As we enter the 21st century, many countries of the South are in a state of economic crisis, with once optimistic visions of the future cruelly dashed by rising mass poverty, inequality, and hunger. At the same time, working people in the North find their living standards declining. Dark Victory reveals the roots of these global trends in a sweeping strategy of global economic rollback unleashed by the US to shore up the North's domination of the international economy and reassert corporate control.

Bello argues that lower barriers to imports, removal of restrictions on foreign investments, privatization of state-owned activities, reduction in social welfare spending, and wage cuts and devaluation of local currencies-all conditions of structural adjustment loans from the North-have had disastrous consequences. Hailed as a classic study of global poverty, Dark Victory is now reissued with a new epilogue by the authors.