The Accumulation of Capital


Rosa Luxemburg - 1913
    In January 1919, after being arrested for her involvement in a workers' uprising in Berlin, she was brutally murdered by a group of right-wing soldiers. Her body was recovered days later from a canal. Six years earlier she had published what was undoubtedly her finest achievement, The Accumulation of Capital - a book which remains one of the masterpieces of socialist literature. Taking Marx as her starting point, she offers an independent and fiercely critical explanation of the economic and political consequences of capitalism in the context of the turbulent times in which she lived, reinterpreting events in the United States, Europe, China, Russia and the British Empire. Many today believe there is no alternative to global capitalism. This book is a timely and forceful statement of an opposing view.

The Racial Contract


Charles W. Mills - 1997
    Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged "contract" has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence "whites" and "non-whites," full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence.The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state. Holding up a mirror to mainstream philosophy, this provocative book explains the evolving outline of the racial contract from the time of the New World conquest and subsequent colonialism to the written slavery contract, to the "separate but equal" system of segregation in the United States. According to Mills, the contract has provided the theoretical architecture justifying an entire history of European atrocity against non-whites, from David Hume's and Immanuel Kant's claims that blacks had inferior cognitive power, to the Holocaust, to the kind of imperialism in Asia that was demonstrated by the Vietnam War. Mills suggests that the ghettoization of philosophical work on race is no accident. This work challenges the assumption that mainstream theory is itself raceless. Just as feminist theory has revealed orthodox political philosophy's invisible white male bias, Mills's explication of the racial contract exposes its racial underpinnings.

Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race


Patrick Wolfe - 2015
    Bringing a historical perspective to bear on the regimes of race that colonizers have sought to impose on Aboriginal people in Australia, on Blacks and Native Americans in the United States, on Ashkenazi Jews in Western Europe, on Arab Jews in Israel/Palestine, and on people of African descent in Brazil, this book shows how race marks and reproduces the different relationships of inequality into which Europeans have coopted subaltern populations: territorial dispossession, enslavement, confinement, assimilation, and removal. Charting the different modes of domination that engender specific regimes of race and the strategies of anti-colonial resistance they entail, the book powerfully argues for cross-racial solidarities that respect these historical differences.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Here I Stand


Paul Robeson - 1971
    The most celebrated black American of his day, Robeson was blacklisted, silenced and had his US passport withheld because of his criticism of McCarthyism, his fascination with the Soviet Union and his strong support of African independence. He wrote Here I Stand as a bold answer to his accusers and it remains today a passionate and defiant challenge to the prevailing fear and racism that continues to characterize American society.'(Robeson's) nobility, his language, his encouragement and his praise put me forever in his debt because it inspired me fully to be like him, and to use my life as he had used his, to put into it the commitment of the liberation of his people and all people.' Harry Belafonte in Restoring Hope'Robeson's book is a perennial, first published in 1958, and now a voice from a different time. It anticipates for black persons the moral support of the American majority with an intensity that now seems evangelical. It's full of probably tragic hope. It should be read.' The Boston Globe'This amazing man, this great intellect, this magnificient genius with his overwhelming love of humanity is a devastating challenge to a society built on hypocrisy, greed and profit-seeking at the expense of common humanity.' The New York Times

Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond


David Gilbert - 2011
    From his entry into the world of political activism as the founder of Students for a Democratic Society at Columbia University to his departure from public life in order to help build the clandestine resistance to war and racism known as the Weathermen, Gilbert relates all of the victories he has achieved and obstacles he has encountered during his struggle to build a new world. In telling the intensely personal story he is stripped of all illusions and assesses his journey from liberal to radical to revolutionary with rare humor and frankness. A firsthand glimpse into the terrors and triumphs of the 1960s and beyond, Love and Struggle is as candid and uncompromising as its author.

Empire's Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism


Greg Grandin - 2006
    But America’s imperial identity was actually shaped much closer to home. In a brilliant excavation of long-obscured history, Empire’s Workshop shows how Latin America has functioned as a proving ground for American strategies and tactics overseas. Historian Greg Grandin follows the United States’ imperial operations from Jefferson’s aspirations for an “empire of liberty” in Cuba and Spanish Florida to Reagan’s support for brutally oppressive but U.S.-friendly regimes in Central America. He traces the origins of Bush’s current policies back to Latin America, where many of the administration’s leading lights first embraced the deployment of military power to advance free market economics and enlisted the evangelical movement in support of their ventures.With much of Latin America now in open rebellion against U.S. domination, Grandin asks: If Washington failed to bring prosperity and democracy to Latin America—its own backyard “workshop”—what are the chances it will do so for the world?

The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution


Julius S. Scott - 2018
    Having delved deep into the gray obscurity of official eighteenth-century records in Spanish, English, and French, Julius S. Scott has written a powerful “history from below.” Scott follows the spread of “rumors of emancipation” and the people behind them, bringing to life the protagonists in the slave revolution.By tracking the colliding worlds of buccaneers, military deserters, and maroon communards from Venezuela to Virginia, Scott records the transmission of contagious mutinies and insurrections in unparalleled detail, providing readers with an intellectual history of the enslaved.Though The Common Wind is credited with having “opened up the Black Atlantic with a rigor and a commitment to the power of written words,” the manuscript remained unpublished for thirty-two years. Now, after receiving wide acclaim from leading historians of slavery and the New World, it has been published by Verso for the first time, with a foreword by the academic and author Marcus Rediker.

Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail


Frances Fox Piven - 1977
    Have the poor fared best by participating in conventional electoral politics or by engaging in mass defiance and disruption? The authors of the classic Regulating The Poor assess the successes and failures of these two strategies as they examine, in this provocative study, four protest movements of lower-class groups in 20th century America:-- The mobilization of the unemployed during the Great Depression that gave rise to the Workers' Alliance of America-- The industrial strikes that resulted in the formation of the CIO-- The Southern Civil Rights Movement-- The movement of welfare recipients led by the National Welfare Rights Organization.

The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement


Gilles Dauvé - 1973
    

Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che


Max Elbaum - 2002
    Revolution in the Air is the definitive study of how radicals from the sixties movements embraced twentieth-century Marxism, and what movements of dissent today can learn from the legacies of Lenin, Mao and Che.

Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination


Alondra Nelson - 2011
    The Black Panthers are most often remembered for their revolutionary rhetoric and militant action. Here Alondra Nelson deftly recovers an indispensable but lesser-known aspect of the organization’s broader struggle for social justice: health care. The Black Panther Party’s health activism—its network of free health clinics, its campaign to raise awareness about genetic disease, and its challenges to medical discrimination—was an expression of its founding political philosophy and also a recognition that poor blacks were both underserved by mainstream medicine and overexposed to its harms.Drawing on extensive historical research as well as interviews with former members of the Black Panther Party, Nelson argues that the Party’s focus on health care was both practical and ideological. Building on a long tradition of medical self-sufficiency among African Americans, the Panthers’ People’s Free Medical Clinics administered basic preventive care, tested for lead poisoning and hypertension, and helped with housing, employment, and social services. In 1971, the party launched a campaign to address sickle-cell anemia. In addition to establishing screening programs and educational outreach efforts, it exposed the racial biases of the medical system that had largely ignored sickle-cell anemia, a disease that predominantly affected people of African descent.The Black Panther Party’s understanding of health as a basic human right and its engagement with the social implications of genetics anticipated current debates about the politics of health and race. That legacy—and that struggle—continues today in the commitment of health activists and the fight for universal health care.

The Black Panthers: Portraits from an Unfinished Revolution


Bryan Shih - 2016
    But beyond the labels of "extremist" and "violent" that have marked the party, and beyond charismatic leaders like Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver, were the ordinary men and women who made up the Panther rank and file. In The Black Panthers, photojournalist Bryan Shih and historian Yohuru Williams offer a reappraisal of the party's history and legacy. Through stunning portraits and interviews with surviving Panthers, as well as illuminating essays by leading scholars, The Black Panthers reveals party members' grit and battle scars--and the undying love for the people that kept them going.

Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States


Sharon Smith - 2006
    And she closely examines the role of the labor movement in the 2004 presidential election, tracing the shrinking electoral influence of organized labor and the failure of labor-management cooperation, “business unionism,” and reliance on the Democrats to deliver any real gains.Smith shows how a return to the fighting traditions of US labor history, with their emphasis on rank-and-file strategies for change, can turn around the labor movement.Subterranean Fire brings working-class history to light and reveals its lessons for today.Sharon Smith is the author of Women and Socialism, also published by Haymarket Books, as well as many articles on women’s liberation and the US working class. Her writings appear regularly in Socialist Worker newspaper and the International Socialist Review. She has also written for the journal Historical Materialism and is a contributor to Iraq Under Siege :The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War and Women and the Revolution by Ethel Mannin. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.

Revolution in the Revolution? Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America


Régis Debray - 1967
    In the late 1960s he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Havana in Cuba, and became an associate of Che Guevara in Bolivia. He wrote the book Revolution in the Revolution?, which analysed the tactical & strategic doctrines then prevailing among militant socialist movements in Latin America, & acted as a handbook for guerrilla warfare that supplemented Guevara's own manual on the subject. It was published by Maspero in Paris in 1967 & in the same year in New York (Monthly Review Press & Grove), Montevideo (Sandino), Milan (Feltrinelli) & Munich (Trikont). Guevara was captured in Bolivia early in 10/67; on 4/20/67, Debray had been arrested in the small town of Muyupampa, also in Bolivia. Convicted of having been part of Guevara's guerrilla group Debray on 11/17 was sentenced to 30 years in prison. He was released in 1970 after an international campaign for his release which included Jean-Paul Sartre, André Malraux, Général De Gaulle & Pope Paul VI.

Workers' Councils


Anton Pannekoek - 1946
    Left Communism is the theory and practice of worker control and self-organization whose adherents provided the main opposition to the Bolsheviks. Rarely printed, often cited, Pannekoek’s Workers’ Councils is the Das Kapital of Left Communism. This updated edition includes a substantial introduction from Noam Chomsky, illuminating the continuing relevance of this classic text."An urgent message to the future— are we listening?—from the most brilliant theoretician of libertarian com-munism."—Mike Davis, author of City of QuartzAnton Pannekoek was a Dutch worker, Socialist, and astronomer. He wrote Workers’ Councils amidst Nazi occupation of Holland.