Economic-union Books

Bousquet's analysis of the "informationalized" university is interesting and rings true. Unfortunately, his sloppy organization and unedited writing result in needless repetition and obscure what would otherwise be a compelling indictment of higher education's exploitation of its educated workforce. He places the blame where it belongs--not on technology or the insignificant employment of "distance learning," but on the public university's adoption of a for-profit, capitalistic mission, top-heavy with overpaid administrators, which in turn creates the need for an informal, "right here, right now" supply of cheap labor. Though he makes his points, the author's long-winded, cluttered sentences and "spiral" organization--he keeps coming back again and again to points already made--detract significantly from his book's effectiveness.

Marc Bousquet has written quite a book that deserves to be widely distributed not only in academia but to any organization involved in labor issues. The University (capitalized as generic) may be the main topic but the background and consequences apply to general labor-management relations. It's a very dense book that weaves social theory, labor relations history and contemporary academic labor analysis.

It should command one's attention and will give academic readers quite a few "wow, that's what's going on where I work" moments. And if you enjoy Michael Berube's writing, you'll enjoy this as well.

I disagree with the previous reviewer that it is badly written. It is dense, yes, but not inaccessible. Most of the concepts used will be familiar to anyone who has paid attention to labor issues beyond academia. It is one of the arguments of the book that, indeed, academics have tended to not think of themselves as labor, and that therefore, academia would be exempt from the major trends affecting the labor market. It has been a costly mistake, for instance, with the massive increase in the use of contingent work. Two major points made by the book:

*"We are not `overproducing Ph.Ds'; we are underproducing jobs." The university would not be able to function without the reserve army of graduate students and contingent workers. In this sense, the work they do constitutes REAL jobs and positions that are simply never filled but could be filled by degree holders. But the way the managed university works is to fill these positions with contingent work, on a casualized basis and treat them as if they were not actual positions. Moreover, contingent workers can often only afford to take these low-paid positions because they have spouses with full-time positions, other systems of financial assistance, or simply get into debt. In other words, cheap teaching is subsidized by other parts of the social structure.

* "Cheap teaching is not a victimless crime." Such labor made and maintained cheap hurts everyone in addition to contingent workers. On the end of the labor chain, the increasing casualization of work at the university tends to increase the stressing of the system: full-time, tenured faculty still have to teach more, advise more, publish more, serve on more committees or continuous improvement teams, get more involved in "shared governance", etc. It also leave undergraduate teaching to the less experienced graduate students.

Marc Bousquet compares the current university system to an HMO. The university has become an organization to be managed like an efficient business where efficiency means delivering education at the lowest possible cost and running at a profit. However, as in the case of health care, this managerial revolution has not brought about cheaper education. Quite the opposite, the cost of higher education has been consistently increasing but not because of expensive teachers but by adding layers upon layers of administrators.

The strength of the book is in raising awareness, through various forms of analysis, regarding working conditions in universities but also in placing academia in its proper social context: the larger global marketplace.

Bousquet does a good job exposing the exploitative practices of the corporate university. He's at his best when he discusses specific cases (the UPS "earn while you learn" ripoff, for example), and he gives a very perceptive analysis of why the perennial optimistic reports about the PhD job "market" (like the Bowen report) got things so wrong.

But I have to agree with a previous reviewer that the book is pretty tough going for a general audience. Bousquet is (alas) a "theoretician", and the neo-Marxist jargon makes one's eyes glaze over for entire paragraphs (and sometimes whole pages). Alas, the effect of this is that the book is really readable only for someone who is already comfortable with this jargon, which means that he's basically preaching to the choir, since anybody who can read the book is already appalled at the abuses! Too bad.

This amazing book has received rave reviews in the major higher ed press--and for good reason. If you or anyone you know is even thinking about college or graduate school, stop and read this book first! Bousquet has been called the "Al Gore of higher education" and compared to Upton Sinclair (the author of Oil! and The Jungle) for this eye-opening expose. Cary Nelson calls it the "single most important" recent book on higher education.

Faculty who spend ten years in graduate school earn less than waiters and bartenders? Most of the courses are taught by grad students and "adjunct faculty," who make about fifty dollars a head for teaching all semester?

No wonder most students don't graduate. Students who do get degrees spend years being farmed out by sleazy administrators to local corporations as cheap or free labor, and then another ten years paying off loan debt. And a college degree doesn't even get you a decent job anymore--unless you're willing to be a business major.

If you want to learn how higher education has become worse than health care, turned into a scam and "profit center" for Enron-Halliburton-Blackwater types, read this book. There are a couple of dense passages, but if you're going to read one book about higher education, this is it.

This is an excellent introduction to the problems of higher education. It focuses on exploitation of junior scholars. One could add a great deal more: shenanigans with retirement systems, horrible treatment of nonacademic staffs, squandered money, outright theft, and more. In a 45-year career in the game, I knew higher administrators who appropriated considerable university money for private parties, one who redirected the library's book-buying budget to redirecting his office, and several who managed to be gone almost all the time (frequently to shop for even better jobs). The one who redirected the library money also got his university involved in various deals with private corporations; they cost the university plenty, benefited the corporations some, benefited the students little.
Many high-level schools reward (sic) famous-name professors by "liberating" (sic) them from teaching undergraduates! They teach a seminar a year, and often no more than that.
At most universities today, expenses on administration--especially high administrators' salaries--skyrocket while expenses on actual teaching are flatlined or nearly so. This is not education at all, let alone "higher" education.
Bousquet and Nelson are right: academics have to organize in some way that will give them some power against these abuses. Meanwhile, any and all students and especially parents and alumni should really take a very long, hard look at what is going on, and act accordingly. Above all, parents and alums, demand that your money goes to teaching and research, not to bloated salaries of supernumerary administrators.

Illuminating look at the changing face of America's former national pastime and its recent growth around the globe. The research, which includes material on baseball in Italy, Germany and the UK, as well as the usual suspects, is impressive.

This book by Alan Klein, the leading authority on the social science of baseball, may be his best (he is also the author of Sugarball, and Baseball on the Border). In Growing the Game he unravels MLB's efforts to expand baseball outside the U.S. Lucid and engaging. Perfect for my Sport, Culture and Society course.

We know how impressive Japan and the Dominican Republic are as baseball playing countries, but Klein goes way beyond that in showing us the rest of the world. This book really gives us a way to look at baseball and globalization. Must reading for baseball fans.
D. Valdes

Growing the Game is just a waste of time and money...The issue of the globalization of baseball has been better analyzed by other authors in the past 5 years!!..Klein is just way out of touch!!...Don't buy it!

Remarkable!! Klein's book is not even out yet, a minor point for M. Torrez who trashes it without having read a word. Readers of these reviews should take note- this space can be a clearing house for people with grudges and agendas. Pay no attention to my rating; I am the author and had to rate the book in order to caution unsuspecting readers.

