A Concise History of the Russian Revolution


Richard Pipes - 1995
    "A deep and eloquent condemnation."--The New York Times.

Darkness at Noon


Arthur Koestler - 1940
    His best-known work tells the tale of Rubashov, a Bolshevik 1917 revolutionary who is cast out, imprisoned and tried for treason by the Soviet government he'd helped create.Darkness at Noon stands as an unequaled fictional portrayal of the nightmare politics of our time. Its hero is an aging revolutionary, imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the Party to which he has dedicated his life. As the pressure to confess preposterous crimes increases, he relives a career that embodies the terrible ironies and human betrayals of a totalitarian movement masking itself as an instrument of deliverance. Almost unbearably vivid in its depiction of one man's solitary agony, it asks questions about ends and means that have relevance not only for the past but for the perilous present. It is —- as the Times Literary Supplement has declared —- "A remarkable book, a grimly fascinating interpretation of the logic of the Russian Revolution, indeed of all revolutionary dictatorships, and at the same time a tense and subtly intellectualized drama."

Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump


Asad Haider - 2018
    The recent experience of the Democratic primaries and the re-emergence of social movements from Occupy to Black Lives Matter has generated a new context for identity politics to become an active force, and new ground to relitigate the frustrating debates between the partisans of "race" and "class" ad infinitum. In Mistaken Identity, Asad Haider reaches for a different approach - one rooted in the rich legacies of the black freedom struggle. Drawing from the words and deeds of black revolutionary theorists, he argues that identity politics is not synonymous with anti-racism, but instead amounts to the neutralization of its movements, a retreat from the crucial passage from identity to solidarity, and from individual recognition to collective struggle against an oppressive social structure. Mistaken Identity is an urgent call for alternative visions, languages, and practices against the white identity politics of right-wing populism. Responding with a contrary, pluralist identity politics has proven successful. The idea of universal emancipation now seems old-fashioned and outmoded. But if we are attentive to the lines of struggle which lie outside the boundaries of the state, we will see that it has been placed on the agenda once again.

Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School


Stuart Jeffries - 2016
    Among the most prominent members of what became the Frankfurt School were the philosophers Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. Not only would they change the way we think, but also the subjects we deem worthy of intellectual investigation. Their lives, like their ideas, profoundly, sometimes tragically, reflected and shaped the shattering events of the twentieth century.Grand Hotel Abyss combines biography, philosophy, and storytelling to reveal how the Frankfurt thinkers gathered in hopes of understanding the politics of culture during the rise of fascism. Some of them, forced to escape the horrors of Nazi Germany, later found exile in the United States. Benjamin, with his last great work—the incomplete Arcades Project—in his suitcase, was arrested in Spain and committed suicide when threatened with deportation to Nazi-occupied France. On the other side of the Atlantic, Adorno failed in his bid to become a Hollywood screenwriter, denounced jazz, and even met Charlie Chaplin in Malibu.After the war, there was a resurgence of interest in the School. From the relative comfort of sun-drenched California, Herbert Marcuse wrote the classic One Dimensional Man, which influenced the 1960s counterculture and thinkers such as Angela Davis; while in a tragic coda, Adorno died from a heart attack following confrontations with student radicals in Berlin.By taking popular culture seriously as an object of study—whether it was film, music, ideas, or consumerism—the Frankfurt School elaborated upon the nature and crisis of our mass-produced, mechanised society. Grand Hotel Abyss shows how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption.

Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat


J. Sakai - 1983
    First published in the 1980s by activists with decades of experience organizing in grassroots anticapitalist struggles against white supremacy, the book soon established itself as an essential reference point for revolutionary nationalists and dissident currents within the predominantly colonialist Marxist-Leninist and anarchist movements at that time.Always controversial within the establishment Left Settlers uncovers centuries of collaboration between capitalism and white workers and their organizations, as well as their neocolonial allies, showing how the United States was designed from the ground up as a parasitic and genocidal entity. Settlers exposes the fact that America’s white citizenry have never supported themselves but have always resorted to exploitation and theft, culminating in acts of genocide to maintain their culture and way of life. As recounted in painful detail by Sakai, the United States has been built on the theft of Indigenous lands and of Afrikan labor, on the robbery of the northern third of Mexico, the colonization of Puerto Rico, and the expropriation of the Asian working class, with each of these crimes being accompanied by violence.This new edition includes “Cash & Genocide: The True Story of Japanese-American Reparations” and an interview with author J. Sakai by Ernesto Aguilar.Please note that none of the illustrations from the paperback edition are included in the digital version.

Stalin


Ian Grey - 1979
    His name brings to mind brutal terrorism and ruthless oppression. Yet, as New York Times bestselling author Ian Grey shows, at the core of the Man of Steel was a humble, puritanical Georgian peasant. What set him above others was his intelligence, discipline, perception, indomitable will, and above all, a messianic determination to lead Russia to a grand destiny. Grey's comprehensive biography portrays Stalin as a complex, paradoxical figure - a leader whose power was rooted in the tsarist traditions he abhorred and whose tyranny was based on an ambition to ensure the strength of his party. In his single-minded dedication to the growth of Russia under communism, Stalin was able to disregard all sense of morality. Yet, through his magnetism, he commanded the respect of his colleagues and the adulation of his people. Even Winston Churchill held him in awe. Stalin is a powerful history of Russia's evolution from backward nation to world power, as well as a dramatic portrait of a man who was called both "The Implacable" and "Beloved Father."

