Boris Kagarlitsky

Patrick Bond

Renfrey Clarke

Long Retreat - Strategies to Reverse the Decline of the Left

Abstract: The music industry has been steadily hemorrhaging sales over the past decade, mainly due to the widespread emergence of digital music piracy. Though much effort has been put forth to stop illegal file-sharing, no actions in the US have been fruitful so far. Making the situation even more dire, there have been very few efforts to research how to sell music to the new pirating generations, and the music industry seems to no longer know its consumers. This research focuses on finding a solution to music industry woes that can be enacted more easily than legislation: how to create music offerings enticing enough for today's pirating-prone consumers to buy instead of pirate. After a thorough examination of industry insider publications, previous studies on piracy, and an exploratory pretest, a hypothesis was proposed that there are two basic types of music consumers who would behave differently in response to value-added offerings (i.e., something "extra" beyond the basic album): high involvement "Music Lovers" and low involvement consumers who tend to simply seek out the latest single with a "Search and Destroy" mindset. To test this hypothesis, I conducted two studies in which 523 participants between the ages of 18 and 22 were asked about their purchase intentions for a new album either with or without a value-added offering (unreleased tracks in Study 1, a chance to meet the artist in Study 2). Results from these studies confirm the hypotheses; offering unreleased tracks increases purchase intentions for Music Lovers, but not for Search and Destroy participants, while offering a chance to meet the artist does the opposite. The implications of this research could be significant; if value-added offerings can increase sales of albums, then this new approach to selling music (i.e., offering something beyond the basic album) could make selling music in the 21st century a much more feasible venture.

Can Value-added Offerings Increase Album Sales?

Saving the Music Industry

Despite the rhetoric, the people of Sub-Saharan Africa are become poorer. From Tony Blair's Africa Commission and the Make Poverty History campaign to the Hong Kong WTO meeting, Africa's gains have been mainly limited to public relations. The central problems remain exploitative debt and financial relationships with the North, phantom aid, unfair trade, distorted investment and the continent's brain/skills drain. Moreover, capitalism in most African countries has witnessed the emergence of excessively powerful ruling elites with incomes derived from financial-parasitical accumulation. Without overstressing the 'mistakes' of such elites, this book contextualises Africa's wealth outflow within a stagnant but volatile world economy.

The Economics of Exploitation

Looting Africa

John S. Saul

Analyses the roots of power, patriarchy, ecological destruction and capitalist dynamics, of anti-apartheid resistance and of on-going movements against inequality and injustice in contemporary South Africa, to show how its contemporary realities are rooted in its past history and earlier struggles for independence. Short-listed for the Deutscher Prize 2014

From Mrs Ples to Mandela & Marikana

South Africa-- the Present as History

Samir Amin

Alexander Gallas

Vishwas Satgar

Christopher Chase-Dunn

Ana Garcia

Ferrial Adam

William K Carroll

Karina Kato

Nivedita Majumdar

Keamogetswe Seipato

Challenges the mainstream understanding of BRICS and US dominance to situate the new global rivalries engulfing capitalism BRICS is a grouping of the five major emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Volume five in the Democratic Marxism series, BRICS and the New American Imperialism challenges the mainstream understanding of BRICS and US dominance to situate the new global rivalries engulfing capitalism. It offers novel analyses of BRICS in the context of increasing US induced imperial chaos, deepening environmental crisis tendencies (such as climate change and water scarcity), contradictory dynamics inside BRICS countries and growing subaltern resistance. The authors revisit contemporary thinking on imperialism and anti-imperialism, drawing on the work of Rosa Luxemburg, one of the leading theorists after Marx, who attempted to understand the expansionary nature of capitalism from the heartlands to the peripheries. The richness of Luxemburg’s pioneering work inspires most of the volume’s contributors in their analyses of the dangerous contradictions of the contemporary world as well as forms of democratic agency advancing resistance. While various forms of resistance are highlighted, among them water protests, mass worker strikes, anti-corporate campaigning and forms of cultural critique, this volume grapples with the challenge of renewing anti-imperialism beyond the NGO-driven World Social Forum and considers the prospects of a new horizontal political vessel to build global convergence. It also explores the prospects of a Fifth International of Peoples and Workers.

Global rivalry and resistance

BRICS and the New American Imperialism

Fully updated edition of best-selling work of political analysis. Released to coincide with 20th anniversary of the end of Apartheid in South Africa.

From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa

Elite Transition - Revised and Expanded Edition

A critical examination of the contradictory rise to power of emerging economies Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

An Anticaptialist Critique

Brics

Ana Garcia (Economist)

"This volume aims to fill a gap in studies of BRICS. It offers a critical analysis of the rise of the BRICS countries' economies within the framework of a global capitalism that is increasingly predatory, exclusionary and unequal, no more so than in the BRICS countries themselves. The authors reflect upon the rise of a Global South (and East), which is sometimes cooperative with and sometimes antagonistic to the traditional powers of the US, Europe and Japan. Most importantly, BRICS's rise occurs in the context of the expansion of capitalism in the 21st century, and also in the midst of world capitalism's worst crisis since the 1930s. The point of this analysis is, firstly, to promote debate between social movements, organised labour and other activists in the struggle for social justice and for alternatives to the current international capitalist order. BRICS is a new area of concern for many. The second goal is to generate critical debate on contemporary themes and theoretical discussions. The book will be required reading for those who wish to have an alternative perspective on this Global South partnership."--Publisher description.

An Anti-capitalist Critique

Paul Clooney

With the world’s attention fixed on the travails of leading global economies due to a still unfolding financial crisis of gigantic proportions, there has been a studied silence on the fate of the third world as the malaise increasingly impacts it. This silence is particularly disturbing because questions of potential pitfalls in the neoliberal policy package, which the third world (unlike Western Europe and Japan) was largely forced to adopt, were never countenanced. as One third world state after another discovered that international institutions were in effect hostile to their governments if they chose alternative developmental models or otherwise resisted the neoliberal triage of liberalization, privatization and deregulation. This collection is a tour de force, effectively countering not only the neoliberal ideology of development as a whole but the marginalizing within today’s mainstream crisis discourse of any discussion of the monstrous misallocation of global resources wrought by the so-called “Washington Consensus” and the suffering and destruction it has wreaked on third world peoples and economies. This edited volume is intended as both a textbook for introductory classes in global development or area studies and as a conduit for advanced students, policymakers, NGO activists and an educated readership to gain knowledge about the socio-economic conditions existing across much of the world we live in, and the policies that brought them about. The specially commissioned and peer reviewed chapters are written by experts in the fields of economics, politics, sociology and international studies. Chapter authors hail from around the world including: Brazil, Mexico, Canada, United States, United Kingdom, South Africa, South Korea and Thailand. The countries/regions’ neoliberal experience and potential futures covered in this book are: Brazil, China, Cuba, Egypt, Mexico, Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam), South Africa, South Korea, Syria, Thailand and Venezuela.

Third World Resistance and Development Strategies

Confronting Global Neoliberalism

Patrick Bond

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