Adopts an historical approach to describe and explain the principal similarities and differences in the systems of authority and inequality in the USA, the USSR, and China.

This book arose out of a friendship between a political philosopher and an economic sociologist, and their recognition of an urgent political need to address the extreme inequalities of wealth and power in contemporary societies. It provides a new analysis of what generates inequalities in rights to income, property and public goods in contemporary societies. By critiquing Marx’s foundational theory of exploitation, it moves beyond Marx, both in its analysis of inequality, and in its concept of just distribution. It points to the major historical transformations that create educational and knowledge inequalities, inequalities in rights to public goods that combine with those to private wealth. It argues that asymmetries of economic power are inherently gendered and racialized, and that forms of coercion and slavery are deeply embedded in the histories of capitalism.

In 1976, there were 38 countries, comprising nearly 50% of the world’s population that self-identified as socialist states, yet by 1991, only one remained. In 1976, the annual GDP per capita of the 38 socialist countries (in inflation adjusted dollars) averaged approximately $5 thousand. By 1990 it had grown to about $8 thousand. During that same period, the GDP per capita, in comparable numbers, for the United States grew from $24 thousand to $36 thousand. The socialist countries never grew their per capita income to more than 22% of the United States. Even China, which today has an economy almost as large as the United States, never saw its per capita GDP grow beyond $2 thousand per year during the twenty-eight year period as a socialist state under Mao Zedong. But, after the death of Mao, China converted its economy to the capitalist model with spectacular success, lifting a billion people out of poverty and challenging the United States for worldwide economic supremacy-an outcome that would have been unthinkable under socialism. Why has capitalism proven to be such an extraordinary success and socialism such a miserable failure? Charles Ladner argues that the success or failure of economic systems can be traced to the degree to which such systems are congruent with the primal force of evolutionary natural selection. This is the most fundamental need of every living thing to survive and reproduce. He encapsulate these forces into the term: selfishness. Capitalism, he finds, is grounded in such selfishness or self-interest, and therefore is fully congruent with the biological needs which provide the aspirational motivation that cause capitalism at all times and in every place, to be successful. Socialism, on other hand, requires and cannot function without, authoritarian rule to suppress expressions of self-interest. Its operation at the level of the state, serves to frustrate the biological needs and thereby will always produce poverty and failure. The historical record, he says, categorically demonstrates this. Capitalism, however, has a fatal flaw, and that is its inability to restrain the expression of selfishness, which ultimately leads to such extremes of wealth and income inequality that the system can self-destruct. In the final chapters, Ladner offers possible remedies for the United States, which he believes is already in the very early stages of such self-destruction.

Analyzing Oppression presents a new, integrated theory of social oppression, which tackles the fundamental question that no theory of oppression has satisfactorily answered: if there is no natural hierarchy among humans, why are some cases of oppression so persistent? Cudd argues that the explanation lies in the coercive co-opting of the oppressed to join in their own oppression. This answer sets the stage for analysis throughout the book, as it explores the questions of how and why the oppressed join in their oppression. Cudd argues that oppression is an institutionally structured harm perpetrated on social groups by other groups using direct and indirect material, economic, and psychological force. Among the most important and insidious of the indirect forces is an economic force that operates through oppressed persons' own rational choices. This force constitutes the central feature of analysis, and the book argues that this force is especially insidious because it conceals the fact of oppression from the oppressed and from others who would be sympathetic to their plight. The oppressed come to believe that they suffer personal failings and this belief appears to absolve society from responsibility. While on Cudd's view oppression is grounded in material exploitation and physical deprivation, it cannot be long sustained without corresponding psychological forces. Cudd examines the direct and indirect psychological forces that generate and sustain oppression. She discusses strategies that groups have used to resist oppression and argues that all persons have a moral responsibility to resist in some way. In the concluding chapter Cudd proposes a concept of freedom that would be possible for humans in a world that is actively opposing oppression, arguing that freedom for each individual is only possible when we achieve freedom for all others.

'Markets Not Capitalism' explores the gap between radically freed markets and the capitalist-controlled markets that prevail today. The contributors argue that structural poverty can be abolished by liberating market exchange from state capitalist privilege, as well as helping working people to take control of their labour.