From the Pulitzer-prize winning, New York Times bestselling author, an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents. But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies in one country do business with corrupt companies in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America. International condemnation and economic sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don't stand a chance. The members of Autocracy, Inc, aren't linked by a unifying ideology, like communism, but rather a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity. In this urgent treatise, which evokes George Kennan's essay calling for "containment" of the Soviet Union, Anne Applebaum calls for the democracies to fundamentally reorient their policies to fight a new kind of threat.

Winner of the 2009 Warwick Prize for Writing In this groundbreaking alternative history of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free-market economic revolution, Naomi Klein challenges the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory. From Chile in 1973 to Iraq today, Klein shows how Friedman and his followers have repeatedly harnessed terrible shocks and violence to implement their radical policies. As John Gray wrote in The Guardian, "There are very few books that really help us understand the present. The Shock Doctrine is one of those books."

Like other great figures of 20th-century American politics, Lyndon Johnson defies easy understanding. An unrivaled master of vote swapping, back room deals, and election-day skulduggery, he was nevertheless an outspoken New Dealer with a genuine commitment to the poor and the underprivileged. And he was also a representative figure. Johnson's career speaks volumes about American politics, foreign policy, and business in the forty years after 1930. As Charles de Gaulle said when he came to JFK's funeral: Kennedy was America's mask, but this man Johnson is the country's real face.In Lone Star Rising, Robert Dallek, winner of the prestigious Bancroft Prize for his study of Franklin D. Roosevelt, turns to this fascinating "sinner and saint" to offer a brilliant, definitive portrait of a great American politician. Based on seven years of research in over 450 manuscript collections and oral histories, as well as numerous personal interviews, this first book in a two-volume biography follows Johnson's life from his childhood to his election as vice-president under Kennedy. We see Johnson, the twenty-three-year-old aide to a pampered millionaire Representative, become a de facto Congressman, and at age twenty-eight the country's best state director of the National Youth Administration. We see Johnson, the "human dynamo," first in the House and then in the Senate, whirl his way through sixteen- and eighteen-hour days, talking, urging, demanding, reaching for influence and power, in an uncommonly successful congressional career.Dallek pays full due to Johnson's failings--his obsession with being top dog, his willingness to cut corners, and worse, to get there--but he also illuminates Johnson's sheer brilliance as a politician, the high regard in which key members of the New Deal, including FDR, held him, and his genuine concern for minorities and the downtrodden.No president in American history is currently less admired than Lyndon Johnson. Bitter memories of Vietnam have sent Johnson's reputation into free fall, and recent biographies have painted him as a scoundrel who did more harm than good. Lone Star Rising attempts to strike a balance. It does not neglect the tawdry side of Johnson's political career, including much that is revealed for the first time. But it also reminds us that Lyndon Johnson was a man of exceptional vision, who from early in his career worked to bring the South into the mainstream of American economic and political life, to give the disadvantaged a decent chance, and to end racial segregation for the well-being of the nation.

A "lively" memoir by the Hollywood legend about the making of Spartacus , with a foreword by George Clooney ( Los Angeles Times ). One of the world's most iconic movie stars, Kirk Douglas has distinguished himself as a producer, philanthropist, and author of ten works of fiction and memoir. Now, more than fifty years after the release of his enduring epic Spartacus , Douglas reveals the riveting drama behind the making of the legendary gladiator film. Douglas began producing the movie in the midst of the politically charged era when Hollywood's moguls refused to hire anyone accused of Communist sympathies. In a risky move, Douglas chose Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted screenwriter, to write Spartacus . Trumbo was one of the "Unfriendly Ten," men who had gone to prison rather than testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee about their political affiliations. Douglas's source material was already a hot property, as the novel Spartacus was written by Howard Fast while he was in jail for defying HUAC. With the financial future of his young family at stake, Douglas plunged into a tumultuous production both on- and off-screen. As both producer and star of the film, he faced explosive moments with young director Stanley Kubrick, struggles with a leading lady, and negotiations with giant personalities, including Sir Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, and Lew Wasserman. Writing from his heart and from his own meticulously researched archives, Kirk Douglas, at ninety-five, looks back at his audacious decisions. He made the most expensive film of its era--but more importantly, his moral courage in giving public credit to Trumbo effectively ended the notorious Hollywood blacklist. A master storyteller, Douglas paints a vivid and often humorous portrait in I Am Spartacus! The book is enhanced by newly discovered period photography of the stars and filmmakers both on and off the set.