When the "founding fathers" wrote the constitution, it brought about great change. Today great change is needed...so what else ought we do but change the constitution? Jackson makes that notion convincingly clear. As i read this book, I kept thinking "I wish I had this book in college." In college, the dynamics of social and political thought were always about programs and policies....it was the bandaid solution. This book lays out the treatment and, most importantly, the diagnosis! Where have we been as a nation? The answer to that question is the real diagnosis....it is the diagnosis no one wants to hear, that Jackson has exposed. But we must acknowledge the diagnosis so we can identify the proper treatment and know how to apply it. How do we heal? The answer to that question is the treatment -- changing the constitution is so fundamental that it is largely ignored by politicos and scholars. Perhaps it is ignored because the constitution has been held as an immovable object. But, as Jackson explains, the constitution can be changed, and any changes (or amendments) become as rock solid as the constitution itself. Jackson has laid out a strategy that has rarely (in part and never in toto) been suggested for our nation -- a new idea -- that fact alone makes this book a MUST HAVE. Jackson has also laid out a strategy that will yield a prognosis for the nation that is desireable to all -- that fact makes this book a MUST DO!

Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr.in his newest book " A More Perfect Union" has proven that he is so much more than the beneficiary of great civil, social, political and theolological pedigree. In this his, chef doeuvre, along with contributor Frank Watkins, he provides the reader with a sweeping commentary of not merely race but racism in all of its legislative origin.

Imagine not stumbling upon the word racism until 1936 and finding no rise of the African American experience. Preposterous. Is it not? But truth. Congressman Jackson not only reveals why we must be outraged, not in the riotous form, but further demonstrates, in this important piece how we must engage our outrage by "economic reform."

Reader do not be discouraged by the book's smallprint or numerous pages. This plethora of information only lends itself to the extensive research and detail the author and his contributor insisted upon. Welcome these pages as they are wealthy. FINALLY there exists an "inclusive textbook" which it resembles and rally for it soon to be.

The reader will delight in a discovery of previously undocumented
yet factual pieces of African-American history "as American as apple pie." Congressman Jackson Jackson exhibits how African-Americans significantly shaped America and its politics. Furthermore, he examines how each American President, past and present viewed(s)and dealt(s) with the race problem and provides the reader with deriviations of words such as Jim Crow, locates and defines for his reader new political buzz words and delves into how "A More Perfect Union" can be achieved through Equal Opportunity, Human Rights,Full Employment, Universal and Comprehensive Health Care, Affordable Housing, Quality Public Education, Fair Taxes, Foreign Policy, Politics, and Moral Responsibility. Congressman Jackson actually dissects each of the above-mentioned and provides VIABLE solutions to their achievement.

Congressman Jackson and his contributor Frank Watkins must be applauded for preaching more than just "high sounding benevolent social rhetoric" as some of his counterparts. A section of the book is semi-autobiograhical and gives the reader perspective into his personal experiences and his subsequent growth. In it he reveals his humanity and there is substantial evidence that he has not taken his political responsibility lightly.

Readers add this book to your shelf only after reading and re-reading. It must "court" your dictionary and your other reference material. This book will invite you to consult it time and time again. It is indeed reference-WORTHY. Although it is a lofty, thought-provoking, brave and maybe even an unpopular undertaking, it is brillantly and perfectly executed. As Lincoln stated "the hen is the wisest of all animal creation because she never cacles until the egg is laid". Congressman Jackson is no hen but an egg he has laid-and "A More Perfect Union" is clearly Faberge'. We recognize if we never did before, Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. as one of our most heady, intellectual statesmen of the 21st century. A must Read!!! BRAVO!!!!

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this book is the biggest piece of garbage I've ever read.......Karl Marx would be proud

Cong. Jackson's book not only outlines America's flawed and inherently racist political ideology but he sets for a blueprint for action for those born after 1965, the benefactors of the Civil Rights Movement, the authors of the so-called Hip Hop Generation, the people who are caught between fulfilling Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'dream' and rushing to the nearest dealership for the latest in bling bling. This book should be required reading for middle school and high school students as it engages you in a critical thinking exercise about what it means to be "American," what it means to be "free" and further unveils the hidden truths in the U.S. Constitution. We live in hypocrisy rather than a democracy, where millions of Americans lack health care, have access to quality education, employment, housing and a corruption free legal/court system. It is clear that we must rally to modify the 10th amendment which continues to undermine the very foundation of the Constitution by allowing the 50 states to operate as seperate and unequal parcels under the guise of a United States. Why do we have 50 separate public school systems; 50 seperate criminal justice systems; 50 seperate policies on everything from immigration to affirmative action to civil/human rights to voting rights...? And how is it that the federal government is not responsible for any? These are the questions probed and answered in this prolific book. In its pages are a challenge for this generation. Do we want power or status? Do we want justice or a lexus? The struggle continues. Forward ever...backwards never.

This book is must reading for anyone who desires to understand how politicial idealogy has developed in the US. Additionally, the book offers a clear agenda for moving the United States towards a more perfect union. I predict that we will see the issues raised in this book edvident in the next presidential election.

Of the books I have read thus far on the corporatization of the university, this is by far the clearest and most direct. Steal this University has some poignant essays in it, in particular the one by the MFA artist who has spent years as a freeway flier in Southern California. Also very enlightening is the essay on the "merit system" for tenure line and tenured profs, and not only, how unfair it is (which I, as a UC employee already know), but actually how expensive and inefficient it is to run.

What I think is missing from the book (and from others like it) and what another reviewer has commented upon is the student perspective and the other odd market forces at work, as well as the ongoing mystery as to why higher education gets more and more expensive for the student, while the pay-scale for everyone other than top administrators seems frozen or going down.

The final issues seem crucial to get answers to, if we are going to have any chance of improving the status quo.

This collection of essays is well organized to outline the key higher education issues of corporatization, organizing, what it's like to be a non-tenured faculty member unsure of their next contract.

Casual labor is here to stay, but solutions to current problems are few and far between. Tenure battles, personal stories of anguish, and barriers to unionization provide the reader a thorough and actually entertaining escape from their own problems resulting from the increased use of contingent faculty.

Although it appears as that the University of Phoenix is being singled out as the great perpetrator, the fact the students have a choice is overlooked. There are more University of Phoenix style schools out there, some of which are being organized with tremendous entrepreneurial funding sources and will probably eclipse Phoenix.

The diverse array of assembled writers and editors adds variety and perspective to this book.

