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Modern Politics
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Title: Creating the National Security State
Author: Douglas T. Stuart
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Price: £19.95
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: CIA
Category: Modern Politics |
For the last sixty years, American foreign and defense policymaking has been dominated by a network of institutions created by one piece of legislation - the 1947 National Security Act. This is the definitive study of the intense political and bureaucratic struggles that surrounded the passage and initial implementation of the law. Focusing on the critical years from 1937 to 1960, Douglas Stuart shows how disputes over the lessons of Pearl Harbor and World War II informed the debates that culminated in the legislation, and how the new national security agencies were subsequently transformed by battles over missions, budgets, and influence during the early cold war.Stuart provides an in-depth account of the fight over Truman's plan for unification of the armed services, demonstrating how this dispute colored debates about institutional reform. He traces the rise of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the transformation of the CIA, and the institutionalization of the National Security Council. He also illustrates how the development of this network of national security institutions resulted in the progressive marginalization of the State Department. Stuart concludes with some insights that will be of value to anyone interested in the current debate over institutional reform.
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Title: Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution
Author: Marta Harnecker
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Price: £8.00
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: USA Politics
Category: Modern Politics |
Marta Harnecker’s interviews with Hugo Chávez began soon after one of the most dramatic moments of Chávez’s presidency—the failed coup of April 2002, which ended with Chávez restored to power by a massive movement of protest and resistance. In the aftermath of the failed coup, Chávez talks to Harnecker about the formation of his political ideas, his aspirations for Venezuela, its domestic and international policies, problems of political organization, relations with social movements in other countries, and more, constantly relating these to concrete events and to strategies for change. The exchange between Harnecker and Chávez—sometimes reflective, sometimes anecdotal, always characterized by their passionate commitment to the struggles of the oppressed—brings to light the process of thought and action behind the public pronouncements and policies of state. The interviews are supplemented by extracts from Chávez’s most recent pronouncements on the ongoing transformation in Venezuela and Latin America, an analysis by Harnecker on the role of the military, and a chronology. |
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Title: Humanitarian Imperialism
Author: Jean Bricmont
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Price: £12.50
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: USA Politics
Category: Modern Politics
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Since the end of the Cold War, the idea of human rights has been made into a justification for intervention by the world's leading economic and military powers - above all, the United States. The criteria for such intervention have become more arbitrary and self-serving, and their form more destructive, from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan to Iraq. Until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the large parts of the left was often complicit in this ideology of intervention - discovering new "Hitlers" as the need arose, and denouncing antiwar arguments as appeasement on the model of Munich in 1938. Jean Bricmont's "Humanitarian Imperialism" is both a historical account of this development and a powerful political and moral critique. It seeks to restore the critique of imperialism to its rightful place in the defense of human rights. It describes the leading role of the United States in initiating military and other interventions, but also on the obvious support given to it by European powers and NATO. It outlines an alternative approach to the question of human rights, based on the genuine recognition of the equal rights of people in poor and wealthy countries. Timely, topical, and rigorously argued, Jean Bricmont's book establishes a firm basis for resistance to global war with no end in sight.
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Title: Build it Now
Author: Michael A. Lebowitz
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Price: £10.95
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Socialism
Category: Modern Politics |
"Build It Now" puts forward a clear and innovative vision of a socialist future, and at the same time shows how concrete steps can be taken to make that vision a reality. It shows how the understanding of capitalism can itself become a political act - a defense of the real needs of human beings against the ongoing advance of capitalist profit. Throughout the book, Lebowitz addresses the concerns of people engaged in struggle to create a better world, but aware that this struggle must be informed by the realities of the twenty-first century. Many chapters of the book began life as addresses to worker organizations in Venezuela, where worker self-management is on the agenda. Written by an eminent academic, this is far more than an academic treatise. The book brings an internationalist outlook and vast knowledge of global trends to bear on concrete efforts to transform contemporary society. "Build It Now" is a testament to the ongoing vitality of the Marxist tradition, drawing on its deep resources of analytical insight and moral passion and fusing them into an essential guide to the struggles of our time.
