: a childhood scarred by severe health problems; his growing understanding of political economy; his generosity and kindness; his grasp of the culture of workers and peasants; his friendship with the economist Piero Sraffa; and his frustration trying to communicate with and be father to the son he never saw. Above all, Merrifield illuminates how Gramsci kept his humanity, suffering horribly in prison while writing a revolutionary classic, The Prison Notebooks.

Personal, compassionate, moving—and illustrated with the author’s photographs —Merrifield revives both the legacy and meaning of Gramsci’s work and the dying art of belles lettres. Roses for Gramsci is an evocative and indelible book.

Shadows of the Enlightenment sheds light on the deeply political agenda underlying Western science from the so-called “Age of Reason” to the present. George McCarthy uncovers the economic, social, and historical origins of modern science, and illuminates the a priori and innate features which furnish the justifications for the technical domination and control of nature and humanity.

The natural sciences were born of a market economy, commercial trade, and industrial production, and were furthermore reflective of the values and institutions of modern capitalism and its class system in the seventeenth century. As such, one of the central roles of Western science has been to legitimate its theoretical imperative to dominate nature and to reorganize human labor for profit, property, and power. Breaking with the medieval scholastic tradition, modern science viewed nature as a reified mechanism which could be mathematically measured, empirically predicted, causally explained, and managed. Nature itself was recast as a dead machine stripped of any inherent meaning or purpose.

Ultimately, when applied to the production process, the field of natural science led to scientific management and economic exploitation; and when applied in the academy, particularly to the social sciences, the field of natural science led to the eclipse of reason and the twilight of social theory. Building upon the radical analysis of Marx and Engels, Shadows of the Enlightenment articulates a new liberatory postmodern science and technology grounded in Marx’s theory of social justice, integrating ancient and modern traditions from classical Greece to the French Revolution, from the Paris Commune to the Iroquois Confederacy. In the process, McCarthy invites us to move beyond the falsely mechanistic sense of reality, and to break free from the sense of alienation that binds us all—all in order to make space for dreaming up a substantively democratic society.

"Superb. Combining unassailable analysis with a thorough grasp of economic and political trends, Duncan Green convincingly argues that the region is headed for even greater tragedy unless people move toward more equitable and ecologically sustainable models of economic development."
—Walden Bello, founder of Focus on the Global South
The first edition of Green's Silent Revolution, published in 1995, described the imposition of neoliberal economic models in Latin America, the role of the IMF and World Bank in enforcing them, and their consequences. In this second, revised edition, Green extends his analysis into the present, showing how the current economic meltdown in Latin America was prepared by an economic strategy that could never live up to its own claims.
The new edition was completed in a moment when the Argentinean economy is in ruins, Brazil is on the brink of collapse, riots are taking place in Uruguay, Peru, and in Paraguay, and a U.S. supported coup has just been averted in Venezuela. It will be an essential work for understanding ongoing developments in the region.

Reveals that the institution of slavery was anchored in the same exploitative capitalist system which remains in place today

Slavery in the British Empire and its Legacy in the Modern World, by Stephen Cushion, situates the crime of enslavement within the business practices that place profit before people. The institution of slavery entailed a unique combination of exploitation and expropriation anchored in patterns of conspicuous con­sumption by the wealthy, and intertwined with the textile, food, agriculture, construction, transportation, infrastructure and insurance industries. It was floated by the same banking and commod­ity trading systems that still remain today.
The exploitation of enslaved labor stimulated capitalist expansion during and after the bloody reign of the British Empire—at the cost of war, inter-imperialist rivalry, Indigenous genocide, and the murderous suppression of the rights of the enslaved. And as Cushion argues, many of the direst problems still facing the world—from horrific economic inequality to rampant environmental decline—have their origins in the institution of slavery.Correcting these wrongs will cost money. Perversely, there is no shortage of funds in the coffers of the institutions which perpetrated them. Neither Anglo governments, nor businesses, have properly addressed their role. Ultimately, Slavery in the British Empire and its Legacy in the Modern World goes beyond cataloguing past wrongs, to engaging with the legacies of slavery, spotlighting, above all, the defiant response of those it wronged—as they call for reparations and more.

A fresh look on the welfare system—with a view beyond the state

With The Class Struggle and Welfare, David Matthews argues that we must understand the welfare state as a dialectical phenomenon—a product of class struggle. Confronting the hypocritical rhetoric of politicians who castigate welfare beneficiaries as lazy and “workshy,” Matthews points to clear evidence that the welfare state is essential to the prosperity and health of capitalist economies. At the same time, in the Marxist tradition, Matthews moves well beyond an analysis of welfare as simply an instrument wielded by capitalism for its benefit, arguing that proof of the class struggle scars the surface of every welfare system.

