Robin Blackburn

Most countries face the future with an ageing population, yet most governments are cutting back on pensions and the care services needed by the elderly. Robin Blackburn exposes the perverse reasoning and special interests which have combined to produce this nonsensical state of affairs. This updated paperback edition of Age Shock includes a new preface explaining why the credit crunch and eurozone crisis have had such a devastating impact and outlining a way to guarantee decent pensions and care provision.… (meer)

Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln exchanged letters at the end of the Civil War. Although they were divided by far more than the Atlantic Ocean, they agreed on the cause of "free labor" and the urgent need to end slavery. In his introduction, Robin Blackburn argues that Lincoln's response signaled the importance of the German American community and the role of the international communists in opposing European recognition of the Confederacy. The ideals of communism, voiced through the International Working Men's Association, attracted many thousands of supporters throughout the US, and helped spread the demand for an eight-hour day. Blackburn shows how the IWA in America—born out of the Civil War—sought to radicalize Lincoln's unfinished revolution and to advance the rights of labor, uniting black and white, men and women, native and foreign-born. The International contributed to a profound critique of the capitalist robber barons who enriched themselves during and after the war, and it inspired an extraordinary series of strikes and class struggles in the postwar decades. In addition to a range of key texts and letters by both Lincoln and Marx, this book includes articles from the radical New York-based journal Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, an extract from Thomas Fortune's classic work on racism Black and White, Frederick Engels on the progress of US labor in the 1880s, and Lucy Parson's speech at the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World.… (meer)

In 1770 a handful of European nations ruled the Americas, drawing from them a stream of products, both everyday and exotic. Some two and a half million black slaves, imprisoned in plantation colonies, toiled to produce the sugar, coffee, cotton, ginger and indigo craved by Europeans. By 1848 the major systems of colonial slavery had been swept away either by independence movements, slave revolts, abolitionists or some combination of all three. How did this happen?

Robin Blackburn’s history captures the complexity of a revolutionary age in a compelling narrative. In some cases colonial rule fell while slavery flourished, as happened in the South of the United States and in Brazil; elsewhere slavery ended but colonial rule remained, as in the British West Indies and French Windwards. But in French St. Domingue, the future Haiti, and in Spanish South and Central America both colonialism and slavery were defeated. This story of slave liberation and American independence highlights the pivotal role of the "first emancipation" in the French Antilles in the 1790s, the parallel actions of slave resistance and metropolitan abolitionism, and the contradictory implications of slaveholder patriotism.

The dramatic events of this epoch are examined from an unexpected vantage point, showing how the torch of anti-slavery passed from the medieval communes to dissident Quakers, from African maroons to radical pirates, from Granville Sharp and Ottabah Cuguano to Toussaint L’Ouverture, from the black Jacobins to the Liberators of South America, and from the African Baptists in Jamaica to the Revolutionaries of 1848 in Europe and the Caribbean.… (meer)