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Title: The Politics of Immigration
Author: Jane Guskin & David L. Wilson
Publisher: Monthly Review Press
Price: £7.95
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: USA Politics
Category: Modern Politics |
In the spring of 2006, hundreds of thousands of immigrants and supporters organized in cities across the United States to protest recent changes to immigration policy. Those protests, labeled "A Day Without an Immigrant," called on immigrants and their children to boycott their jobs and schools for a single day in an effort to both demonstrate their opposition to the harsher, more restrictive HR 4437 legislation, and to show the force of their economic power as workers and consumers. With each election, the debate surrounding immigration reform continues to grow. The fate of millions of hard-working families hangs in the balance as well-funded anti-immigration groups like the Minutemen and the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) rally public and congressional support for their closed borders campaigns. "The Politics of Immigration" takes a fresh, honest look at immigration policy in the United States. Its up-to-date analysis, presented in question-and-answer format, aims to dispel the myths and clarify the issues. Those who support more restrictive enforcement in the belief that immigrants are a threat to U.S. society - taking jobs from Americans, driving down wages, straining public services, and avoiding paying taxes - will find reasoned and compelling evidence here against such assumptions. |
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Title: Pessimism of the Intellect
Author: Duncan Thompson
Publisher: Merlin Press
Price: £16.95
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Socialism
Category: Modern Politics |
Duncan Thompson provides a concise summary of the hitherto neglected history of New Left Review and its political and intellectual development from 1962 to the present. Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn et al. emerged as the leading figures of a second new left around New Left Review six years after the new left first emerged in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Britain and France's invasion of Suez. Thompson traces NLR's attempts to develop socialist politics, through the 'old' Labour of Harold Wilson, through heady days in 1968, through new Marxist theory, through the Cold War years and into the era of contemporary capitalist globalisation. He surveys the achievements of NLR: a respectable academic reputation has been won, but it has not succeeded in achieving or facilitating the primary goal of the second New Left, that of finding a strategy for transition to socialism.
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Title: Charlie Wilson's War
Author: George Crile
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Price: £8.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: USA Politics
Category: Modern Politics |
In the last decade, two events have transformed the world: the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of militant Islam. This is the first book to explain the link between these two occurrences. George Crile spent nearly a decade researching and writing this original account of the biggest, most expensive secret war in history: the arming of the Afghan resistance to Soviet occupation. Moving from the secret chambers in CIA headquarters to stand-offs in the Khyber Pass, Charlie Wilson's "War" is one of the most thorough and vivid descriptions of CIA operations ever written. It is the missing chapter in the geopolitics of our time. |
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Title: The Right Talk
Author: Mark A. Smith
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Price: £17.95
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: USA Politics
Category: Modern Politics |
Political analyst Mark Smith offers the most original and compelling explanation yet of America's startling swing to the political right. How did the GOP transform itself from a party outgunned and outmaneuvered into one that today defines the nation's most important policy choices? Why have Democrats in recent decades often been unable to get their message heard? And where does the country go from here? Conventional wisdom attributes the Republican resurgence to a political bait and switch - the notion that conservatives win elections on social issues like abortion and religious expression, but once in office implement far-reaching policies on the economic issues downplayed during campaigns. Smith illuminates instead the eye-opening reality that economic matters have become more central, not less, to campaigns and the public agenda. He analyzes a half century of speeches, campaign advertisements, party platforms, and intellectual writings, systematically showing how Republican politicians and conservative intellectuals increasingly gave economic justifications for policies they once defended through appeals to freedom. He explains how Democrats similarly conceived economic justifications for their own policies, but unlike Republicans they changed positions on issues rather than simply offering new arguments and thus helped push the national discourse inexorably to the right. "The Right Talk" brings clarity, reason, and hard-nosed evidence to a contentious subject. Certain to enrich the debate about the conservative ascendancy in America, this book will provoke discussions and reactions for years to come. |
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Title: More Equal than Others
Author: Godfrey Hodgson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Price: £29.95
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: USA Politics
Category: Modern Politics |
During the past quarter century, free-market capitalism was recognized not merely as a successful system of wealth creation, but as the key determinant of the health of political and cultural democracy. Now, renowned British journalist and historian Godfrey Hodgson takes aim at this popular view in a book that promises to become one of the most important political histories of our time. "More Equal Than Others" looks back on twenty-five years of what Hodgson calls "the conservative ascendancy" in America, demonstrating how it has come to dominate American politics. Hodgson disputes the notion that the rise of conservatism has spread affluence and equality to the American people. Quite the contrary, he writes, the most distinctive feature of American society in the closing years of the twentieth century was its great and growing inequality. He argues that the combination of conservative ideology and corporate power and dominance by mass media obsessed with lifestyle and celebrity have caused America to abandon much of what was best in its past. In fact, he writes, income and wealth inequality have become so extreme that America now resembles the class-stratified societies of early twentieth-century Europe. "More Equal Than Others" addresses a broad range of issues, with chapters on politics, the new economy, immigration, technology, women, race, and foreign policy, among others. A fitting sequel to the author's critically acclaimed "America In Our Time", "More Equal Than Others" is not only an outstanding synthesis of history, but a trenchant commentary on the state of the American Dream. |
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Title: Global Flashpoints
Author: Leo Panitch and Colin Leys
