Books with category Political Science
Displaying 21 books

Wages, Price and Profit

2021

by Karl Marx

How are wages and prices determined? What is the difference between labor and labor power? How do capitalists make a profit?

Are the struggles of workers to raise wages and reduce working hours in vain? Is the demand for "fair wages" meaningful? Can workers limit themselves to wage struggles alone?

In the 1850s and 60s, while preparing for Capital, Karl Marx presented these questions to the leaders of the First International in 1865, two years before the first volume of Capital was published. Many topics and concepts deeply explored in Capital were addressed in this presentation in a way that even those not well-versed in economics could understand. In other words, Wages, Price and Profit can also be read as an introduction to Capital.

Originally written in English and published after the deaths of Marx and his co-founders of Marxism, this work offers a comprehensive insight into the economic struggles of the working class.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Jarvious Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Klu Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation; his father was barred by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.

As the United States celebrates the nation's "triumph over race" with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or have been labeled felons for life. Although Jim Crow laws have been wiped off the books, an astounding percentage of the African American community remains trapped in a subordinate status—much like their grandparents before them.

In this incisive critique, former litigator-turned-legal-scholar Michelle Alexander provocatively argues that we have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it. Alexander shows that, by targeting black men and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of color blindness. The New Jim Crow challenges the civil rights community—and all of us—to place mass incarceration at the forefront of a new movement for racial justice in America.

Liberation Day: Our Nation Empowered by the Constitution

2017

by Eric Martin

Liberation Day - it's a title suited to a story of a nation at war and a people held captive. In this case, the invader is not some foreign enemy. It is the government at war with the nation it governs. And the Liberation Day this book speaks of is the day we take our nation back – back from a federal government that has long defied the constitutional restraints that guarantee our freedom.

In Liberation Day, Eric Martin shows us how our Constitution can and must be used to make us and the states in which we live prosperous, powerful, and free as they were meant to be. Martin lays out a rationally innovative plan that radically downsizes or completely dissolves more than 250 federal entities that wield power both unconscionable and unconstitutional.

With its unconstitutional burdens rightfully jettisoned, our federal government will align at last with the Founding Law that makes us and our states truly free. The framers of the Constitution understood only too well that government is by its nature a beast, of use if properly restrained, but oppressive and even lethal if allowed out of bounds. By reapplying to government the well-wrought chains of our Constitution, we will liberate ourselves.

Trauma and Recovery

The groundbreaking work on trauma that remains a “classic for our generation” (Bessel van der Kolk, MD, author of The Body Keeps the Score).

Trauma and Recovery is the foundational text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a political frame, psychiatrist Judith L. Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context.

Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war.

This edition includes a new epilogue by the author assessing what has—and hasn’t—changed in understanding and treating trauma over the last three decades.

Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how we heal.

The Prince

Machiavelli needs to be looked at as he really was. Hence:

Can Machiavelli, who makes the following observations, be Machiavellian as we understand the disparaging term?

  1. So it is that to know the nature of a people, one need be a Prince; to know the nature of a Prince, one need to be of the people.
  2. If a Prince is not given to vices that make him hated, it is unusual for his subjects to show their affection for him.
  3. Opportunity made Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and others; their virtue dominated the opportunity, making their homelands noble and happy. Armed prophets win; the disarmed lose.
  4. Without faith and religion, man achieves power but not glory.
  5. Prominent citizens want to command and oppress; the populace only wants to be free of oppression.
  6. A Prince needs a friendly populace; otherwise in diversity there is no hope.
  7. A Prince, who rules as a man of valor, avoids disasters.
  8. Nations based on mercenary forces will never be solid or secure.
  9. Mercenaries are dangerous because of their cowardice
  10. There are two ways to fight: one with laws, the other with force. The first is rightly man’s way; the second, the way of beasts.

The Constitution of the United States of America

The Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights presented without commentary.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

Hitler boasted that The Third Reich would last a thousand years. It lasted only 12. But those 12 years contained some of the most catastrophic events Western civilization has ever known.

No other powerful empire ever bequeathed such mountains of evidence about its birth and destruction as the Third Reich. When the bitter war was over, and before the Nazis could destroy their files, the Allied demand for unconditional surrender produced an almost hour-by-hour record of the nightmare empire built by Adolph Hitler. This record included the testimony of Nazi leaders and of concentration camp inmates, the diaries of officials, transcripts of secret conferences, army orders, private letters—all the vast paperwork behind Hitler's drive to conquer the world.

The famed foreign correspondent and historian William L. Shirer, who had watched and reported on the Nazis since 1925, spent five and a half years sifting through this massive documentation. The result is a monumental study that has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of one of the most frightening chapters in the history of mankind.

This worldwide bestseller has been acclaimed as the definitive book on Nazi Germany; it is a classic work.

The accounts of how the United States got involved and how Hitler used Mussolini and Japan are astonishing, and the coverage of the war-from Germany's early successes to her eventual defeat-is must reading.

