In his new book, Yves Engler sets to demolish the near saintly status of Lester Bowles ("Mike") Pearson in the public sphere, Canadian foreign policy circles and even on the social democratic left. And in the process, he takes on the much repeated slogan that "the world needs more of Canada."

Much like Noam Chomsky who provides a forward to Lester Pearson's Peacekeeping, the author relies mostly on the excellent but largely unread scholarship plus the former PM's own statements in Parliament and in memos to successfully establish a case.

Harperland: The politics of control

by Lawrence Martin (Viking Canada, 2010; $35.00)

As politics has shifted to the right since the early 1980s, the left remains sadly flat-footed as neo-liberal policies have proliferated around the western, democratic world. Where the right preached a gospel of smaller government, the left attempted to capture the political imagination by defending the role of the state. It was an important position to take, but as political strategy it has largely been a losing game. How can we deconstruct the neo-liberal rise to power and how do we rebuild a social democratic vision that inspires the country?

That is the central question of today's politics.

Michael Lebowitz is a professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University now living in Venezuela working with Centro International Miranda, a government-supported think tank. In The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development, he contrasts Venezuelan policies with the top-down socialism of the 20th century. The latter had focused on rapid industrial development through state ownership and top-down command. In Venezuela the government of Hugo Chavez focuses on human development, on the cooperative meeting of human needs, on social ownership and on participation in community and workplace decisions.

Marx and Engels had no idea what they were setting loose in 1848 when they wrote The Communist Manifesto -- and they would be the first to admit it. That's the sense you get reading Tariq Ali's The Idea of Communism a short book in the "What Was Communism" series. It is no longer 1991. The Soviet Union is gone. Rather than a communist utopia China resembles aspects of Dickens' England ... on methamphetamine. A few anomalies like Cuba and Korea remain, but the safe money is that they will not remain thus.

In Capital As Power Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler launch an attack on both mainstream and Marxist theories of capitalism by focusing on one of the oldest theoretical conundrums in the discipline of political economy -- the theory of capital. While the work clearly fits into the tradition of radical political economy it is not easy to place it in any one school, and this for very good reason; the authors are trying to create a new approach to the study of society. The release of this highly ambitious book is aptly timed, for as the global political-economic crisis unfolds and existing theories and paradigms come into question a space will be created in which new theoretical alternatives might be welcomed.

York University political economist Daniel Drache is a prolific writer and editor. It sometimes seems that he writes faster, the ideas gushing out, than the rest of us can read.

His latest book, Defiant Publics: The Unprecedented Reach of the Global Citizen, published by the prestigious Polity Press in 2008, may be his best yet. It is a thought provoking book about globalism to come from someone who was a leading nationalist writer, and activist, in the 1960s. It is prescient in describing global protest that, as a result of the global financial crisis, has sharply increased since he wrote this book. It is a work of impressive erudition that attempts to order and make sense of a vast literature.

In recent years, James Laxer's laptop has taken a pounding. Since 2004, he has written five books, all under labels with broad distribution.

Laxer's latest book, The Perils of Empire, wades into debates about the challenges facing the mandarins of U.S. power as they seek to retain global dominance. He predicts, as others have in recent years, that the global empire built by U.S. elites since the end of World War II is currently in decline.

To make this case, Laxer draws on historical lessons from several previous empires and his assessment of current trends. What results is an ambitious yet succinct work, one that offers several useful insights despite arriving at a dispiriting conclusion (more on that later).

Gregory Wilpert has pulled off a triumph on two fronts with his new book on the Bolivarian Revolution, Changing Venezuela by Taking Power. Most obviously, Wilpert's book — in both its scope and (sometimes almost maddening) objectivity — is the most detailed and credible analysis yet published of the Venezuelan revolution, which itself represents, arguably, the single most significant challenge today to the hegemony of global capitalism.

But Wilpert has not just produced a comprehensive look at the social, economic and political transformation that has shaken the foundations of Venezuela over the past decade; he has also delivered a sharp rebuke to one of the trendiest, if dubious, political theories to appear on the academic left in recent years.

Neoliberalism came on to the political scene as a project of the New Right and major corporate interests with the crisis of Keynesianism in the 1970s. Neoliberalism today represents an ideological discourse, administrative and regulatory practices, a system of inter-state relations, and social form of political power across the advanced capitalist countries and, indeed, the vast majority of the world.

In Canada, Bob Rae, Roy Romanow, Gary Doer and Jean Chretien have all governed as neoliberals, as have champions of the New Right such as Brian Mulroney, Ralph Klein, Mike Harris and Bernard Lord.

We all know that the U.S. dominates the world. Its corporations have huge influence; its culture, from Hollywood to Pepsi, finds its way into the smallest villages in Bhutan or Peru; its president is perhaps the single most powerful individual on the planet. The U.S. is also dominated by social conservatives who are hostile to equal rights and sympathetic to an aggressive religious right. The U.S. under Bush has blocked progress on climate change, invaded Iraq and supported the crushing of Lebanon.

Much of the planetâe(TM)s population would like to see regime change in Washington, yet as this book shows this is incredibly difficult.