As Black As Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation


Zoé Samudzi - 2018
    Arguing that Blacks have always been considered non-citizens in the United States, Samudzi and Anderson make the case for a new program of transformative politics for African Americans, one rooted in an anarchist framework. This is not a feel-good-and-make-peace book. With the passion of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, the raw truth of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and the revolutionary fervor of Emma Goldman’s timeless essays, As Black as Resistance shakes us from our slumber and energizes us for the road ahead.

Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown


Leszek Kołakowski - 1976
    Written in exile, this 'prophetic work' presents, according to the Library of Congress, 'the most lucid and comprehensive history of the origins, structure, and posthumous development of the system of thought that had the greatest impact on the twentieth century'. Kolakowski traces the intellectual foundations of Marxist thought from Plotonius through Lenin, Lukacs, Sartre and Mao. He reveals Marxism to be 'the greatest fantasy of our century ...an idea that began in Promethean humanism and culminated in the monstrous tyranny of Stalinism'. In a brilliant coda, he examines the collapse of international Communism in light of the last tumultuous decades. Main Currents of Marxism remains the indispensable book in its field.

One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society


Herbert Marcuse - 1964
    This second edition, newly introduced by Marcuse scholar Douglas Kellner, presents Marcuse's best-selling work to another generation of readers in the context of contemporary events.

Marx's Capital: An Illustrated Introduction


David N. Smith - 1982
    Smith and Phil Evans present Karl Marx's Capital as it was meant to be: in graphic novel form.

The Ego and Its Own


Max Stirner - 1844
    The work also constitutes an enduring critique of liberalism and socialism from the perspective of an extreme eccentric individualism. Stirner has latterly been portrayed variously as a precursor of Nietzsche, a forerunner of existentialism, an individualist anarchist, and as manifestly insane. This edition includes an Introduction placing Stirner in his historical context.

The Verso Book of Dissent: From Spartacus to the Shoe-Thrower of Baghdad


Andrew Hsiao - 2010
    Their echoes reverberate from Ancient Greece, China and Egypt, via the dissident poets and philosophers of Islam and Judaism, through to the Arab slave revolts and anti-Ottoman rebellions of the Middle Ages. These sources were tapped during the Dutch and English revolutions at the outset of the Modern world, and in turn flowed into the French, Haitian, American, Russian and Chinese revolutions. More recently, resistance to war and economic oppression has flared up on battlefields and in public spaces from Beijing and Baghdad to Caracas and Los Angeles.This anthology, global in scope, presents voices of dissent from every era of human history: speeches and pamphlets, poems and songs, plays and manifestos. Every age has its iconoclasts, and yet the greatest among them build on the words and actions of their forerunners. The Verso Book of Dissent will become an invaluable resource, reminding today’s citizens that these traditions will never die.

Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method


Bertell Ollman - 2003
    In this book Ollman offers a thorough analysis of Marx's use of dialectical method.   Marx made extremely creative use of dialectical method to analyze the origins, operation, and direction of capitalism. Unfortunately, his promised book on method was never written, so that readers wishing to understand and evaluate Marx's theories, or to revise or use them, have had to proceed without a clear grasp of the dialectic in which the theories are framed. The result has been more disagreement over "what Marx really meant" than over the writings of any other major thinker.   In putting Marx's philosophy of internal relations and his use of the process of abstraction--two little-studied aspects of dialectics--at the center of this account, Ollman provides a version of Marx's method that is at once systematic, scholarly, clear and eminently useful.   Ollman not only sheds important new light on what Marx really meant in his varied theoretical pronouncements, but in carefully laying out the steps in Marx's method makes it possible for a reader to put the dialectic to work in his or her own research. He also convincingly argues the case for why social scientists and humanists as well as philosophers should want to do so.

Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History of Lenin, Trotsky & Stalin


Bertram D. Wolfe - 1948
    Bertram Wolfe, a political scientist and historian of Russia, knew Trotsky and Stalin personally, and here brings his profound insider's knowledge to bear on his subjects. Three Who Made a Revolution recounts the early lives and influences of the three leaders, and shows the development of their diverging ideologies as decades gave strength to their cause and brought Russia closer to its turning point, a revolution that would alter the course of the twentieth century.

Our Word is Our Weapon: Selected Writings


Subcomandante Marcos - 2000
    Introduced by Nobel Prize winner José Saramago, and illustrated with beautiful black and white photographs, Our Word Is Our Weapon crystallizes "the passion of a rebel, the poetry of a movement, and the literary genius of indigenous Mexico."Marcos first captured world attention on January 1, 1994, when he and an indigenous guerrilla group calling themselves Zapatistas revolted against the Mexican government and seized key towns in Mexico's southernmost state of Chiapas. In the six years that passed since their uprising, Marcos altered the course of Mexican politics and emerged an international symbol of grassroots movement-building, rebellion, and democracy. The prolific stream of poetic political writings, tales, and traditional myths which Marcos penned from 1994 to 2000 fill more than four volumes. Our Word Is Our Weapon presents the best of these writings, many of which have never been published before in English.Throughout this remarkable book we hear the uncompromising voice of indigenous communities living in resistance, expressing through manifestos and myths the universal human urge for dignity, democracy, and liberation. It is the voice of a people refusing to be forgotten the voice of Mexico in transition, the voice of a people struggling for democracy by using their word as their only weapon.