The Servant State

The global financial and industrial turmoil of recent years has once more brought the crisis-prone nature of the capitalist system to the forefront. In the context of economic stagnation and the retreat of working-class organizations, the rich and powerful around the world have redoubled their attack on the poor through neoliberal policies and austerity measures. In The Servant State, McCormack and Workman explore Canada’s experience through the “age of austerity” and highlight how this experience has been shaped by the exigencies of capitalist development and the catalyzing role of the Canadian state. The analytical standpoint is not that of the oppressed per se, but rather that of capitalism as a whole. They share the condemnation of the capitalist establishment, are appalled by the greed and avarice of the ruling elite and despair at the obscenities of the age; however, the critical spirit of their study is imbued less with a mood of indignation and more with assumptions and sensitivities about the inner tendencies of capitalism and the obliging role of the state. The struggle against contemporary excess and horror, they argue, must be framed with reference to the immuring tendencies of the capitalist order of things.

Renowned economist Jeff Faux explains why neither party's leaders have a plan to remedy America's unemployment, inequality, or long economic slide America's political and economic elite spent so long making such terrible decisions that they caused the collapse of 2008. So how can they continue down the same road? The simple answer, that no in charge one wants to publicly acknowledge: because things are still pretty great for the people who run America. It was an accident of history, Jeff Faux explains, that after World War II the U.S. could afford a prosperous middle class, a dominant military, and a booming economic elite at the same time. For the past three decades, all three have been competing, with the middle class always losing. Soon the military will decline as well. The most plausible projections Faux explores foresee a future economy nearly devoid of production and exports, with the most profitable industries existing to solely to serve the wealthiest 1% The author's last book, The Global Class War, sold over 20,000 copies by correctly predicting the permanent decline of our debt-burdened middle class at the hands of our off-shoring executives, out of control financiers, and their friends in Washington Since his last book, Faux is repeatedly asked what either party will do to face these mounting crises. After looking over actual policies, proposed plans, non-partisan reports, and think tank papers, his astonishing conclusion: more of the same.

Building on Covenant and Eschatology: The Divine Drama, this volume is part two of a three-part project surveying essential topics of Christian theology through the lens of covenant. In Lord and Servant: A Covenant Christology, Michael Horton explores the topics that are generally grouped under the doctrines of God, humanity, and Christology. Rather than attempt a general systematic theology, Horton revisits these topics at the places where covenant and eschatology offer the most promising insight and where there is the most contemporary interest and debate.

The key role played by indentured servants in the settlement and development of the English colonies in the West Indies and the North American mainland in the first century of English colonization has been overshadowed by interest in the much larger later trade in African slaves. 'There is Great Want of Servants' provides the first full examination of the English trade in indentured servants, which delivered the majority of an estimated 457,000 white people who migrated to the American colonies before 1720. English colonisation intended to create 'new Englands out of England' - to enlarge trade and plantation - but settlement required people to work the land. Labour had to be transported over 4,000 miles of threatening ocean in a new system of indentured servitude, in which people paid for their transportation and keep, with four years of unpaid service for adults, and more for children and adolescents. The system was not benign, neither in the sugar plantations of the West Indies and the tobacco plantations of Maryland and Virginia, nor at the centre of the trade in London and in other ports such as Bristol. Merchants, procurers, and masters of ships often used illicit methods to recruit servants as human cargo. Measures to reduce spiriting by making the offence a felony punishable by hanging, or registering servants in new offices, had little effect. The 1718 Transportation Act eased servant recruitment, but when wars in 1689-1697 and 1702-1713 disrupted the supply of servants, and demand for the addictive products of the sugar and tobacco colonies soared in Britain and Europe, white servants were increasingly substituted by African chattel slaves.