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Dialectics of the Ideal: Evald Ilyenkov and Creative Soviet Marxism by Alex Levant
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The Book of War: Sun-tzu The Art of Warfare & Karl von Clausewitz On War
Sun Tzu - 2000
Liddel HartFor two thousand years, Sun-tzu's The Art of Warfare was the indispensable volume of warcraft. Although his work is the first known analysis of war and warfare, Sun-tzu struck upon a thoroughly modern concept: "The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting." Karl von Clausewitz, the canny military theorist who famously declared that war is a continuation of politics by other means, also claims paternity of the notion "total war." His is the magnum opus of the era of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic vars.Now these two great military minds are made to share the same tent, metaphorically speaking, in The Book of War. What a bivouac it is, and what a conversation into the night.Military writer Ralph Peters has written a new Introduction for this Modern Library edition.
Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital
Jason W. Moore - 2015
Climate. Food. Work. How are the crises of the twenty-first century connected? In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore argues that the sources of today’s global turbulence have a common cause: capitalism as a way of organizing nature, including human nature. Drawing on environmentalist, feminist, and Marxist thought, Moore offers a groundbreaking new synthesis: capitalism as a “world-ecology” of wealth, power, and nature. Capitalism’s greatest strength—and the source of its problems—is its capacity to create Cheap Natures: labor, food, energy, and raw materials. That capacity is now in question. Rethinking capitalism through the pulsing and renewing dialectic of humanity-in-nature, Moore takes readers on a journey from the rise of capitalism to the modern mosaic of crisis. Capitalism in the Web of Life shows how the critique of capitalism-in-nature—rather than capitalism and nature—is key to understanding our predicament, and to pursuing the politics of liberation in the century ahead.
Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today
John Holloway - 2002
Offers a radical rethinking of Marx's concept of revolution that shows how we can bring about social and political change today.
Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left
Roger Scruton - 2015
Beginning with a ruthless analysis of New Leftism and concluding with a critique of the key strands in its thinking, Roger Scruton conducts a reappraisal of such major left-wing thinkers as E. P. Thompson, Ronald Dworkin, R. D. Laing, Jurgen Habermas, Gyorgy Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Ralph Milliband, and Eric Hobsbawm. In addition to assessments of these thinkers' philosophical and political contributions, the book contains a biographical and bibliographical section summarizing their careers and most important writings.In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands Scruton asks, What does the Left look like today, and how has it evolved? He charts the transfer of grievances, from the working class to women, gays, and immigrants, asks what we can put in the place of radical egalitarianism, and what explains the continued dominance of antinomian attitudes in the intellectual world. Can there be any foundation for resistance to the leftist agenda without religious faith?Writing with great clarity, Scruton delivers a devastating critique of modern left-wing thinking.
The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation
Michael Perelman - 2000
But, in the great texts of that discourse, these writers downplayed a crucial requirement for capitalism’s creation: For it to succeed, peasants would have to abandon their self-sufficient lifestyle and go to work for wages in a factory. Why would they willingly do this? Clearly, they did not go willingly. As Michael Perelman shows, they were forced into the factories with the active support of the same economists who were making theoretical claims for capitalism as a self-correcting mechanism that thrived without needing government intervention. Directly contradicting the laissez-faire principles they claimed to espouse, these men advocated government policies that deprived the peasantry of the means for self-provision in order to coerce these small farmers into wage labor. To show how Adam Smith and the other classical economists appear to have deliberately obscured the nature of the control of labor and how policies attacking the economic independence of the rural peasantry were essentially conceived to foster primitive accumulation, Perelman examines diaries, letters, and the more practical writings of the classical economists. He argues that these private and practical writings reveal the real intentions and goals of classical political economy—to separate a rural peasantry from their access to land. This rereading of the history of classical political economy sheds important light on the rise of capitalism to its present state of world dominance. Historians of political economy and Marxist thought will find that this book broadens their understanding of how capitalism took hold in the industrial age.
Orthodoxy and the Kingdom of Satan
Spyridon Bailey - 2017
Assessing the evidence of a corrupt world, Father Spyridon, a Greek Orthodox priest, draws together the different strands that reveal how the institutions and international organisations are preparing humanity for the end. The first half of the book deals with the United Nations, the arms industries, banking, the Freemasons, and the various secret elite groups hat control our world. He then gives a clear explanation of the means by which we are being attacked and manipulated through television, education, culture and philosophy.Finally he presents the prophecies of various Orthodox saints who told us what else we should expect. Father Spyridon's warnings will comfort some and anger others, This is a book that many will try to dismiss, while others will find in it comfort and confirmation of what they already suspected was happening. Written in a sober style, Orthodoxy And The Kingdom of Satan is a wake up call for all those who believe that time is running out. "It's Later than you think" we once heard, and the hour may be later than we dared imagine.