The other two reviews accurately reflect logical perspectives on the clash of the dwindling but nevertheless delighted adepts securely tenured in the guild, the restless hordes of journeymen "freeway flyers" doomed to adjunct/part-time work (or in my case, full-time, non-tenured at a corporate university [not U of Phoenix, thank heaven for small mercies] which grants nobody tenure but everybody must work on an "at will" agreement sans contracts), and the eager if exhausted grad students, the apprentices. Benjamin Johnson's edited this collection of accounts, which range from overviews of the situation to analyses of the corporatization effects on higher education, union efforts, and a critique by David Noble (see his "Digital Diploma Mills" for more of same). Ana Marie Cox, whose essay is not really about Phoenix per se as much as the profit-making universities--disdains the proprietary system and makes the negative observations that are largely accurate, and to be expected.

As one from within such ivy-less, for-profit walls that Cox evidently has not entered, what this essay (and book) lacks, however, in my judgment is the first-person testimony of a faculty member from the ranks that Cox and all other contributors shrink away from as if they'd come into contact with lepers. The essayists understandably bewail their fate, lest they end up--desperate and humiliated after graduate matriculation at the Ivies and East Coast elites--at such an institution.

I see from the notes appended that all but one of those with PhDs, no matter their earlier travails, are employed full-time now at universities. Nearly all of those with doctorates (reading between the lines of some descriptions?) seem now on tenure-tracks; Cox alone went into journalism on- and then off-line; two more are doctoral candidates, the remaining two are union organizers. One PhD who has not entered the ranks of the blessed, artist Alexis Moore, shares with me an Angeleno experience of commuting and teaching all about this vast gridlocked expanse, and the fact that she continues to do so in such a journeyman fashion. Her account, as with Kevin Mattson's narrative that includes tellingly a stint of one class taught in a shopping mall at a community college branch, should remind those who declaim solidarity and radicalism from their tenured lecterns that they also are in part responsible for perpetuating not even the status quo of tenure even as a hope to the worthy one in a hundred applicants, but as smug contributors to its decline. How many salaries at the top, administrators, full profs with two or three courses a year, football coaches, fundraisers, are paid so generously thanks to the "surplus labor" of many more adjuncts, with six courses to teach, as scattered across three colleges a semester?

Johnson notes that one in three tenure-track positions recently opened up by boomer-retirees are filled with tenure-track candidates; the rest are divvied up into cheaper disposable part-time and grad student slots. One in three, at best, of those of us with recent PhDs enter tenure-track status; and of course those granted tenure, as Jack Westheimer's chilling tale depicts, will comprise about 10% of all up-and-coming PhDs. Those of us outside of this status are teaching often at basic or remedial levels many of the working class, poor, immigrants or marginalized Americans praised so often by postcolonial, radical, or transgressive theorists who view these disenfranchised from distant ivory towers where few of the proletariat settle or where few of the indentured professoriate ascend.

Cary Nelson (in his similar book "Office Hours") laments the loss of "dedicated leisure" for academic progress among the expendable cohorts. What this leaves, as Mattson depicts well, is the lack of time for the life of the mind, for pondering and reading and writing, and the weakening of future scholarship by those of us beaten down after picking up the heavy teaching loads that our 'betters' jettisoned happily. With little grading or lecturing, endowed profs now can roam to far-flung conferences and enjoy media attention given to pundits and sound-bite experts.

At these conferences, some of us listen to them, if more rarely are invited to join with them in their grant-funded research. Many of us were well-trained by such celebrity as well as more humble profs, to follow the boomers that have taught us and granted us PhDs. We have much to offer, but how much can be achieved when one is given no research funds, no time off, and no financial incentive or scheduling break to think for a while about one's specialty and to produce scholarship...and not only teach at basic and remedial levels one's field? Yes, some of us still manage to do research, but far less than may be needed in many fields either to substantially advance our career or further in-depth study in our specialized discipline.

Those on the tenure perch who scoff at the rest of us wishing they could climb up have often emerged from a far more generously funded past, when only a diss. might be required, one had one's pick of postwar posts, and one could expect to land a decent professorship without publishing books while still in grad school. So far, only a few profs bother in print to even fathom this tidal shift and ebb. Cary Nelson (included here), Michael Berube, and Stephen Watt--to name three in my general field--take the trouble to make this contrast known, and from their own tenured redoubts they rally for the rest of us still fighting in the trenches.

With so many more looking up at those few remaining in the heights, the competition fierce, the pre-requisites daunting, the claim that the rest of the PhDs are simply Not Our People, Darling becomes ludicrous. Supply and demand: for humanities and social science PhDs = low pay; much work of many supports high pay, low work of a few. Academic bottom-line merges with corporate capital. Work, yes, is also researching and publishing, but these labors are desired by any PhD who seeks not only a job but a chance to change the world by ideas and intellectual effort. Overwork in the pursuit of knowledge is no vice!

Half of college teaching done by part-timers, an indeterminate amount (useful for juggling numbers of student-faculty ratios and to keep those endowed chairs happy with the life of the mind little hindered by their two or three small seminars annually at the expense saved by administrators of those who teach hundreds of students in a dozen or fifteen courses a year) of grad students and research assistants, and another fifth like me, full time and not lifetime: meet today's faculty cohorts. I teach 45 weeks for the same pay what my colleagues at teaching, not research, universities do for two semesters. I teach about fifteen courses annually, including mandatory night courses in hybrid on- and off-line form; this strategy is shown to maximize space and resources (like us) while getting students through college admittedly faster (in theory) than the 5 of 6 years increasingly common at "traditional" state schools.

This widening disparity, glaringly, is not addressed sufficiently: do professors have to adjust themselves like other white-collar (in status if not in salary) workers to a post-Fordist economy? The impact of on-line and hybrid coursework, mix-and-match distance learning with a customary sit-in-class three hours a week set-up for today's time-pressed and often little-prepared students does demand that those at the NYUs and Yales and Columbias featured here in their righteous organizing also remember that millions of students and faculty do not have even the dubious but still revered privilege of esteem bestowed by an Ivy or elite degree or faculty affiliation. The cc's and the Cal States (which do gain attention in one chapter, as does Minnesota--where the elimination of tenure nearly occurred) and all the second- and third-tier institutions where most faculty teach today are not given the in-depth exploration they deserve.

Still, for my current level of college employment as a PhD from a "public Ivy" in the most "casualized" (i.e., the faculty having been overwhelmingly in the past three decades made not tenure-track but adjunct, grad-student, and full-time without tenure taught) of all disciplines, the fact that I have at last read accounts and pondered strategies for change, does raise my spirits. With this book at least more awareness is generated about those who face deteriorated conditions, and who face opposition, indifference or prejudice from those who again from the security of tenure proclaim so much compassion for the exploited while they ignore those with whom they share if not quiet offices than at least the libraries and classrooms. And we are not whining when we draw justified attention to the inequalities inherent in corporatized education, and how they fundamentally clash with the rhetoric and positions of traditional education that should be less than theory and more in practice. Those like Smith and Mattson teach out of love and idealism, but is it too much to ask for decent pay and an office or phone?