During the 1970s radical politics in France underwent major changes, transformed by the rise of the Socialist Party, the decline of the Communists, and the loss of faith in Marxism. These changes, together with the lessened impact of the industrial proletariat and the problems presented by Mitterrand's sweeping Socialist victory in 1981, signalled a veritable turning point in modern French history. This book offers a historical and political analysis of the history of labor, Socialism, and Communism in France since the Revolution, an analysis that is essential for understanding recent French political developments. Unlike most books, which treat labor, Socialist and Communist history separately and view French Marxism as a self-contained philosophical phenomenon, Marxism and the French Left offers a refreshingly different approach to the subject. Judt emphasizes the complex and interwoven themes that unify the topics of his essays to construct a distinctive and original interpretation of French left-wing politics over the past 150 years.

"Eliminate the pressure of immigration, and we may be headed for a caste system based on ethnic diversity and mitigated to only a negligible degree by economic differences." --Horace Kallen, in Democracy versus the Melting Pot, 1915 Democracy versus the Melting Pot was published in The Nation magazine by Horace Kallen in 1915, at a time when the United States were receiving the largest influx of immigrants in history. The government tried to enable the assimilation of those diverse peoples into "American" culture through "Americanization" programs, but Kallen saw these programs as being mostly in the interest of Anglo-Saxon business classes and against the spirit of democracy. Kallen rejected the "melting pot" concept, and supported "cultural pluralism," a term he coined. Democracy versus the Melting Pot also strongly influenced Randolph Bourne, another progressive writer. Just as Kallen, Bourne was also against forcing immigrants to assimilate to the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture as he described in his famous article Trans-national America in 1916. Kallen's work is relevant as ever for students of history, political scientists, and others interested in the current discussion about immigration in America.

2015 Reprint of 1951 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. First published in 1913 and generally held to be her finest achievement, this volume reveals Luxemburg as a Marxist critical of Karl Marx. It offers a theory of the dynamic development of capitalism which is of continued relevance to contemporary scholarship. Taking Marx as her starting point, she offers an independent and fiercely critical explanation of the economic and political consequences of capitalism in the context of the turbulent times in which she lived, reinterpreting events in the United States, Europe, China, Russia and the British Empire. Most today believe there is no alternative to global capitalism. This book is a timely and forceful statement of an opposing view. Rosa Luxemburg was born in 1870 in Russian Poland. She was murdered in Germany while on way to prison. Contains an introduction by Joan Robinson.

2016 Reprint of Undated Original Edition [Circa 1965]. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. This gives a succinct account of Rothbard's view of the state. Following Franz Oppenheimer and Albert Jay Nock, Rothbard regards the state as a predatory entity. It does not produce anything but rather steals resources from those engaged in production. In applying this view to American history, Rothbard makes use of the work of John C. Calhoun How can an organization of this type sustain itself? It must engage in propaganda to induce popular support for its policies. Court intellectuals play a key role here, and Rothbard cites as an example of ideological mystification the work of the influential legal theorist Charles Black, Jr., on the way the Supreme Court has become a revered institution. A wealth of citations and references supports the basic premise.

2009 Reprint of original 1956 edition. Paperback, 114pp. Mises wrote and lectured extensively on behalf of classical liberalism and is seen as one of the leaders of the Austrian School of economics. Mises introduced praxeology as a more general conceptual foundation of the social sciences and established that economic laws were only arrived at through the means of methodological individualism firmly rejecting positivism and materialism as a foundation for the social sciences. Many of his works were on two related economic themes:1. Monetary economics and inflation; 2. The differences between government controlled economies and free trade.

Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research recounts the strategies used by the country's top economic policymakers to conceal their failure to recognize the housing bubble or take steps to rein it in before it grew to unprecedented levels, resulting in the loss of millions of jobs, homes, and the life savings of tens o...

