Noel Ignatiev grew up in Philadelphia in the 1940s. He wrote in his memoir, Acceptable Men, that “from the time I was a youngster I knew I wanted to dedicate my life to revolution.” His parents had both been communists and he inherited the family business, traversing over his lifetime a variety of revolutionary groupings, from Stalinist to proto-anarchist. A man ahead of his time, he maintained a steady focus on the fight against racial oppression.

In his new book, Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean, historian Peter James Hudson tells the story of how U.S. banks entered the Caribbean in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Up until the crisis of 2008, racial inequality in the United States was showing signs of improvement. Poverty and unemployment among blacks had fallen sharply in the 1990s, and the wages of black and white workers had begun to converge.

Paul Mattick’s most recent book, Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Future of Capitalism, was just published by Reaktion Books. In late April, he sat down with John Clegg and Aaron Benanav of the journal Endnotes.