The solutions, honestly, in this anthology are rather anodyne. The union after a year was crushed at a sister campus of my employer. Placing so much faith in collective organizing is to be expected from a collection that takes much of its impetus from the Yale and NYU strikes of the late 90s. But, as past few years since this 2003 publication show only more momentum for alternative and more profitable (to the administration; whether for students and faculty in this standardized process as on-line modules and syllabi and common texts and publisher's add-on platforms and e-books all proliferate) methods of selling degrees, the suggestions advocated here for class awareness and group effort to make others aware of the precarious plight of contingent faculty seem already--as Johnson notes in his afterword--rather conservative and understated.

Also, like it or not, students, parents, and yes, employers are all wondering why, if the prices of tuition skyrocket past the cost of living increases and the rate of inflation, where all the cash goes, and why students are often an embarassment when with BA in hand they display their true level of skills. If companies are held accountable, if offsourcing and outsourcing are common in the employers of these college grads-- companies who invest in universities for-profit or purportedly non-profit, if taxpayers must come up with more funds for beleaguered state schools, if loans become more common and grants less so under the current Federal and state administrations, then is it that shocking that universities should be expected to document more precisely their failures and their flaws to those outside the ivory towers?

This is not to justify faculty or student exploitation but to recognize that many contributors here in the book fail to address in detail the pressures brought upon formerly impregnable colleges by market forces, student needs for flexibility, and the lack of preparation of many students whose demographics little match those commonly found at NYU, Yale, Columbia or, even, the Cal States. Attention must be paid.

College has been sold as a product, more students of all ages are buying it, and for their debt burdens and time committments, they demand quality at best but often efficiency even more. I wish it were otherwise, but job opportunities for idealists are few. The acceleration of on-line courses, the scrutiny this affords administrators of an instructor's course delivery, and the pressure to teach in compressed shorter modules all increase the pace of our performance and intensify its panoptic surveillance. Like it or not, this reduction to practical learning, more than protests in New Haven or Manhattan, is the norm for most of us teaching (for wages that our BS graduates will often surpass immediately upon graduation from four-year schools) on today's very diverse and often underfunded (ironically!) campuses.

If Professor Johnson, his contributors, or others wish to include in another forum addressing more specifically the role of corporatization not at Columbia as a "corporate university" but at a college that actually is run by such an entity, I will be happy to elaborate more my reflections.

a reader, you are clearly ignorant of the realities of adjuncting and grad school, and why it is not acceptable for universities to make hefty profits off of their students and then turn around and pay adjuncts and grad students sub-poverty wages. The class I'm teaching right now at a state college pays $2800. I'd have to teach ten classes a year to make $28k! Four and four is the 'normal' load...lets see *you* teach four classes and then come home and read a little critical theory so you can finish your Phd. What a reader sees as 'back to the sixties' and hostility is really a struggle by working people to make a living doing something they believe in, and what they believe in is being gutted of learning content and franchised and commercialized by corporations. Yes it's true, a reader, and you shouldn't make light of the struggle of working people and intellectuals to fight for the power of education. Pendejo.

Steal this University is a collection of thirteen essays by various academics and activists, which broadly decries the "corporatization" of American universities and generally recommends the organization of academic labor unions to oppose this trend. The book's title, a riff on 1960s radical Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book!, gives a clue that the essayists wax nostalgic for the New Left but also, oddly enough, the Middle Ages. Many of the essayists assume the existence of a past where faculty, all tenured, governed themselves unencumbered by administrators or financial concerns. A number of the authors appear to equate the notion of faculty governance with "democracy". The faculty governance implied by many of the authors probably never existed, at least in the form of the curiously undefined democracy imagined by them.

One of the editors, in keeping with the book title's lineage, notes that "[t]he 1960s stand as the last decade when big questions were raised about the modern university". While the big question is characterized as "corporatization", the principal issue in this book appears to be the oversupply of Ph.Ds in the humanities. One essayist, Ana Marie Cox, rails against a true corporate university, the University of Phoenix, a successful for-profit company. So incensed by the very existence of such an entity, which emphasizes the "employability" of its graduates, Cox uses corporate names as cursewords and is nonplussed by her admission that Phoenix's students actually want it that way. Of course, the objection to Phoenix's emphasis on employability is ironic since most of this book is about the less than ideal employability of certain academics. So wound up over the existence of corporations, Cox does not understand how universities can hire them to operate dining services and bookstores. Cox's solution is, predictably, state regulation - no student aid for those attending for-profit colleges and laws requiring specific numbers of credits in various disciplines, i.e. government guarantees of employment for under-utilized academics.

Some of the essayists display a precious combination of ideology and naivete. On-line education is no good because it too often requires corporate-university cooperation. Merit pay for faculty is no good because it is too hard. Anyway, efficiency is not the be-all and end-all. Benjamin Johnson complains that adjunct faculty working 40 hours a week have no time to read books. It is safe to say, I believe, that there are a considerable number of people in America who work 40 hours a week and read books. Kevin Mattson cannot imagine anything tougher than earning a Ph.D in 1994. Corey Robbins, writing of the failed graduate assistants strike at Yale, finds Edmund Burke and Augusto Pinochet equally "reactionary". The Modern Language Association is a "conservative organization".

A recurring theme among several of the essayists is open hostility to those who have achieved tenured faculty positions. Not surprising,since what is most evident from this book is that envy is a principal animating feature of the excessive Left. To Johnson, tenured faculty have a "mighty cushy job" and that "very few people on the planet exercise as much control over their daily working lives". If true, it would seem that "faculty governance" is alive and well.

Regarding tenured faculty reaction to attempts at academic unionization, one of the editors asserts that these "winners of the academic lottery are just as interested in crushing such drives" yet some of the contributors acknowledge their disappointment with unions and their "hierarchical" organization.

This is not to say that some of the contributors do not have something to add to the discourse on the modern state of higher education. Is there an overemphasis on on "training" and occupational preparation at the expense of the mind-broadening and critical thinking-enhancing liberal arts? Perhaps, but the answer, as suggested here, is not state-mandated liberal arts curricula or a kind of syndicalist regime in American universities. To use coercive measures, and not reasoned argument, to promote the liberal arts is a jarring irony. In any event, it will be difficult to convince most people that just because someone is attracted to getting a Ph.D in English and the academic lifestyle, that that someone has an inherent right to a high-paying lifetime job.

