"Karl Marx wrote a great deal about the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America, but commentators upon his work have subsequently disagreed--sometimes violently--about the implications of his observations. In this book, the author strives to disentangle the threads of Marx's narrative and analysis and to demonstrate how, property understood, they form a coherent pattern and one still capable of application to the world about us. An outstanding merit of the book is that although it makes a signal and distinguished contribution to Marxism, it is at the same time one of the best and clearest introductions to Marxism that one could hope to find"--Provided by publisher.

The contributors to this book review key problems relating to the Third World from different theoretical perspectives within the framework of Marxian and allied theory. The first section deals with various theoretical problems related to an understanding of the Third World. The second section contains articles on the Marxian concept of the Asiatic mode of production. The third section examines the application of Marxian theory to enable an understanding of Third World realities.

'Like the brilliant sun, the October Revolution shone over all five continents, awakening millions of oppressed and exploited people around the world. There has never existed such a revolution of such significance and scale in the history of humanity'. - Hồ Chí Minh// From Cuba to Vietnam, from China to South Africa, the October Revolution remains as an inspiration. After all, that Revolution proved that the working class and the peasantry could not only overthrow an autocratic government but that it could form its own government, in its image. It proved decisively that the working class and the peasantry could be allied. It proved as well the necessity of a vanguard party that was open to spontaneous currents of unrest, but which could guide a revolution to completion. This book explains the power of the October Revolution for the Third World. It is not a comprehensive study, but a small book with a large hope - that a new generation will come to see the importance of this revolution for the working class and peasantry in that part of the world that suffered under the heel of colonial domination.

Capitalism and the Third World is the first comprehensive assessment of dependency and world systems scholarship, and questions whether such theories offer a scientific basis for the study of international relations. Wil Hout skilfully compares the theories of dependency and world systems with their theoretical predecessors and competitors. In the first part of the book comparisons are made with traditional economic and neo-Marxist theories of imperialism, the liberal theory of international free trade, Prebisch's structuralism and modernisation theories. The second part analyses the writings of Andre Gunder Frank, Samir Amin, Johan Galtung and Immanuel Wallerstein, and tests three causal models derived from the writings of these scholars using quantitative macro-political and macro-economic data. This valuable study will be widely used for courses on international political economy and development economics. It will be of particular interest to those studying the political economy of North-South relations.

In Marx's familiar dictum, the more-developed country shows the less developed an image of its own future. Turning this idea upside down, In the Mirror of the Third World looks to the contemporary Third World for a reflection of European history. The resulting view challenges standard accounts of European social, economic, and political development. Sandra Halperin's analysis of the European experience begins where studies of Third World development often start: considering the legacies of colonial domination. Europe also had a colonial past, she reminds us, and the states of Europe, like those of today's Third World, were the product of colonialism and imperialism. From this starting point, Halperin traces features characteristic of Third World development through the history of European capitalism: enclave economies oriented to foreign markets; weak middle classes; alliances among the state, traditional landowning elites, and new industrial classes; unstable and partial democracy; sharp inequalities; and increasing poverty—all as much a part of European society on the eve of World War I as they are of developing countries today. Halperin also emphasizes the emergence of a militant, literal religion in Europe and its critical role in the class struggles of the nineteenth century.

In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by Marx that cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the New York Tribune, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well. Through highly informed readings of work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond. For this expanded edition, Anderson has written a new preface that discusses the additional 1879–82 notebook material, as well as the influence of the Russian-American philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya on his thinking.