With chapters focusing on welfare issues, including social security, health, disability, housing, and education, Matthews examines historical and current developments in Britain as a basis for a wider understanding of the relationship between capitalism and welfare. The Class Struggle and Welfare shows that as welfare states grew exponentially throughout the advanced capitalist world over the course of a century, the intents, purposes and perceptions of the institution of welfare underwent a dialectical transformation. On the one hand, the services offered served to bolster capitalism. On the other hand, welfare systems in and of themselves were born of class struggle. In turn, even as current welfare systems reflect the values and the needs of the capitalist arena, the influence and imprint of the working class is plain to see. The Class Struggle and Welfare ultimately looks to the future, arguing that the working class must consider an alternative type of welfare system—one which looks beyond the state and truly reflects the values of equality, solidarity, and community.

A deconstruction of the neoliberal placations about global capitalism, exposing the inequalities of global poverty

“We’re making headway on global poverty,” trills Bill Gates. “Decline of Global Extreme Poverty Continues,” reports the World Bank. “How did the global poverty rate halve in 20 years?” inquires The Economist.

Seth Donnelly answers: “It didn’t!” In fact, according to Donnelly, virtually nothing about these glad tidings proclaiming plummeting global poverty rates is true. It’s just that trend-setting neoliberal experts and institutions need us to believe that global capitalism, now unfettered in the wake of the Cold War and bolstered by Information Technology, has ushered in a new phase of international human prosperity.

This short book deconstructs the assumption that global poverty has fallen dramatically, and lays bare the spurious methods of poverty measurement and data on which the dominant prosperity narrative depends. Here is carefully researched documentation that global poverty—and the inequalities and misery that flourish within it—remains massive, afflicting the majority of the world’s population. Donnelly goes further to analyze just how global poverty, rather than being reduced, is actually reproduced by the imperatives of capital accumulation on a global scale. Just as the global, environmental catastrophe cannot be resolved within capitalism, rooted as it is in contemporary mechanisms of exploitation and plunder, neither can human poverty be effectively eliminated by neoliberal “advances.”

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.

A straightforward discussion of the issues surrounding immigration

U.S. immigration has been the subject of furious debates for decades. On one side, politicians and the media talk about aliens and criminals, with calls to “deport them all.” On the other side, some advocates idealize immigrants and gloss over problems associated with immigration. Dialogue becomes possible when we dig deeper and ask tough questions: Why are people in other countries leaving their homes and coming here? What does it mean to be “illegal”? How do immigration raids, prisons, and border walls impact communities? Who suffers and who profits from our current system—and what would happen if we transformed it?

The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers goes beyond soundbites to tackle these concerns in straightforward language and an accessible question-and-answer format. First published in 2007, this updated and expanded edition is an effective tool to confront current stereotypes and disinformation. Those who believe immigrants take jobs from citizens, don't pay taxes, strain public services, and threaten the dominant culture will find their assumptions challenged with compelling arguments and hard data. Ideal for classroom use, The Politics of Immigration provides those who are undecided about immigration with the facts and clear reasoning they need to develop an informed opinion.

Toppling the First Ministry, by T. M. Thomas Isaac and Richard W. Franke, tells the story of the CIA’s covert operations against India’s first Communist ministry. When Kerala, the south-west Indian coastal province, established its first Communist ministry in 1957, it immediately drew up a development schema rooted in plans to redistribute land and provide public education and healthcare to all. But as quickly as it began executing its vision, Kerala’s efforts were disrupted by anti-communist agitation that succeeded in toppling the ministry with the help of the CIA. To this day, the CIA has not claimed any direct role in toppling Kerala’s government


Kerala is not alone. From Guatemala to Iran to the Congo to Brazil, to Indonesia and beyond, the CIA put up the financing to generate street mobs, groomed thuggish political bosses to do the CIA’s bidding, organized private armies that answered to the CIA, bought and controlled media and individuals, assassinated popular leaders, and toppled elected ministries in an effort to maintain or establish U.S. control of the political and economic systems. One could see the story of Kerala as just one more tragic example of the CIA’s successful efforts to manipulate the course of history and disrupt everyday life in countless emerging post-colonial nations following WWII. And yet, Kerala stands apart as an exceptional case, remarkable for what it managed to achieve: a redistributive strategy of development and consequent high quality of life for its ordinary citizens, initially at a relatively low level of economic growth. Since then, bolstered by subsequent intermittent left-led governments, Kerala`s democratic development alternative has continued to flourish.


Drawing upon the recent revelation of thousands of pages of documents via the Freedom of Information Act, Isaac and Franke offer a detailed examination of the internal workings of the CIA and its local Kerala allies in subverting and ultimately overthrowing the newly elected ministry. They also show how, against all odds, Kerala continues to be a stronghold of the left in India and even across the globe.