Peter Reddaway (George Washington University Washington, DC) und Dmitri Glinski (Institut für Weltwirtschaft und internationale Beziehungen Moskau) legen mit dieser voluminösen Studie der postsowjetischen russischen Reformversuche nicht nur die bisher bei weitem fundierteste Kritik des Reformkurses der Jelzin-Regierung vor. Sie steuern mit diesem Buch auch eine besonders detaillierte, fakten- und quellengesättigte Beschreibung der turbulenten Ereignisse im Rußland der 1990er sowie eine umfassende Interpretation dieses Jahrzehnts im Kontext der gesamten russischen Geschichte bei. Dieses Buch scheint dafür prädestiniert zu sein, sich zu einem Standardwerk zu Jelzins Herrschaft zu entwickeln.
Aufgrund der Vielzahl der Ereignisse, Tendenzen, Theorien und Konzepte, die Reddaway und Glinski hier vorstellen, werden Rezensenten ganz verschiedene Aspekte erwähnenswert finden.
Reddaways und Glinskis Konzipierung und Verwendung des Bolschewismusbegriffs ist in diesem Zusammenhang durchaus einer ernsthaften Beachtung wert. Besteht - trotz aller offensichtlichen ideologischen Gegensätze zwischen den Bolschewiki des beginnenden und radikalen Reformern des ausgehenden 20. Jahrhunderts - womöglich tatsächlich eine strukturelle Ähnlichkeit im Gesellschaftsbild, Selbstverständnis und der Transformationsstrategie beider Gruppierungen? Viele Beobachter - so auch dieser - würden eine derartige Gleichstellung zunächst ablehnen. Nach der Lektüre des Buches stellt sich jedoch die Sinnhaftigkeit eines Vergleichs beider Strömungen nicht mehr als so abwegig dar (wenn auch eine pauschale Gleichstellung weiterhin ungerechtfertigt erscheint). Zumindest ist festzustellen, daß die Ereignisse der 1990er als eine Revolution und die "Reformer" als Revolutionäre zu betrachten sind. Auch läßt sich eine gewisse Arroganz im öffentlichen Auftreten solcher Männer wie Anatolij Cubais, Boris Fëdorov oder Egor Gajdar sowie der dubiose, ja destruktive Charakter bestimmter "Reformschritte", insbesondere der Privatisierung einiger Filetstücke der russischen Industrie nach dem "Kredite für Aktien"-Schema, nicht bestreiten. Zudem können einige Figuren im Lager der "Reformer", wie etwa der berüchtigte, später als Stabschef der Union Rechter Kräfte fungierende Alfred Koch, wohl kaum als wirkliche Demokraten bezeichnet werden. Ebenso erscheinen die teilweise ambivalenten Stellungnahmen einiger als "Westler" geltender Politiker zum Tschetschenienabenteuer des konservativen Teils der Jelzinadministration als alarmierend. Nicht zuletzt machen Reddaway und Glinski zu Recht darauf aufmerksam, daß das Verhältnis zwischen freier Marktwirtschaft und Demokratie keineswegs so eineindeutig ist, wie es viele russische "Refomer" sowie einige westliche Kommentatoren den einfachen Russen glauben machen wollten. Ob dies und einige weitere Aspekte der Reformversuche der 1990er ausreichend sind, um von einem "Marktbolschewismus" der "Reformer" der verschiedenen Jelzinregierungen zu sprechen, wird der Leser für sich entscheiden müssen. Die Fülle von Reddaways und Glinskis Argumenten stimmt zumindest nachdenklich.
Wie wohl viele Leser, ist auch dieser Rezensent mit einer ganzen Reihe von Reddaways und Glinskis Bewertungen und Aussagen bezüglich der Gründe für die Schmerzhaftigkeit beziehungsweise das teilweise Scheitern der Reformen nicht einverstanden. Trotzdem scheint mir das Buch ein wertvoller Beitrag zu sein, weicht es doch auf erfrischende, ja manchmal provokative Art und Weise vom sogenannten "Washington-Konsensus" ab. Obwohl sich Reddaway und Glinski mit ihren Angriffen auf viele westliche Beobachter und ihrer unverblümten Verurteilung einer ganzen Reihe im Westen bislang hoch angesehener russischer "Reformer" nur wenig Freunde machen werden, kann den Autoren schon jetzt dazu gratuliert werden, einen der bislang markantesten Beiträge zur Diskussion um die russischen Reformen gemacht zu haben.

This book is a polemical diatribe against Boris Yeltsin and reformist politicians who worked for him. While parts of it contain fair summaries of political events, the analysis is entirely one-dimensional, seeking to blame Yeltsin and his policies for all RussiaÕs problems.

The authors make the typical mistake of assuming that economic transformation in Russia began in the 1990s. They make no mention of GorbachevÕs economic reforms, and apparently believe that central planning was still working right up until the early 1990s. They show no understanding of the Soviet economy or the reasons for its disintegration in the 1980s. Instead they blame everything on subsequent market reforms, though they show no real knowledge of what these reforms were.

Attempts to blame all RussiaÕs problems on economic reformers would be more convincing if they had not been forced out of the government every few months. In fact throughout the Yeltsin period Russian governments were dominated not by "young reformers" but by old-style Soviet industrialists, who also retained power in Russia's regions.

But the authors are not interested in such subtleties. Instead they rely on old cliches, such as the myth of "shock therapy" in Russia. In fact attempts to introduce Polish-style monetary policies were thwarted by corrupt beneficiaries of the status quo. As a result, the first half of the 1990s was characterised by hyperinflation. More than anything else, this failure to reform plunged RussiaÕs population into desperate poverty.

Economic reforms in Russia have been slow and partial in comparison with most east European countries, which have successfuly made a transition to a market economy. But the authors do not make any attempt to put Russian reforms in an international context. A comparison with Ukraine or Belarus would discredit the idea that post-Soviet problems were primarily caused by rash market reforms. A comparison with Estonia Ð the fastest-growing economy in the former Soviet Union Ð would show the effects of single-minded commitment to economic liberalism.

The alternatives the authors present completely lack substance. There is a vague reference to "dismantling central planning gradually" Ð a policy that was tried for several years during the 1980s, with disastrous consequences. But the authors Ð political scientists rather than economists Ð are not particularly interested in economic analysis, and opt for simple stereotypes about RussiaÕs economy and economic policies.

Unfortunately their political analysis is equally full of holes. They argue that the "Soviet middle class" could have provided the base for a political alternative Ð as if a few college professors could take on the combined weight of the Communist and post-Comunist nomenklatura (ironically the authors accuse Russian reformers of unrealistic thinking). Incredibly, the authors refer approvingly to the KGB as one of the "less corrupt institutions of the establishment". They are obviously unaware of the KGBÕs role in the mass theft of state property during the late Gorbachev period.

There are plenty of much better books on post-Soviet Russia. A good starting point is Thane GustafsonÕs "Capitalism: Russian-Style", which offers a balanced and well-researched description of RussiaÕs economic reforms.

