Two weeks before qualifying for his 30-year pension benefits, my father lost his job. This corporate reduction in labor force introduced a debilitating shame to the displaced breadwinner and a new level of precarity to a family with 3 of 4 kids in college. It also shattered the myth that capitalism rewarded individual initiative and hard work. Understanding inequities and the manifold structural forces that can determine an individual’s life prospects became a focal point of my graduate studies and my four decades of university teaching. Using race, gender, and sexuality as analytical tools, my research enriched traditional approaches to political economy.
In the 1990s, as mainstream economists and political scientists celebrated the virtues of globalization, the condition of women in many regions of the globe worsened. I wanted to investigate how an economic phenomenon designed to promote free trade, individual self-interest, and profit maximization could foster increasingly precarious existence, intensified exploitation, and heightened exhaustion among women who struggled with the demands of domestic labor, reproductive labor, subsistence provision, and paid employment.
This book explores how capitalism produces social, economic, and political inequalities grounded in gender, race, class, ethnicity, and nationality and documents the efforts of social justice activists to contest these growing inequities within and across nations.
Proponents of capitalism assert that human nature is constant, propelled by an unquenchable pursuit of self-interest. Historians suggest that rampant individualism that undergirds the entrepreneurial spirit is a product of the Enlightenment’s quest to displace communal values associated with religion and tradition.
In this brilliant novel, which shared the 1992 Booker Prize withThe English Patient, Unsworth traces the historical emergence of the profit motive, “which justifies everything, sanctifies all purposes” including multiple modes of dehumanization such as involuntary servitude and slavery.
The searing depictions of the conditions of labor on a slave ship and the brutal commodification of flesh in the African slave trade eviscerate capitalism’s benign self-image and raise powerful questions about the morality of an economic system in which the wealth of the few impoverishes the vast majority.
Liverpool, 1752. William Kemp has lost a fortune in cotton speculation, and must recoup his losses if his son is to marry the wealthy woman whom he loves. His last resort is a slave ship, one that will take him to the Guinea coast, where he will trade for human cargo, then embark on the infamous Middle Passage. When disease ravages the ship and the African prisoners mutiny, William’s profit-seeking venture falls apart. Slaves and sailors alike will join together to found a utopian community on the coast of Florida—not knowing that the vengeful, younger…
In my youth, the “Age of Discovery” launched by Columbus’s 1492 arrival in the “New World” and perpetuated by European imperialism through the mid-20th century, was characterized as a “civilizing mission.”
McClintock’s superb interdisciplinary scholarship provides a markedly different assessment of settler colonialism, a global order that legitimates white, male control of colonized women and men. Attained by violence, these stratified systems are sustained through capitalist economic relations secured by “voluntary” contract.
The book illuminates how the invention of race not only enabled European men to own and manage 85% of the earth’s surface by the end of the 19th century but also police the “dangerous classes,” the working class, the Irish, Jews, prostitutes, feminists, gays and lesbians, criminals, and anti-imperialists within their own nations.
Imperial Leather chronicles the dangerous liaisons between gender, race and class that shaped British imperialism and its bloody dismantling. Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power.
The United States typically describes itself as the world’s most advanced capitalist economy and as a nation characterized by equal opportunity, fair play, and the rule of law that acknowledges no privilege or advantage related to race, gender, class, ethnicity, or sexuality.
Zinn’s meticulous research offers a radically different view of the nation from founding through the “War on Terror.” He demonstrates how white supremacy was built into state and federal constitutions and how the law was used to benefit the wealthy and marginalize and oppress the majority of the population.
Placing the excluded at the center of his analysis, he traces the sustained struggle for universal suffrage, minimum wage and maximum hour legislation, health and safety standards in the workplace, racial equality, and women’s rights and shows how easily these gains can be eroded.
"A wonderful, splendid book—a book that should be read by every American, student or otherwise, who wants to understand his country, its true history, and its hope for the future." –Howard Fast
Historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States chronicles American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official narrative taught in schools—with its emphasis on great men in high places—to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace.
Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, itis the only volume to tell America's story from the…
Americans are reared on the myth that we are all created equal.
But this myth can have negative effects in a highly stratified society, where the richest 5% of families have 248 times as much wealth as the second richest 20% of the population and where racial discrimination permeates every aspect of life.
In this classic work, Lewis shows how the myth of equal opportunity “individualizes” success and failure. The belief that each individual earns success or is responsible for failure contributes to a public ethos in which the poor are blamed for their plight and the rich lack compassion for the worst off.
The book illuminates the profound policy consequences of these beliefs for public education, crime, race relations, and poverty reduction.
Who do America's wars against poverty turn out to be wars against the poor? Why does a nation so committed to fighting crime show such a bad record of combating it and so morbid a fascination with it? Why is American racism so deeply rooted? This study aims to answer these and other questions. Its central thesis is that the national faith in individual initiative and free opportunity has become a breeding ground for guilt about our own limited successes and prejudice against all who exhibit signs of failure.
As economic inequality has grown exponentially over the past five decades, some of the dispossessed have rebelled.
Focusing on mobilizations in Brazil, Mexico, and Salvador, Gledhill demonstrates how struggles for social justice are transformed into “threats” to national security, which require “securitization” measures. Through intricate ethnographies, the book documents the deployment of the police, military, and paramilitary to quell domestic disputes.
Protests by students, laborers, migrants, Indigenous, the poor, environmentalists, and human rights activists are subjected to police “pacification” involving state violence, criminalization, incarceration, and sometimes death.
Situating securitization in the context of transnational and global relations generated by capitalist uneven development, Gledhill argues that the logic of capitalist accumulation in the current era is inseparable from repressive violence against “inconvenient” populations.
When viewed from the perspective of those who suffer the consequences of repressive approaches to public security, it is often difficult to distinguish state agents from criminals. The mistreatment by police and soldiers examined in this book reflects a new kind of stigmatization.
The New War on the Poor links the experiences of labour migrants crossing Latin America's international borders, indigenous Mexicans defending their territories against capitalist mega-projects, drug wars and paramilitary violence, Afro-Brazilians living on the urban periphery of Salvador, and farmers and business people tired of paying protection to criminal mafias. John Gledhill looks at how and why…
As a young doctor, Carl Holman has experienced the horrors of World War I and the death of his lover, a fellow officer. Back home after the War, he befriends a young jazz musician who he hopes will become a companion he can share his life with. But this is Oregon: the Ku Klux Klan is gaining influence, homosexual acts are illegal, and such a relationship will jeopardize Carl’s promising medical career.
Musician Jimmy Harper has his own dreams for the future and his own obstacles to overcome before he will allow himself to accept Carl’s love. More than a gay love story, Acquaintance is a deep dive into gay and lesbian history based on extensive period research of the 1920s.
As a young surgeon, Carl Holman has experienced the horrors of World War I and the loss of his lover, a fellow officer. Back home after the war, he befriends a young jazz musician who he hopes will become a companion he can share his life with. But this is Oregon: the Ku Klux Klan is gaining influence, homosexual acts are illegal, and such a relationship will jeopardize Carl’s promising medical career. Musician Jimmy Harper has his own dreams for the future and his own obstacles to overcome before he will allow himself to accept Carl’s love. Acquaintance is a…