God and the State
Mikhail Bakunin - 1882
Born into the Russian nobility, he renounced his hereditary rank in protest against Czarist oppression and fled to Western Europe. A colorful, charismatic personality, Bakunin quickly became central to the anarchism movement, and everyone involved either built upon or reacted to his ideas. Yet Bakunin, despite the power of his ideas, was primarily a man of action, and he wrote little. His only major work, God and the State, remained unfinished, although it is the torso of a giant.God and the State has been a basic anarchist and radical document for generations. It is one of the clearest statements of the anarchist philosophy of history: religion by its nature is an impoverishment, enslavement, and annihilation of humanity. It is the weapon of the state. It must be smashed, according to Bakunin, before the right of self-determination can be possible. As an introduction to anarchist thought, a manifesto of atheism, or as a summing-up of the thoughts of Bakunin, God and the State remains a mind-opening experience, even for those basically unsympathetic to its premise.
If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote, They'd Have Given Us Candidates
Jim Hightower - 2000
But he will give you a sizeable piece of his mind on Election 2000. This plain-talking, name-naming, podium-pounding populist zeros in on everything that ails us, from the global economy and media to big business and election winners everywhere. In his hard hitting commentary and hilarious anecdotes, Hightower spares no one, including the scared cows -- and especially the politicians -- who helped steer us into this mess in the first place. An equal opportunity muckrucker and a conscientious agitator for "We the People", Hightower inspires us to take charge again, build a new politics for a better tommorow -- and have a lot of laughs along the way
On Liberty and Other Essays
John Stuart Mill - 1989
In his Introduction John Gray describes these essays as applications of Mill's doctrine of the Art of Life, as set out in A System of Logic. Using the resources of recent scholarship, he shows Mill's work to be far richer and subtler than traditional interpretations allow.
Ice Cream Man
Dax Flame - 2019
Having run out of options, former YouTube star Dax Flame must get a job at an ice cream shop in order to make ends meet.
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
Valentin Voloshinov - 1929
N. Volosinov's important work, first published in Russian in 1929, had to wait a generation for recognition. This first paperback edition of the English translation will be capital for literary theorists, philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and many others.Volosinov is out to undo the old disciplinary boundaries between linguistics, rhetoric, and poetics in order to construct a new kind of field: semiotics or textual theory. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik have provided a new preface to discuss Volosinov in relation to the great resurgence of interest in all the writing of the circle of Mikhail Bakhtin.
The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
Bhaskar Sunkara - 2019
With the stunning popularity of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Americans are embracing the class politics of socialism. But what, exactly, is socialism? And what would a socialist system in America look like? The editor of Jacobin magazine, Sunkara shows that socialism, though often seen primarily as an economic system, in fact offers the means to fight all forms of oppression, including racism and sexism. The ultimate goal is not Soviet-style planning, but to win rights to healthcare, education, and housing, and to create new democratic institutions in workplaces and communities. A primer on socialism for the 21st century, this is a book for anyone seeking an end to the vast inequities of our age.
The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy
Diana West - 2019
officials were turning the surveillance powers of the federal government -- designed to stop terrorist attacks -- against the Republican presidential team. These were the ruthless tactics of a Soviet-style police state, not a democratic republic.The Red Thread asks the simple question: Why? What is it that motivated these anti-Trump conspirators from inside and around the Obama administration and Clinton networks to depart so drastically from "politics as usual" to participate in a seditious effort to overturn an election?Finding clues in an array of sources, Diana West uses her trademark investigative skills, honed in her dazzling work, American Betrayal, to construct a fascinating series of ideological profiles of well-known but little understood anti-Trump actors, from James Comey to Christopher Steele to Nellie Ohr, and the rest of the Fusion GPS team; from John Brennan to the numerous Clintonistas still patrolling the Washington Swamp after all these years, and more.Once, we knew these officials by august titles and reputation; after The Red Thread, readers will recognize their multi-generational and inter-connecting communist and socialist pedigrees, and see them for what they really are: foot-soldiers of the Left, deployed to take down America's first "America First" and most anti-Communist president.If we just give it a pull, the "red thread" is very long and very deep.
Marx: A Very Short Introduction
Peter Singer - 1980
He sees him as a philosopher primarily concerned with human freedom, rather than as an economist or a social scientist. In plain English, he explains alienation, historical materialism, the economic theory of Capital, and Marx's ideas of communism, and concludes with an assessment of Marx's legacy.About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.
The Income Tax: Root of All Evil
Frank Chodorov - 1954
For the Amendment gives to the Federal Government first claim upon the earnings of the individual, and so infringes his natural right to own what he produces.With its graduated-tax provision, the Income Tax Amendment is a replica of that clause in the Communist Manifesto which provides for the confiscation of all property through the use of just such a tax.Not only is the individual citizen's liberty partitioned by the Amendment, but the several states are deprived of their Constitutional sovereignty, and the central Federal Government is overstrengthened at their expense. This growth of centralized power is a development which generations of Americans fought stubbornly to prevent.And the Federal Government, by the very nature of government itself, increases its "needs" in accordance with its means of revenue. Reduce Federal income, argues Frank Chodorov, and Federal "needs" will automatically be reduced.The author takes a forthright stand as he defines the immoral nature of income taxation and the fallacy of using to "level off" society. And finally he outlines what can be done to repeal the Income Tax Amendment, bearing in mind the Federal Government's legitimate need for revenue.