This is the book for anyone with a sense of placement (or the struggling lack thereof) and a taste for living history, but it's also a mandatory text for the market economists who predicted in 1990 that the former Soviet Union would be once again on top of the world by the 21st century, economically speaking. After all, many argued, they had 80 years to sit by and scrutinize, study, and learn from the mistakes of the other capitalist states that bumped, lurched, and stumbled along. But, as Heller once wrote, "something happened along the way..."

The book opens up with a brief history of the Russian (then Soviet, then Russian again) people; their track record of reform and reaction. The next chapters explore theories behind pure capitalism versus pure democracy; presidents versus parliaments; dependency and co-existence throughout the entire planet; the many forms of nationalism throughout the expanding Russian national consciousness; and finally, the often painful consequences of economic globalization.

Further, we begin to explore what would become the collapse of the Soviet Union; Gorbachev's attempts at reformation and his apparent "capitalistic" frame of mind (to the chagrin of his CPSU handlers, from whom these leanings had been well-hidden, and for good reason). The true heart of the book, however, opens with Yeltsin's "economic revolution" in 1991 (or '92, depending on where you lived). The economic revolution, the authors feel, helped stave off what would have certainly been a political revolution for purer democracy - the nomenklatura had yet to provide any real reforms other than the opening and immediate snapping shut of the window on democracy that was Glasnost. Unfortunately, Yeltsin's political and economic advisers had their sights set on higher aims, and weren't necessarily providing the soundest of information. Further, it would appear that they felt Boris was nothing more than a stepping stone, that the global public would soon tire of his drunken shenanigans, and would have him disposed of far more easily (and quickly, and permanently) than his predecessor.

The cultural and moral decay brought about by Yeltsin's attempts at moving cabinet members around like pawns on a chess board are spelled out vividly. The authors feel, however, that the situation is not beyond hope, and present evidence to support this claim.

The reader should approach this book not as a sympathetic driver cruising along the highway, slowing down just enough to cast a furtive glance at a crash victim, then to speed up and leave the accident scene in the rear-view mirror. There comes a time when the driver should pull over and offer what assistance can be provided, no matter what the immediate cost. The rewards (whether spiritual, moral, or financial - that's up to the driver to decide) will be monumental.

By applying structural methodology, the authors have in this book managed to disentangle and address a plethora of important issues attached to the transitional phase of the Russian modernisation. The principal claim of shock therapy being an outcome of the "democracy-capitalism" dichotomy is plausibly supported and illuminated by evidence proving the unsuitably pervasive influence of external institutions such as the IMF, coupled with presidential authoritarianism. The analysis accumulates considerable propensity and dynamic when the authors address the Western `ready made, assumptions of social phenomena such as nationalism, democracy and populist movements. It delivers an insight of the intricacies inherent in the social structure. Although the authors attempt to remain largely impartial and empirical in their study, the reader cannot fail to get the feeling that the line of arguments, at times, is too one-dimensioned towards Yeltsin and the IMF. It would add more substance to the study, had the authors incorporated a wider discussion of the international dimension. I do largely agree with the author's criticism towards Yeltsin when they argue that the presidential institution enjoyed the decree to choose a more suitable path to economic modernisation. Moreover, I concur that there was a link between Yeltsin's domestic powers and the unconditional international support he enjoyed. This is not to say that external moods could or ought to have played a decisive role in shaping the future of Russia, but it should no doubt, in hindsight, have favoured the emergence of a civil society before the market. The authors have throughout the book pointed out several missed opportunities for a genuine democratic movement to take root. With Yeltsin out of the political circus, it remains to be seen if Putin will eventually allow the democratic forces in Russia, to infiltrate the socio-political layers and by so doing; put an end to another protracted and pernicious era in Russian history. I highly recommend this book for those who wish to understand Russia's place in today's and tomorrows economically globalised world.

Yes, it's right, Anders Aslund, former advisor to the Russian Government under Yeltsin, took quotes out of context from Reddaway and Glinski's book in a futile attempt to paint Reddaway, perhaps the most prominent authority in the world on the Soviet dissident movement and the abuse of psychiatric hospitals under the Soviet regime, and Glinski, a prominent figure in the democratic movement in Russia, as fascists...in any case, this book is by far the best that has been written telling the truth of Boris Yeltsin's tragic turn to the right -- to the mafiya and to old figures in the Soviet nomenklatura, and the accompanying turn away from the democratic movement which brought him to power.

This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to go beyond the pronouncements of the American foreign policy establishment that Russia is on the road to democracy and learn what really happened.

I bought this book researching Joe Hill, who eludes Rosemont as effectively as he does everyone else. The material he finds about the Wobbly bard could be effectively contained in a monograph, but once you accept that, this is a delightful work, full of illustrations, pleas for submissions of information, and endless tidbits about Franklin Rosemont, his imagination, research, and beliefs. He's an indefatigable reader, a passionate latter-day Wobbly, and a treasure trove of anecdote and speculation. Reading the book was something akin to proofreading a friend's manuscript: you end up trying to be supportive even as you acknowledge a kind of looseness -- after all it's HIS book, not yours. Joe Hill is rife with cuttable sections -- after the second attack on Wallace Stegner, the reader's eyes glaze over -- but the prose style and intellectual speculation are loose enough to encourage judicious skimming. Joe Hill's anachronistic relationships to such things as ecology and Beatnik poetry are figments of Rosemont's imagination more than subjects for serious inquiry, but they're the kind of things that one thinks about while deciding whether to get out of bed in the morning or while driving to work with U. Utah Phillips playing in the background. My own research into Hill's life and work was helped immeasurable by Rosemont's trailblazing in the field -- his bibliography alone is worth the cost of the book. In the process of reading this book, I feel like I made a new friend, even if it wasn't Joe Hill. Read this book by all means.

There are parts of this book which are utterly engrossing. Rosemont constructs a fine narrative of events. Perhaps I should say "events", as it is at times researched like a eighth-grade paper. Lots of conjecture, unsupported speculation, hearsay and other aspects of irresponsible scholarship. Mr. Rosemont freely admits that there is frustratingly little concrete evidence about much of Hill's life, but he chooses to try and flesh out a lengthy book anyways. This is exasperating at times as when one is forced to try and endure each and every tedious mentioning of the drawn or painted art of Joe Hill, despite the lack of much actual material (surviving anyways). However, by doing this he touches on many peripheral aspects of Hill's life that have gone by and large unnoticed till now, but which are much easier to verify than the sketchy details about Hill himself. Several mentions of correspondence, lives affected by Hill, and reactions to Hill's art, and many others tidbits of information are thrown out for more or less the first time in cohesive form. Less cohesive, and downright teasing at times, are many starts and stops of several ideas that would be very interesting on their own. The Wobbly influence on the beat poets, the slighting of the IWW by other revolutionary and pseudorevolutionary groups (rarely written about from a fellow worker's perspective), and others seem like promising beginnings for reading but then are waded into only ankle-deep. At one point when abandoning a topic Mr. Rosemont even suggests that it would be a good idea for further research, by someone else. All in all a fairly decent read but could have used prodigious editing and some fact-checking with standards higher than those of the NY Times.