Publisher: Merlin Press
Price: £14.95
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: USA Politics
Category: Modern Politics |
What are the forces at work in opposition to the American Empire? Are such forces, in the Islamic World and in Latin America, reactionary or progressive?What are the distinguishing features of neoliberalism today? What are its emerging contradictions? This volume surveys the key flashpoints of resistance today. The main arena of resistance to imperialism is the Middle East. Six essays explore the ambivalent nature of Islamic anti-imperialism, and the West's crucial role in making it so significant, as well as the different forms it takes as a political creed; and they provide particular insight into the relationship between religion and politics today in Iraq, Palestine and Turkey. Resistance to neoliberalism has been seen most clearly in the 'pink tide' in Latin America. Seven essays evaluate the potential - or lack of it - for a 21st century socialism across the region, and especially in Venezuela, Bolivia, Mexico, and Argentina; while an interview with João-Pedro Stédile, leader of Brazil's Landless People's Movement, provides a unique perspective on class struggles in that country. Three further essays look at recent reactions to neoliberalism and imperialism elsewhere - in Eastern Europe, in France, and in the heart of empire, the United States itself. The volume concludes with a symposium: three leading left economists analyse neoliberalism as a global regime of social and political control, and critically examine the left's response it. |
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Title: Uncouth Nation
Author: Andrei S. Markovits
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Price: £14.95
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: USA Politics
Category: Modern Politics |
No survey can capture the breadth and depth of the anti-Americanism that has swept Europe in recent years. From ultraconservative Bavarian grandmothers to thirty-year-old socialist activists in Greece, from globalization opponents to corporate executives - Europeans are joining in an ever louder chorus of disdain for America. For the first time, anti-Americanism has become a European lingua franca. In this sweeping and provocative look at the history of European aversion to America, Andrei Markovits argues that understanding the ubiquity of anti-Americanism since September 11, 2001, requires an appreciation of such sentiments among European elites going back at least to July 4, 1776. While George W. Bush's policies have catapulted anti-Americanism into overdrive, particularly in Western Europe, Markovits argues that this loathing has long been driven not by what America does, but by what it is. Focusing on seven Western European countries big and small, he shows how antipathies toward things American embrace aspects of everyday life - such as sports, language, work, education, media, health, and law - that remain far from the purview of the Bush administration's policies. Aggravating Europeans' antipathies toward America is their alleged helplessness in the face of an Americanization that they view as inexorably befalling them. More troubling, Markovits argues, is that this anti-Americanism has cultivated a new strain of anti-Semitism. Above all, he shows that while Europeans are far apart in terms of their everyday lives and shared experiences, their not being American provides them with a powerful common identity - one that elites have already begun to harness in their quest to construct a unified Europe to rival America. |
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Title: Gordon Brown: Past, Present and Future
Author: Francis Beckett
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Price: £10.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Labour Party
Category: Modern Politics |
What sort of a man is Gordon Brown? What kind of Prime Minister will he make? Can he stem the growing unpopularity of the Labour Party and win it a fourth term in office? This book, written in the first three months of the year in which Brown becomes Prime Minister, is both a biography and an assessment. Francis Beckett interviewed several of Brown's closest political collaborators, and had a background briefing from Brown himself. He says the popular image of Brown is entirely wrong: he found an amusing, erudite and charming man who will bring his own style to 10 Downing Street - not Tony Blair's style, but at least as stylish. He believes that a Brown premiership will mark a fundamental break with the Blair years: a new and different relationship with the USA, a broader foreign policy which is able to look beyond the Middle East, a new and more transparent way of reaching decisions. In a groundbreaking final chapter, he draws on the best evidence available to predict what Gordon Brown will do with his new job. |
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Title: After the NeoCons
Author: Francis Fukuyama
Publisher: Profile
Price: £7.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: USA Politics
Category: Modern Politics |
Francis Fukuyama used to regard himself as a 'neocon'. But, attacking the right-wing policymakers he had previously worked with, he argues here that the Bush administration, in the war in Iraq, has wrongly applied the principles of neoconservatism - a philosophy that is vital to the arguments about Iraq, but rarely explored, and whose history he carefully untangles. He explains why the US did not realize how much foreign hostility there would be towards the war, or how difficult reconstruction would be. Showing that there is no established tradition in international relations theory that can help guide American foreign policy today, he then outlines a new approach, in his usual clear and penetrating style. |
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Title: Condoleezza Rice: Naked Ambition
Author: Marcus Mabry
Publisher: Gibson Square
Price: £20.00
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: USA Politics
Category: Modern Politics |
Few future contenders for the American presidency are more enigmatic than US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She is both regularly voted one of the most influential women in the world, and, in a poll taken well into her new post, the preferred dinner guest for men - ahead of a celebrity field including Angelina Jolie and Oprah Winfrey. Yet for a senior politician with such wide appeal, very little is known about her private life. Condoleezza Rice, who has remained unmarried, gave interviews for this first personal biography. She also consented to unqualified access to her close-knit family and friends. |
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Title: Dreams from My Father
Author: Barack Obama
Publisher: Canongate
Price: £12.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: USA Politics
Category: Modern Politics |
In this memoir written at the age of 33, Barack Obama, son of a black African father and a white American mother, describes the search for meaning in his life as a black American. He begins in New York where he learns that his father, more a myth than a man to him, has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey that sees Obama travel to Kansas, Hawaii and Kenya in search of his family's roots. A memoir that rightfully belongs on the shelves alongside the autobiography of "Malcolm X", "Dreams from My Father" is an unforgettable read.