It was July 23, 1892, and Alexander Berkman was planning to die. He just had some business to attend to first. Dressed in a new suit and a black derby hat, Berkman burst into the Pittsburg office of Henry Clay Frick, the notoriously anti-union manager of the Carnegie Steel Company. From his pocket, Berkman produced a pistol. This pocket-sized book collects the shorter works of one of the world's most influential anarchists.

"Even the most superficial readers of the popular Press know today that Communism means the public ownership of the means of production. Fascism, on the other hand, Is still regarded principally as a political movement; The economic implications of the term are generally ignored. the meaning of the term ''corporate state' is unkown even to people whose general intelligence and special knowledge of foreign affairs and of economics is well above the average." -Paul Einzig

Beneficial social and economic exchange relies on a certain level of trust. But trust is a delicate matter, not least in the former socialist countries where illegitimate behaviour by governments made distrust a habit. The chapters in this volume analyze the causes and the effects of the lack of social trust in post-socialist countries. The contributions originated in the Collegium Budapest project on Honesty and Trust: Theory and Experience in the Light of the Post-Socialist Transition. A second volume entitled, Building a Trustworthy State in Post-Socialist Transition , is being published simultaneously.

Isaak Illich Rubin (12 June 1886, Dinaburg, now Latvia - 27 November 1937, Aktobe, now Kazakhstan) was a Soviet Marxian economist. His main work Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was published in 1924. He was executed in 1937 during the course of the Great Purge, but his ideas have since been rehabilitated. Rubin's main work emphasised the importance of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism in the labor theory of value. Against those who counterposed Marx's early interest in alienation with his later economic theory, Rubin argued that Marx's mature economic work represented the culmination of his lifetime project to understand how human creative power is shaped, defined, and limited by social structures, which take on a uniquely "objective" economic form under capitalism. Significantly, Rubin is at pains to argue that simple commodity production is not a historical phenomenon that developed into capitalism, as it is often understood by both Marxists and critics of Marx; rather, it is a theoretical abstraction that explains one aspect of a fully developed capitalist economy. The concept of value, as understood by Rubin, cannot exist without the other elements of a full-blown capitalist economy: money, capital, the existence of a proletariat, and so on. Rubin's work was never reissued in the Soviet Union after 1928, but in 1972 Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was translated into English by Fredy Perlman and Milos Samardzija. This work became a foundation stone of the "value-form" approach to Marxist theory, exemplified by Hans-Georg Backhaus, Chris Arthur, Geert Reuten, and the "Konstanz-Sydney" group (Michael Eldred, Mike Roth, Lucia Kleiber, and Volkbert Roth). In this interpretation of Marx, "it is the development of the forms of exchange that is seen as the prime determinant of the capitalist economy rather than the content regulated by it". Capitalism is here understood as a method of regulating human labor by giving it the social form of an exchangeable commodity (the "value-form"), rather than a disguised or mystified system that is otherwise similar in content to other class-based societies. According to Arthur, the rediscovery of Rubin's "masterly exegesis" was "the most important single influence on the value form approach to Capital". (wikipedia.org)

Evolutionary Socialism was Bernstein's most significant work, and it set the stage for the Democratic Socialism of today. In Evolutionary Socialism, Bernstein was principally concerned with refuting Karl Marx's predictions about the imminent and inevitable demise of capitalism. Bernstein warned that a violent proletarian revolution, as in France in 1848, produced only reactionary successes, which undermined workers' interests. Therefore, he rejected revolution and instead insisted the best strategy to be patiently building up a durable social movement working for continuous nonviolent incremental change.

Originally published in 1981, this book covers the development of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) from its inception to the end of the Weimar republic. Within a historical framework it analyses the role and operation of the SPD in the changing social and political climate of Germany and describes the party's internal struggles throughout the period. The party continually debated its aims and the means to achieve them. Conducted by people such as Kautsky, Bernsteina dn Rosa Luxemburg, with close links to Marx, Engels and other leaders of the international socialist movement, this debate within the party was one of the most fundamental socialist controversies, whose relevance remains today.