This document summarizes three books related to Marxism: 1) The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx by Alex Callinicos provides a comprehensive introduction to Marx's life, thought, and intellectual influences in a clear manner. 2) Chocolate Nations by Órla Ryan examines the political and economic factors that have led to poverty for cocoa farmers in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, but fails to adequately analyze the role of structural adjustment policies. 3) A book review criticizes Chocolate Nations for its omission of discussion on the negative impacts of IMF and World Bank policies and argues this undermines the book's explanatory power.

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None of the above observations are meant to oppose any workers’ initiative to trans-
form their own workplaces. They are merely a recognition of the struggles that lie ahead
in trying to implement and relate democracy at the micro level with international class
solidarity and struggle, at moments in which nationalism, within the leading capitalist
nation in a moment of crisis, is a real factor with real consequences.
Still, we should appreciate Alperovitz’s efforts in his book to open up the space to
discuss what has historically become one of the victims of both socialism and capitalism,
and which in moments of crisis demonstrates its continued relevance, as several cases,
like Buenos Aires in 2001 or Chicago in 2008, have confirmed. Workers’ control and
self-management are once again back on the discussion table as some of the many ele-
ments that might help constitute not only a defence against capitalism’s inhuman logic,
but also an insight into what kind of post-capitalist future awaits us if socialism is to
triumph.
Author biography
Ian J. Seda-Irizarry is a visiting assistant professor at Bucknell University, where he teaches
courses in the history of economic thought, development in Latin America, and principles of
economics. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Rethinking Marxism, and is editor
of the online music magazine Herencia Latina. He also contributes pieces of economic analysis to
the weekly newspaper Claridad in Puerto Rico.
Órla Ryan
Chocolate Nations: Living and Dying for Cocoa in West Africa, Zed Books,
London, UK, 2011; 176 pp: 9781848130050, £12.99 (pbk)
Reviewed by Sébastien Rioux, York University, Canada
For the US$75 billion chocolate and cocoa-based products market, West Africa is a key
region. If the region produces about two-thirds of the world production of cocoa beans,
Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana contribute over 50 per cent to the world supply. As the former
Reuters correspondent in Uganda and Ghana and actual Financial Times journalist Órla
Ryan demonstrates, our favourite sweet is produced thanks to the mass poverty of mil-
lions of farmers. Divided into ten chapters, including an Introduction and an Epilogue,
Ryan argues in this short, journalistic book that politically fragmented small producers
need political leadership, negotiating muscle, education, scientific support and land
reform, while chocolate companies need more transparency.
Since their independence in 1957 and 1960, both Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire have used
their respective national marketing board as financial instruments for developmental
projects, buying from the producers at a fixed price and selling at higher prices on inter-
national markets. Mismanagement and corruption in Ghana led to a dramatic decline in
production during the 1960s and 1970s, a trend that was only reversed by the govern-
ment setting higher farm-gate prices under pressure from the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, in order to increase production. With elections in
1992, the government became increasingly dependent on the country’s 720,000 cocoa