I grew up with stories of the IWW permiating my family. They were legendary do gooders (mom's side of the family) and absolute evil (dad's). I choose mom's view. This book of several dozen short essays on the IWW and Joe Hill is one of the best I've ever read on the subject. And I have most every book written on the subject and several file drawers full of photocopies to boot.

Rosemont uses Joe Hill, the world's most famious wobbly, as a reason not only for the book but as a muse. The stories of Joe Hill, often from older wobblies who actually knew Joe Hill, are excellent and often the only place where you can find them.

But most of the book uses Hill as a muse to reflect on Rosemonts' own experiences as an IWW, and more importantly, the experiences of other IWWs he has known. For example, in my faourite article, Rosemont starts with the fact that Joe Hill was an accomplished Chinese cook. He asks the question, why? That leads to historic documents and personal recolections which discuss the IWW's affinity for Chinese cooking as a solidarity effort with chinese workers being discriminated against by the AFL, et all.

Sure there are aspects of speculation in Rosemonts book. So what? He knew dozens of old IWWs as a young man and knows their unwritten histories. I knew half a dozen old wobs when I was a young man and Franklin Rosemont's book rings true, its just like the stories old wobblies told me. This is the stuff, as they would say.

This book is so much better than an academic history. They are dead and dry. This book is fun, a delight, a living history, an oral history. From my long experience with the IWW (25 or so years) as well as the stories told to me by the first generation of wobblies, this book is spot on the money. This is a real IWW history, told in an IWW manner.

Buy two copies, one to read, one to lend.

This is a huge and wonderful book, full of the details of Joe Hill's life. Many aspects of the life and lore of Joe Hill receive their first and only discussion in this 642-page opus. Frustrated academics often rail at the little supporting documentation surrounding the lives of working class heros, from blues singers to union organizers, and they often abandon ship in the face of such frustration. But Rosemont has had the endurance to follow every trail leading to and from Joe Hill, and we the readers are much richer for it. It's also a mini-history of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and their relationship to the arts, poetry, feminism, cops, Stalinism, the Beats and more. There's even a chapter discussing Joe Hill myths! Profusely illustrated with IWW and Joe Hill graphics, this book will give you hours of enjoyable reading.

Everthing in this book can be found in a dictionary.

Provides a comprehensive picture of the course of economic transition in Russia under Yeltsin. Explains how the West's push for shock therapy had brutal consequences. Important contributions from a number of prominent Russian and American economists.

I am not a traditional book reader and this book was found by me accidentally. The book is very interesting even for Russians since in Russia we still have a very strong neoliberal propaganda and everybody who criticises our "reformers" is treated immediately as a communist. For me it was great to find such a book, where highly qualified Russian and American economists including Nobel prize winners criticise so hardly our "market bolsheviks". I also found a very nice web-site containing many articles of Russian and Western economists on this subject. For those of you who can read Russian texts I would like to recommend this web-site:
http://rusref.nm.ru

The book The New Russia: Transition Gone Awry is a collection of twenty-seven essays by noted Russian and American economists and analysts, including Oleg Bogomolov, Leonid Abalkin, Georgi Arbatov, Marshall Pomer, and Lawrence Klein (winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize in economics). The book is divided into three main parts ("Economic Role of Government," "Economic Crisis," and "Policy Agenda") and contains a foreword by Mikhail Gorbachev. This volume resulted from the activities of the Economic Transition Group (ETG), an international network of economists set up in 1994 on the initiative of Marshall Pomer (Macroeconomic Policy Institute, Santa Cruz, California) and Alexander Nekipelov (Institute of International Economic and Political Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences). The purpose of the ETG was to bring together prominent economists, many of them Nobel Prize winners, to reexamine the early Yeltsin years and develop an alternative economic strategy that would strengthen democratic government but also "minimize harm in human terms." The contributors advocate a balanced approach to reform that avoids both unrealistic free-market ideals and excessive government control. The chapters are clearly written and cover a wide range of topics, including the shortcomings of the competitive-equilibrium model, origins and consequences of "shock therapy," privatization, corrupt banking and "pyramid schemes," poverty and social assistance, real estate markets, agriculture, coal industry, energy efficiency, human capital, government leadership, and trade within the Commonwealth of Independent States.
In the first essay, Pomer warns against attributing the failures of Russian economic reform to "bad implementation of good policy." He believes that Russian reformers paid too little attention to government's role and placed too much faith in the free market (p. 21). The Western-oriented competitive-equilibrium model (the "neoclassical paradigm") was unsuitable for the Russian economy. "The proposition that the market would adjust on its own without an activist government proved fallacious in Russia," Pomer writes (p. 23). Russian citizens were not ready for "shock therapy." The foreign competition and radical price liberalization (beginning in January 1992) stunned industry. This led to a sharp drop in living standards.
In their essay on crime and corruption, Svetlana Glinkina, Andrei Grigoriev, and Vakhtang Yakobidze point out that perestroika actually fueled corruption (p. 234). Privatization merely transferred the assets of an inherently wealthy country to a powerful elite ("oligarchs"), a politically connected business elite largely oriented toward plunder. Although individual Russian citizens during the first phase of privatization could purchase "vouchers" that were supposedly redeemable for cash or a share of industry, they soon discovered that the vouchers were useless because dividends were rarely paid and investors had no power in the decision-making process.
Banks run by the "oligarchs" sprang up that promised citizens rates of return over 1,000 percent. Desperate to preserve their savings in the inflationary period of the early 1990s, more than 20 million citizens lost everything in what turned out to be "pyramid" schemes. These banks---for which there were no reporting requirements regarding sources of large deposits---were heavily involved in money laundering and embezzlement on the part of insiders (p. 236). According to the authors, "by delaying payments on government obligations and giving short-term interbank credits at outrageous interest rates, the bankers were able to amass substantial fortunes. At the same time, federal and local governments routinely reneged on paying salaries (p. 237). Five of the largest private banks and their leaders---Inkombank (Vinogradov), SBS-Agro (Smolensky and Berezovsky), Most Bank (Gusinsky), Menatep (Khodorkovsky), and Rossiiskii Kredit (Malkin)---routinely granted loans to their affiliated companies for amounts greater than those of their debts to private depositors (p. 242).
The New Russia contains many more insights than can be covered here. Because the book covers many aspects of the Russian economic system, it would be suitable to assign in courses on comparative economics or Russian politics. The detailed, cogent essays written mostly by Russian economists make this book preferable to more generalized books on Russian economic transition written by Western scholars, such as Stephen Cohen's Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia (2001) and Steven Solnick's Stealing the State: Control and Collapse in Soviet Institutions (1998), or those that focus almost exclusively on crime and corruption, such as Paul Khlebnikov's Godfather of the Kremlin: Boris Berezovsky and the Looting of Russia (2000).--Johanna Granville, Ph.D. (Stanford University)

The establishment of numerous satellite states in Eastern Europe after World War II gave the radical left numerous problems. In these Eastern European nations, the Red Army installed new regimes that were completely subservient to the orders of Moscow - involving trials and murders of all dissidents and the development of a military industrial complex, which the radical left had always wanted to overthrow. Under such conditions their support of marxism was very questionable.