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea

2009

by Barbara Demick

Nothing to Envy follows the lives of six North Koreans over fifteen years—a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the unchallenged rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il, and the devastation of a far-ranging famine that killed one-fifth of the population. Taking us into a landscape most of us have never before seen, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick brings to life what it means to be living under the most repressive totalitarian regime today—an Orwellian world that is by choice not connected to the Internet, in which radio and television dials are welded to the one government station, and where displays of affection are punished; a police state where informants are rewarded and where an offhand remark can send a person to the gulag for life.

Demick takes us deep inside the country, beyond the reach of government censors. Through meticulous and sensitive reporting, we see her six subjects—average North Korean citizens—fall in love, raise families, nurture ambitions, and struggle for survival. One by one, we experience the moments when they realize that their government has betrayed them.

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

2008

by Naomi Klein

In her ground-breaking reporting from Iraq, Naomi Klein exposed how the trauma of invasion was being exploited to remake the country in the interest of foreign corporations. She called it disaster capitalism. Covering Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, and New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic shock treatment losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers.

The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq.

At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. By capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, Klein argues that the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.

The Republic

2008

by Plato

Presented in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and three different interlocutors, this classic text is an enquiry into the notion of a perfect community and the ideal individual within it. During the conversation, other questions are raised: what is goodness?; what is reality?; and what is knowledge? The Republic also addresses the purpose of education and the role of both women and men as guardians of the people. With remarkable lucidity and deft use of allegory, Plato arrives at a depiction of a state bound by harmony and ruled by philosopher kings.

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance

2004

by Noam Chomsky

Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance is a profound exploration by the world-renowned intellectual, Noam Chomsky, into the United States' relentless pursuit of global supremacy. For more than half a century, the U.S. has been engaged in a grand imperial strategy aimed at dominating the globe.

Chomsky meticulously dissects how this ambition manifests in aggressive policies, from the militarization of space to the dismantling of international agreements. With striking logic and thorough documentation, he shows how these actions align in a drive for hegemony that ultimately threatens human survival.

Chomsky argues that the pursuit of "full spectrum dominance" is not only perilous but also a threat to our planet's future. He vividly illustrates how the politics of global control, including state terrorism and unilateralism, cohere in a strategy that risks our existence. Through his lucid writing, Chomsky presents a compelling case for re-evaluating America's foreign policy and its implications for the world.

This book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of power and the urgent need for change to avert a global catastrophe.

تحليل النظم الدولية

In World-Systems Analysis, Immanuel Wallerstein provides a concise and accessible introduction to the comprehensive approach that he pioneered thirty years ago to understanding the history and development of the modern world.

Since Wallerstein first developed world-systems analysis, it has become a widely utilized methodology within the historical social sciences and a common point of reference in discussions of globalization. Now, for the first time in one volume, Wallerstein offers a succinct summary of world-systems analysis and a clear outline of the modern world-system, describing the structures of knowledge upon which it is based, its mechanisms, and its future.

Wallerstein explains the defining characteristics of world-systems analysis: its emphasis on world-systems rather than nation-states, on the need to consider historical processes as they unfold over long periods of time, and on combining within a single analytical framework bodies of knowledge usually viewed as distinct from one another—such as history, political science, economics, and sociology.

He describes the world-system as a social reality comprised of interconnected nations, firms, households, classes, and identity groups of all kinds. He identifies and highlights the significance of the key moments in the evolution of the modern world-system: the development of a capitalist world-economy in the sixteenth-century, the beginning of two centuries of liberal centrism in the French Revolution of 1789, and the undermining of that centrism in the global revolts of 1968.

Intended for general readers, students, and experienced practitioners alike, this book presents a complete overview of world-systems analysis by its original architect.

The Revolution Betrayed

2004

by Leon Trotsky

The Revolution Betrayed is one of Marxism's most important texts, offering a profound evaluation of Stalinism from a Marxist standpoint. Written by Leon Trotsky in 1936 and published the following year, this brilliant analysis prophesied the collapse of the Soviet Union and related events.

Following the October Revolution, a nationalized planned economy was established, demonstrating the practicality of socialism for the first time. However, by the 1930s, the Soviet workers' democracy had crumbled into bureaucratic decay, giving rise to a totalitarian regime. Trotsky uses facts, figures, and statistics to illustrate how Stalinist policies rejected the productive potential of the nationalized planned economy in favor of a corrupt bureaucratic system.

Readers from all political persuasions can gain an insider's view of what went wrong, as Trotsky's work remains relevant even six decades later. The book is an essential read for anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of the Soviet Union and its historical impact.

The Federalist Papers

The Federalist Papers is a collection of eighty-five essays written by the Founding Fathers Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay from 1787 to 1788. This collection was published as a means to persuade the public to ratify the Constitution of the United States.

Hailed by Thomas Jefferson as “the best commentary on the principles of government which was ever written,” this enduring classic is perfect for modern audiences passionate about Hamilton's work or seeking a deeper understanding of one of the most important documents in US history.

With nearly two-thirds of the essays written by Hamilton, The Federalist Papers offers an indispensable guide to the intentions of the founding fathers who created the United States. It stands as a canonical text in the development of western political thought.

