The Dialectics of Globalization:

Economic and Political Conflict in a Transnational World

By Jerry Harris

Combining bold theortical analysis and careful empirical investigation Harris provides a critical framework to understand the political and economic underpinnings of globalization. In an unique historical approach the book examines how the revolution in information technologies and the break-up of the Soviet Union intertwined to present new global opportunities to reorganize capitalism as a unified world system headed by an emerging transnational capitalist class.

The book challenges the common view that nation states still define international relations, with the United States as hegemonic leader of the world system. Instead Harris offers a more complex analysis of world affairs that sees the current period as one of transition between nationally based industrial capitalism and a global system based on revolutionary methods of production and new class relationships. He argues this conflict appears in every country as national economies realigned to fit new patterns of world accumulation creating a host of political tensions within and between nations.

This analysis is detailed in a distinctive interpretation of the US military/industrial complex, as well as the contemporary class struggles in Germany and the emerging powers of China, India and Brazil. The book concludes by investigating alternative trends which are currently challenging the inequalities of global capitalism, unfolding a fresh approach to the relationship between the state, market and civil society.

Towards an Inclusive Democracy

The Crisis of the Growth Economy and the Need for a New Liberatory Project

Takis Fotopoulos

The collapse of "actually existing socialism", which confirmed the failure of the socialist movement to achieve a synthesis of the demands for autonomy and equality, the parallel degradation of socialdemocracy into an integral part of the neoliberal consensus, and the consequent universalisation of the market economy, have intensified the crisis which began about two centuries ago, when the system of the market economy and representative democracy were established. Thie establishment of the market economy in particular was instrumental in creating the present huge concentration of power, currently accelerated by globalisation. But, it is the concentration of power which is the fundamental cause of the present multi-dimensional crisis: political, economic, social and ecological.

On the threshold of a new millennium, the need to formulate a new liberatory project is imperative. Such a project should aim at the negation of concentration of power, and at the same time would be the synthesis, but also the transcendence, of the two great historical traditions, the socialist and the democratic ones, as well as of the radical trends within the green, feminist and autonomist movements. Today, this project can have no other content than that of an inclusive democracy and its explicit aim should be the equal distribution of power among citizens: at the political level, through direct democracy, at the economic level through economic democracy, i.e. a new form of economic organisation beyond the failed systems of the market economy and central planning, as well at the broader social level. Inclusive Democracy therefore is not a utopia but, in effect, perhaps the only realistic way out of the chronic and today generalised crisis in an effort to integrate society with polity, the economy and Nature.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end.
Henry David Thoreau

The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Henry David Thoreau

I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.
Thomas Jefferson

An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.
Gandhi

Evil in Modern Thought:

An Alternative History of Philosophy

Susan Neiman

Evil threatens human reason, for it challenges our hope that the world makes sense. For eighteenth-century Europeans, the Lisbon earthquake was manifest evil. Today we view evil as a matter of human cruelty, and Auschwitz as its extreme incarnation. Examining our understanding of evil from the Inquisition to contemporary terrorism, Susan Neiman explores who we have become in the three centuries that separate us from the early Enlightenment. In the process, she rewrites the history of modern thought and points philosophy back to the questions that originally animated it.

Whether expressed in theological or secular terms, evil poses a problem about the world's intelligibility. It confronts philosophy with fundamental questions: Can there be meaning in a world where innocents suffer? Can belief in divine power or human progress survive a cataloging of evil? Is evil profound or banal? Neiman argues that these questions impelled modern philosophy. Traditional philosophers from Leibniz to Hegel sought to defend the Creator of a world containing evil. Inevitably, their efforts--combined with those of more literary figures like Pope, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Sade--eroded belief in God's benevolence, power, and relevance, until Nietzsche claimed He had been murdered. They also yielded the distinction between natural and moral evil that we now take for granted. Neiman turns to consider philosophy's response to the Holocaust as a final moral evil, concluding that two basic stances run through modern thought. One, from Rousseau to Arendt, insists that morality demands we make evil intelligible. The other, from Voltaire to Adorno, insists that morality demands that we don't.

Beautifully written and thoroughly engaging, this book tells the history of modern philosophy as an attempt to come to terms with evil. It reintroduces philosophy to anyone interested in questions of life and death, good and evil, suffering and sense.