“A vivid and compelling ‘grass-roots’ account of life in the village precisely during the period in which the new Communist power was establishing itself. . . . [A] unique contribution to our understanding of life in a northern Chinese village on the eve of the Communist takeover.”
—Benjamin Schwartz, New York Times Book Review

“Fanshen is an extraordinary book. It will dispose of many myths, both those of the Left and of the Right.”
—C. P. Fitzgerald, The Nation

“Fanshen is an important book. . . . It is an arresting narrative [on] the agonizing story of rural China in turmoil…told with a remarkable evenness of temper and a rare understanding of human weaknesses and strengths. The lessons of Long Bow village, so movingly and compassionately recorded…should be studied and restudied by all.”
—C. T. Hsu, Saturday Review

More than forty years after its initial publication, William Hinton’s Fanshen continues to be the essential volume for those fascinated with China’s revolutionary process of rural reform and social change. A pioneering work, Fanshan is a marvelous and revealing look into life in the Chinese countryside, where tradition and modernity have had both a complimentary and caustic relationship in the years since the Chinese Communist Party first came to power. It is a rare, concrete record of social struggle and transformation, as witnessed by a participant. Fanshen continues to offer profound insight into the lives of peasants and China’s complex social processes. Rediscover this classic volume, which includes a new preface by Fred Magdoff.

In this new book, John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff offer a bold analysis of the financial meltdown, how it developed, and the implications for the future. They examine the specifics of the housing bubble and the credit crunch as well as situate current events within a broader crisis of monopoly-finance capitalism—one that has been gestating for several decades. It is the "real" productive economy’s tendency toward stagnation, they argue, that creates a need for capital to find ways to profitably invest its surplus. But rather than invest in socially useful projects that would benefit the vast majority, capital has constructed a financialized "casino" economy that neglects social needs and, as has become increasingly clear, is fatally unstable. Written over a two-year period immediately prior to the onset of the crisis, this timely and illuminating book is necessary reading for all those who wish to understand the current situation, how we got here, and where we are heading.

Some of the soil-building strategies include:

• Increasing soil organic matter • Using appropriate tillage • Incorporating animal manures • Making and using composts • Integrating cover crops into rotations • Reducing erosion • Methods to avoid and decrease soil compaction

In this short, clear, and concise book, Fred Magdoff and Michael D. Yates explain the nature of the economic crisis. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the authors demonstrate that this crisis is not some aberration from a normally benign capitalism but rather the normal and even expected outcome of a thoroughly irrational and destructive system. No amount of tinkering with capitalism, whether it be discredited neoliberalism or the return of Keynesianism and a "new" New Deal, can overcome the core contradiction of the system: the daily exploitation and degradation of the majority of the world’s people by a tiny minority of business owners.

While the current economic maelstrom has laid bare the web of greed, corruption, and propaganda that are central to capitalism, only an aroused public, demanding the right to health care, decent employment, a secure old age, and a clean and healthy environment, can lead the United States and the world out of the worst crisis since the Great Depression and toward a system of production and distribution conducive to human happiness. This book is aimed primarily at working people, students, and activists, who want not just to understand the world but to change it.