Two Hundred Years Together

Two Hundred Years Together is an abridged version of a significant work by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the acclaimed author known for exposing the horrors of the Stalinist gulag. In this book, Solzhenitsyn, at the age of 84, boldly tackles one of the most sensitive topics of his writing career – the role of the Jews in the Bolshevik revolution and Soviet purges.

The book explores the complex and often taboo subject of Jewish involvement as both perpetrators and victims in the repression of the communist revolution. It delves into the historical context, referencing the 1772 partial annexation of Poland and Russia, which significantly increased the Russian Jewish population. Within its pages, Two Hundred Years Together discusses the Jewish role in the revolutionary genocide and secret police purges of Soviet Russia.

The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements

MacDonald provides a theoretical analysis and review of data on the widespread tendency among Jewish-dominated intellectual movements to develop radical critiques of gentile culture. These movements are viewed as the outcome of the fact that Jews and gentiles have different interests in the construction of culture and in various public policy issues (e.g. immigration policy, Israel).

Several of these Jewish movements attempt to combat anti-Semitism by advocating social categorization processes in which the Jew/gentile distinction is minimized in importance. Jewish policy was aimed at developing an America characterized by cultural pluralism and populated by groups of people from all parts of the world rather than by a homogeneous White Christian culture populated largely by people of European descent.

Particular attention is paid to Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, leftist political ideology and behavior, and the Frankfurt School of Social Research. Each of these movements can be characterized as an authoritarian political movement centered around a charismatic leader who strongly identified as a Jew and who was idolized by his disciples who were also predominantly Jewish.

Regarding immigration policy, Jewish political and intellectual activity was motivated less by a desire for higher levels of Jewish immigration than by opposition to the implicit theory that America should be dominated by individuals with northern and western European ancestry.

This is a controversial analysis of particular interest to those concerned with evolutionary approaches to human behavior, with Judaica, and with an evolutionary perspective on history and psychology.

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

In April of 1994, the government of Rwanda called on everyone in the Hutu majority to kill everyone in the Tutsi minority. Over the next three months, 800,000 Tutsis were murdered in the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler's war against the Jews.

Philip Gourevitch's haunting work is an anatomy of the killings in Rwanda, a vivid history of the genocide's background, and an unforgettable account of what it means to survive in its aftermath.

Through intimate portraits of Rwandans in all walks of life, Gourevitch focuses on the psychological and political challenges of survival and on how the new leaders of postcolonial Africa went to war in the Congo when resurgent genocidal forces threatened to overrun central Africa.

Can a country composed largely of perpetrators and victims create a cohesive national society? This moving contribution to the literature of witness tells us much about the struggle everywhere to forge sane, habitable political orders, and about the stubbornness of the human spirit in a world of extremity.

Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

In this pathbreaking work, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky show that, contrary to the usual image of the news media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and defense of justice, in their actual practice they defend the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate domestic society, the state, and the global order.

Based on a series of case studies—including the media’s dichotomous treatment of “worthy” versus “unworthy” victims, “legitimizing” and “meaningless” Third World elections, and devastating critiques of media coverage of the U.S. wars against Indochina—Herman and Chomsky draw on decades of criticism and research to propose a Propaganda Model to explain the media’s behavior and performance.

Their new introduction updates the Propaganda Model and the earlier case studies, and it discusses several other applications. These include the manner in which the media covered the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and subsequent Mexican financial meltdown of 1994-1995, the media’s handling of the protests against the World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund in 1999 and 2000, and the media’s treatment of the chemical industry and its regulation.

What emerges from this work is a powerful assessment of how propagandistic the U.S. mass media are, how they systematically fail to live up to their self-image as providers of the kind of information that people need to make sense of the world, and how we can understand their function in a radically new way.

The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books I-II

Volume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation. This work exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society.

Drawing on his own experiences, Solzhenitsyn reveals with torrential narrative and dramatic power the entire apparatus of Soviet repression. Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims, we encounter the secret police operations, the labor camps, and the prisons. The uprooting or extermination of whole populations is also depicted.

Yet we also witness astounding moral courage and the incorruptibility with which individuals or scattered groups, all defenseless, endured brutality and degradation. Solzhenitsyn's genius has transmuted this grisly indictment into a literary miracle.

Capital, Vol. 1: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production

1967

by Karl Marx

Capital, one of Marx's major and most influential works, was the product of thirty years close study of the capitalist mode of production in England, the most advanced industrial society of his day. This new translation of Volume One, the only volume to be completed and edited by Marx himself, seeks to do justice to the literary qualities of the work.

The introduction is by Ernest Mandel, author of Late Capitalism, one of the only comprehensive attempts to develop the theoretical legacy of Capital.

The Proper Role of Government

The Proper Role of Government is a concise exploration into the essential functions and responsibilities of government. What should the government do? This book provides insights and perspectives on the framework within which government should operate.

Ezra Taft Benson offers a thought-provoking analysis, emphasizing the importance of understanding governmental roles in society. It's a must-read for anyone interested in political science and civic education.

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