Bankruptcies and Bailouts

Edited by Wayne Antony, Julie Guard

Recession? Depression? Market adjustment? Billion-dollar bailouts? Just what is happening to the economy? Like the rest of the industrialized world, Canada is in the midst of an economic crisis that is cleary of global proportions. Yet, Nobel Prize winning economists failed to see it coming. This is unsurprising since, in the words of the newly humble Alan Greenspan, the crisis revealed “a flaw in the model ... that defines the way the world works.” Bankruptcies and Bailouts explains… (more information)

Economic Democracy

The Working Class Alternative to Capitalism

Allan Engler

Identifying capitalism as a system of socialized labour, privately owned capitalist collectives (corporations) and workplace (dictatorships), this book proposes economic democracy as an alternative form of organization. Unlike the capitalist system, which centralizes power with a small elite, economic democracy entitles everyone to a voice and equal vote in their communities’ economic and political decisions. Workplace and community democracy will replace capitalist (corporate) dictatorship… (more information)

Global Capitalism in Crisis

Karl Marx & The Decay of the Profit System

Murray E.G. Smith

The world economy is currently experiencing a devastating slump not seen since the Second World War. Unemployment rates are skyrocketing and salaries are plummeting in the developed world, while astronomical food prices and starvation ravage the developing world. The crisis in global capitalism, Smith argues, should be understood as both a composite crisis of overproduction, credit and finance, and a deep-seated systemic crisis. Using Marx to analyze the origins, implications and scope of the current… (more information)

Global Trade

Past Mistakes, Future Choices

Greg Buckman

Trade, along with the free movement of capital, is at the heart of today’s international economy. But international trade is an intensely political and contested subject. This book traces the history of global trade, the impact of current global trading arrangements on poverty, inequality and the environment, its hugely differential consequences for high-income and low-income countries, and future options for revised trading arrangements. It argues that factors like future fossil fuel costs… (more information)

Juggernaut Politics

Understanding Predatory Globalisation

Jacques B. Gelinas

This book explains the global economy and uncovers the facts behind the hype. Globalisation is not a vehicle without a driver, or an irresistible and inevitable force of nature, as political leaders and pundits would have us believe. Juggernaut Politics identifies the actual institutions and people controlling the system and explains how the globalisation machine really works. It exposes the hidden face of the unregulated global market and its unequal trade treaties and domination by big money.… (more information)

Ploughing Up the Farm

Neoliberalism, Modern Technology and the State of the World’s Farmers

Jerry Buckland

Ploughing Up the Farm brings together an impressive array of evidence to show that neoliberalism and modern technology underlie recent trends: rural depopulation in the North, rising rural poverty in the South and environmental problems all around the farming world. Market-driven growth and trade liberalization have encouraged production for agricultural export, and the growing use of chemical inputs are often biased against Third World farmers and small farmers everywhere. Jerry Buckland calls… (more information)

Social Economy

Health and Welfare in Four Canadian Provinces

Edited by Louise Tremblay, Yves Vaillancourt

The fundamental principles of the social economy are solidarity, democratic organization of work, and user and community participation. Based on a three-year study carried out by researchers at the Université du Québec “ Montréal, Université de Moncton, the University of Ottawa and the University of Regina, the essays here testify to the value and diversity of the social economy sector in four Canadian provinces. Researchers explore the realities of the third sector… (more information)

Stolen Fruit

The Tropical Commodities Disaster

Peter Robbins

Many countries in the South have been encouraged to grow coffee, sugar, cotton and other crops, but small farmers get only a tiny share of the final price of these commodities in the North. As prices collapse, the terms of trade between North and South have widened. This investigation, by one of the leading authorities on commodity trading, analyzes the current trading arrangements and their disastrous effect on foreign exchange earnings, tax revenues and economic growth in developing countries.… (more information)

The Global Food Economy

The Battle for the Future of Farming

Tony Weis

The modern food industry is a paradox: surplus “food mountains” sit alongside global malnutrition; the developed world subsidized its own agriculture while pressurizing the developing to liberalize at any cost; and an increasingly aggressive export competition is accompanied by a growing reliance on imports in many countries. The WTO’s uneven application of neoliberal economics to food production is relatively new, and the consequences of mounting deficits, rising “food miles… (more information)

Who Owes Who?

50 Questions about World Debt

Damien Millet, Eric Toussaint

This book explains in a simple but precise manner how and why the debt impasse for developing countries has arrived. Illustrated with figures, maps and tables, it details the roles of the actors involved and the mesh in which indebted countries are caught. It explains scenarios for getting out of this impasse and alternatives to future indebtedness. It also sets out the arguments—moral, political, economic, legal and environmental—for a wholesale cancellation of developing countries&… (more information)