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Books > Social sciences > Politics & government > Political ideologies
Since the Great Financial Crisis swept across the world in 2008,
there have been few certainties regarding the trajectory of global
capitalism, let alone the politics taking hold in individual
states. This has now given way to palpable confusion regarding what
sense to make of this world in a political conjuncture marked by
Donald Trump's `Make America Great Again' presidency of the United
States, on the one hand, and, on the other, Xi Jinping's ambitious
agenda in consolidating his position as `core leader' at the top of
the Chinese state. * Is a major redrawing of the map of global
capitalism underway? * Is an unwinding of globalization in train,
or will it continue, but with closure to the mobility of labour? *
Is there a legitimacy crisis for neoliberalism even while
neoliberal practices continue to form state policy? * Are we
witnessing an authoritarian mutation of liberal democracy in the
21st century? * Should the strategic issues today be posed in terms
of `socialism versus barbarism redux'?
In 1682 the French explorer Rene-Robert Cavelier de La Salle
claimed the Mississippi River basin for France, naming the region
Louisiana to honor his king, Louis XIV. Until the United States
acquired the territory in the Louisiana Purchase more than a
century later, there had never been a revolution, per se, in
Louisiana. However, as Jennifer Tsien highlights in this
groundbreaking work, revolutionary sentiment clearly surfaced in
the literature and discourse both in the Louisiana colony and in
France with dramatic and far-reaching consequences. In Rumors of
Revolution, Tsien analyzes documented observations made in Paris
and in New Orleans about the exercise of royal power over French
subjects and colonial Louisiana stories that laid bare the
arbitrary powers and abuses that the government could exert on its
people against their will. Ultimately, Tsien establishes an
implicit connection between histories of settler colonialism in the
Americas and the fate of absolutism in Europe that has been largely
overlooked in scholarship to date.
Approaching the subjects of empire and colonization in a new light,
this survey states that the free global market and institutions
such as the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World
Trade Organization are actually recolonizing Southern Africa. This
polemic argues that the unalloyed working of capitalism--the
manufacture and exacerbation of a hierarchy that enlarges the gap
between the rich and the poor--is self-creating and
self-sustaining. It is also locked into place by governments and
their institutions, leaving no space for an alternative structure.
Those increasingly unable to defend themselves against the free
global market have been recolonized into this capitalist system.
In Rock | Water | Life, Lesley Green examines the interwoven realities of inequality, racism, colonialism, and environmental destruction in South Africa, calling for environmental research and governance to transition to an ecopolitical approach that could address South Africa's history of racial oppression and environmental exploitation.
Green analyses conflicting accounts of nature in environmental sciences that claim neutrality amid ongoing struggles for land restitution and environmental justice.
Offering in-depth studies of environmental conflict in contemporary South Africa, Green addresses the history of contested water access in Cape Town; struggles over natural gas fracking in the Karoo; debates about decolonising science; the potential for a politics of
soil in the call for land restitution; urban baboon management, and the consequences of sending sewage to urban oceans.
In and out of the Maasai Steppe looks at the Maasai women in the
Maasai Steppe of Tanzania. The book explores their current plight -
threatened by climate change - in the light of colonial history and
post-independence history of land seizures. The book documents the
struggles of a group of women to develop new livelihood income
through their traditional beadwork. Voices of the women are shared
as they talk about how it feels to share their husband with many
co-wives, and the book examines gender, their beliefs, social
hierarchy, social changes and in particular the interface between
the Maasai and colonials.
There's a war against truth... and if we don't win it, intellectual freedom will be a casualty.
The West’s commitment to freedom, reason, and true liberalism has never been more seriously threatened than it is today by the stifling forces of political correctness.
Dr. Gad Saad, the host of the enormously popular YouTube show THE SAAD TRUTH, exposes the bad ideas—what he calls “idea pathogens”—that are killing common sense and rational debate. Incubated in our universities and spread through the tyranny of political correctness, these ideas are endangering our most basic freedoms—including freedom of thought and speech.
The danger is grave, but as Dr. Saad shows, politically correct dogma is riddled with logical fallacies. We have powerful weapons to fight back with—if we have the courage to use them.
A provocative guide to defending reason and intellectual freedom and a battle cry for the preservation of our fundamental rights, The Parasitic Mind will be the most controversial and talked-about book of the year.
The much-anticipated definitive account of China's Great
Famine
An estimated thirty-six million Chinese men, women, and children
starved to death during China's Great Leap Forward in the late
1950s and early '60s. One of the greatest tragedies of the
twentieth century, the famine is poorly understood, and in China is
still euphemistically referred to as "the three years of natural
disaster."
As a journalist with privileged access to official and
unofficial sources, Yang Jisheng spent twenty years piecing
together the events that led to mass nationwide starvation,
including the death of his own father. Finding no natural causes,
Yang attributes responsibility for the deaths to China's
totalitarian system and the refusal of officials at every level to
value human life over ideology and self-interest.
"Tombstone" is a testament to inhumanity and occasional heroism
that pits collective memory against the historical amnesia imposed
by those in power. Stunning in scale and arresting in its detailed
account of the staggering human cost of this tragedy, "Tombstone"
is written both as a memorial to the lives lost--an enduring
tombstone in memory of the dead--and in hopeful anticipation of the
final demise of the totalitarian system. Ian Johnson, writing in
"The New York Review of Books," called the Chinese edition of
"Tombstone ""groundbreaking . . . One of the most important books
to come out of China in recent years."
Cultural Writing. Political Science. Cutting through the myths,
misunderstandings, and neglect that have obscured the influence of
Darwinism on radical thought, this detailed account examines the
paradoxical challenges that Darwinism posed for late 19th- and
early 20th- century socialism. This study shows that Darwin
provided British socialists from Alfred Russel Wallace to Emile
Vandervelde with a new language of political expression, and that
socialist thought developed through interaction with the most
advanced biological theories of the day.
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