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Title: Thatcher & Sons
Author: Simon Jenkins
Publisher: Penguin
Price: £9.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Margaret Thatcher
Category: Modern Politics
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The history of Britain in the last thirty years, under both Conservative and Labour governments, has been dominated by one figure - Margaret Thatcher. Her election marked a decisive break with the past and her premiership transformed not just her country, but the nature of democratic leadership. Simon Jenkins analyses this revolution from its beginnings in the turmoil of the 1970s through the social and economic changes of the 1980s. Was Thatcherism a mere medicine for an ailing economy or a complete political philosophy? And did it eventually fall victim to the dogmatism and control which made it possible?This is the story of the events, personalities, defeats and victories which will be familiar to all those who lived through them, but seen through a new lens. It is also an argument about how Thatcher's legacy has continued down to the present. Not just John Major, but Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are her heirs and acolytes. And as the Conservative party reinvents itself as a viable political force once again, is the age of Thatcher finally over?
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Title: Marxism and Politics
Author: Ralph Miliband
Publisher: Merlin Press
Price: £10.95
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: Karl Marx
Category: Modern Politics |
What is class conflict? How do ruling classes and the state reproduce capitalism? What is the role of the Party and what are the differences between reform and revolution? This is a readable and engaging survey: mainly of key Marxist texts - Marx, Engels and Lenin - and of Marxist political experience. Miliband believes in a socialism which defend freedoms already won: and to make possible their extension and enlargement by the removal of class boundaries.
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Title: The Chomsky Reader
Author: Noam Chomsky
Publisher: Serpents Tail
Price: £17.50
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: USA Politics
Category: Modern Politics
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At the centre of pratically every major debate over America’s role in the world, one finds Noam Chomsky’s ideas - sometimes attacked, sometimes studiously ignored, but always a powerful presence. Drawing from his published and unpublished work, The Chomsky Reader reveals the awesome range of this ever-critical mind - from global questions of war and peace to the most intricate questions of human intelligence, IQ and creativity. It reveals the underlying radical coherency of his view of the world - from his enormously influential attacks on America’s role in Vietnam to his perspective on Nicaragua and Central America Today. Chomsky’s challenges to accepted wisdom about Israel and the Palestinians has caused a furore in America, as have his trenchant essays on the real nature of terrorism in our age. No one has dissected more graphically the character of the cold war consensus and the way it benefits the two superpowers, and argued more thoughtfully for a shared elitist ethos in liberalism and communism. No one has exposed more logically America’s acclaimed freedoms as masking irresponsible power and unjustified privilege, or argued quite so insistently that the ‘free press’ is part of a stultifying conformity that pervades all aspects of American intellectual life.
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Title: Stranger in a Strange Land
Author: Gary Younge
Publisher: New Press
Price: £11.99
Bookshop: Amazon
Spartacus Website: USA Politics
Category: Modern Politics |
Gary Younge is not your typical foreign correspondent. Yet, in three years working for the Guardian newspaper in New York, Younge has acquired a translantic reputation as one of the most thoughtful commentators on contemporary America. In these pages we take the stage with an extravagantly attired drag queen in John Ashcrofts's hometown, join the dinner table of a fundamentalist Republican who has just lost his son in the Iraq war, and ride a bus with a group of illegal immigrants on a latter-day Freedom Ride to Washington, D.C.
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