"State Capitalism In Russia" (originally written as "The Nature Of Stalinist Russia") deals with exceptional clarity with the argument of Trotsky that Russia was still a Marxian workers' state because the property was nationalised.

Cliff was simple and forceful in his argument that a complete counterrevolution had occurred in Russia during the 1920s when Stalin rose to power. He shows using available government statistics that whilst most resources up to Stalin's triumph in the 1920s were devoted to improving the living standards of the Russian masses, from the time of the Five-Year Plans, all these resources were transferred into the hands of the bureaucracy. As Cliff sees it, this bureaucracy accumulated vast resources through exploitation of the Russian working class, in the process building a military-industrial complex that aimed directly to compete with market capitalist nations in the West for production of the most powerful weapons. Stalin saw this as the only way to protect the USSR, but in fact the only way a socialist regime could have survived was via the overthrow of the Western ruling classes and seizure of their vast internationally accumulated profits.

Cliff shows clearly how much better off for wages the Russian masses were under Lenin than under either the Tsar or Stalin and, as a prerequisite for this, how much higher a proportion of production was devoted to consumer rather than capital goods under Lenin.

At the same time, Cliff clearly shows how oriented Russian laws were to protecting the power of the bureaucratic ruling class. A perfect example is the exceptionally regressive turnover tax system, which the radical left have likened to the tzxes in developed nations on consumption that disproportionately affect the poor. Marxism advocated the use of steeply progressive taxes on income and inheritance and abolishing all indirect taxation.

Cliff is similarly clear about how his theory of state capitalism explains what had actually occurred in Eastern Europe since 1945: new ruling classes had been established on the Soviet model by parties merely calling themselves "Communist": workers had no control over the means of production.

Cliff's theory of state capitalism explains the Soviet ruling class' actions in the years after World War II very well because understanding the bureaucracy as a capitalist ruling class explains their desire to compete with the West. Cliff is also very clear in his view that only a genuine workers' revolution could produce a genuine socialist system where the needs of the masses take precedence over the enrichment of the wealthy.

Many reader, however, find the idea of Lenin's Russia as a model for workers' liberation dubious.

Whilst Cliff does clearly demonstrate major differences between Lenin's and Stalin's Russia (so do mainstream historians), the view that socialism eliminated chivalry in warfare is interpreted very differently on the right - that Lenin himself with the Cheka eliminated it. the size of the Cheka, according to Soviet archives, was so large that claims by the radical left that the Whites were responsible for the carnage of the Russian Civil War are dubious. This in itself makes claims of Stalini's counterrevolution less clear than Tony Cliff himself would like them to be. It also makes one question whether Leninism was the model for workers' power I was taught it was as a young student at Melbourne University.

This is a very good book, but it's claims really need to be tested against evidence from a truly opposing side - and the mainstream centre never does that.

The book may be informative regarding the then contemporary situation for the populace of the USSR, but anybody who jumps on the bandwagon of saying that the USSR was not socialist, is unfit for partifipation in a rational debate about society and economics. Worse yet, when the russian tyrrany is relabelled as a form of capitalism, then the territory of revisionism is entered.

Socialism is state ownership of the means of production + planned economy (it can hardly be anything else, when the state owns the economic assets, and as such, has the power to decide the prices and application of the final goods). The claim about socialism being "common ownership" is nonsense in this context, when applied on a medium to large scale - whenever a large group of people sets out to own something "in common", as state buerocracy is bound to arise. I'd suggest the other reviewers do a reality check on their political knowledge.

Second, capitalism is an antithesis of statism (which is what socialism is). Capitalism is private ownership, with emphasis on private. Ergo "state capitalism" is an oxymoron - "state capitalism" would essentially mean "state private ownership" - an obvious contradiction (I hope?).

In short, the conclusion to this book is false, bordering on the usual anti-capitalism propaganda, even though it may tell a truthful thing or two about the failure of the "workers paradise" of Russia.

Cliff's book clearly shows that Soviet Russia was not socialist. Workers there had no control over society or their own lives. What existed was a form of state capitalism. Cliff explains that only a new revolution could bring socialism.This book is vital to understand the way forward for the working class movement since the fall of so called Communism.It throws aside the pessimism of much of the left.It places workers self activity at the heart of socialism.

Tony Cliff's book "State Capitalism in Russia" first published in 1947.. When the stalinizm in "golden age" after the II. War... He shows why we must describe stalinst Russia as "state capitalist" country.. And also he shows the alternative: Socialism from below..

As a black female, I was excited to finally read Michael Honey's book. However, it turned out to be a major disappointment. Honey's extremely slanted view skews history to the extent that most readers will be turned off by this work. Honey totally discounts the importance unions had in achieving equality for blacks, a major blunder according to any historian. While Honey has a great grasp of the English language, his book should not be counted on for accuracy. Readers will find, after researching other literature, Honey's arguments should not be repeated. Save yourself some time and pass on this book.

The Murray Morgan Prize is awarded annually by the Tacoma Public Library to an outstanding Washington author in recognition of a work published during the previous year that is of high literary quality and wide interest. The work must exemplify the principles of narrative excellence and high standards of research as demonstrated in the distinguished career of author, historian, journalist and educator Murray Morgan.

"Black Workers Remember expands what we know of the Civil Rights Movement," explained Jack Bregger, a member of the Murray Morgan Prize Selection Committee. "Through the voices and stories of the African American men and women who worked in Memphis, Tennessee's factories, Honey tells of a struggle for freedom that spans the 20th century -- a story which until now was all but invisible. Michael Honey effectively places these moving personal accounts in the more powerful context of social upheaval and, in a sense, cultural revolution. It insists, as Honey writes in the book's Preface, that we think 'about what it means to be poor, black, and working class, and to recognize the unfinished character of the struggle for racial and economic justice in our own time'. The ultimate success of this extra