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producers, and thereby rising producers’ prices became an essential aspect of electoral
life, although poverty remains the norm for cocoa farmers.
Chapters 2 to 4 survey the transformation of Côte d’Ivoire’s miracle into a night-
mare. Ryan argues that in ‘these two decisions [welcoming immigrants with open
arms and making land freely available] lie the secrets of the success of the Ivorian
cocoa industry and the roots of its downfall’ (p. 26). Plummeting international prices
in the 1980s destroyed the previous two decades of rapid economic growth. Defaulting
on its debt in 1987, structural adjustment forced the government to balance its books
on the back of coffee and cocoa farmers by cutting their payments by half, while caus-
ing widespread economic hardship. As people from the cities tried to go back to the
land, disputes around citizenship and land ownership emerged. Simmering through-
out the 1990s, tensions degenerated into civil war in 2002, effectively dividing the
country in two. Meanwhile, under pressure from the World Bank, the government
abolished the Cocoa Board in 1999, only to create five new bodies to regulate the
cocoa trade in the following years. Between 1999 and 2003, levies on exports increased
ninefold, and cocoa taxes almost tripled. Exporters downloaded these extra costs onto
smallholders, who were no longer protected by a minimum price. Amidst widespread
poverty, producers became increasingly dependent on family labour, including child
labour, and instances of child slavery and trafficked children on cocoa plantations
have surfaced.
Chapters 5 and 6 address the difficulties in transferring value-added manufacturing
processes to the continent and the myths and reality of Fairtrade solutions to West
African poverty. With only 7 per cent of the price of a chocolate bar spent on cocoa
ingredients, most profits come from manufacturing (43 per cent). Yet chocolate compa-
nies have shown little or no interest in moving production of finished products to the
continent, with the importation of key ingredients such as milk and the providing of
refrigerated means of transportation for the perishable treat deemed too costly. On the
other hand, Ryan maintains that market and democratic forces, rather than Fairtrade,
explain producers’ rising share of world prices in Ghana. In recent years, the price of
cocoa has risen above the Fairtrade floor, and the minimum price received by farmers
frequently matches or exceeds the latter. For Ryan, while Fairtrade would protect farmers
from a future drop in international prices, so would greater productivity and crop diver-
sification.
With Cadbury, Kraft, Ferrero, Nestlé and Masterfoods controlling 57 percent of the
European chocolate retail market, and Cargill, Barry Callebaut and ADM controlling 41
percent of the global processing business, Chapter 7 shows that parallel to market con-
centration and the consolidation of power by international companies runs the gradual
fragmentation of producers’ power. As the author argues in the following chapter,
education and scientific support are keys to a sustainable future based on intensive rather
than expansive production. And while recognising that the lack of both is largely the
result ‘of sector reforms [read structural adjustments] in the 1990s’ (p. 153), Ryan praises
industry-led initiatives as potentially transformative.
Contrary to what the subtitle of this book suggests, the book is not about West Africa
per se, but about Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire – other regional producers such as Nigeria in
West Africa or Cameroon in Central Africa are ignored. The book also contains very
little, if any, comparative data to assess the evolution of people’s standards of living since

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independence. More importantly, however, Chocolate Nations at best offers a partial
explanation of the reasons behind farmer poverty. While Ryan is certainly right to criti-
cise at length ‘decades of political mismanagement, theft and waste’ (p. 62) by Ghanaian
and Ivorian authorities, the absence of any sustained discussion on decades of economic
mismanagement, theft and waste by structural adjustment policies (SAPs) is a painful
omission that not only seriously undermines the explanatory capacity of the book, but
also creates important historical, analytical and logical difficulties. The net effect is a
subtle narrative that reproduces the sanitised developmental discourse of the IMF and
the World Bank, as Ryan remains largely silent on the widespread poverty and misery
created in both countries by these institutions.
Ryan’s critique of Fairtrade is interesting but weak. She undermines her own argu-
ment that international markets can also be ‘fair’ by noting ‘that, in real terms, prices in
2000-2005 were a quarter of what they were in the 1970s’ (p. 128). And while the jour-
nalistic tone of the book makes it accessible, the content of the book’s two-page bibliog-
raphy is a strong reminder of its analytical limits and shortcomings, which make it a
useful, yet one-sided introduction to cocoa production in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire.
With these caveats in mind, Ryan’s book is to be praised for presenting this important
issue to a wider audience.
Author biography
Sébastien Rioux is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada post-doctoral
research fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia, Canada.
His research interests include the political economy of food, labour studies, critical geography,
historical sociology, and feminist and Marxist method and knowledge.
Alex Callinicos
The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx, Haymarket Books, Chicago, IL, 2011;
262 pp: 9781608461387, £9.99 (pbk)
Reviewed by Michael Merlingen, Central European University, Budapest
This book is a comprehensive introduction to Marx’s life and thought. It starts off by
sketching his personal, intellectual and political trajectories, drawing out connections
between them and situating them in the broader political struggles in Europe at the time.
The chapters that follow further contextualise Marx. Drawing on Lenin’s famous three-
sources-of-Marxism argument, Callinicos positions Marx’s work in relation to French
socialism, English political economy and German philosophy. The storyline inevitably
involves theoretical perspective-taking on contested issues within Marxism, such as the
class nature of absolutism in continental Europe or the periodisation of capitalist expan-
sion in Western Europe. The book’s main chapters cover ‘Marx’s Method’, ‘History and
the Class Struggle’, ‘Capitalism’, and ‘Workers’ Power’. It ends with chapters on ‘Marx
Today’ and ‘Further Readings’. Written by one of the leading contemporary Marxists,
the book presents Marx’s thought system in a wonderfully clear manner, which manages
to make even complicated things seem simple. Both newcomers to Marx and those who

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