This book provides a concise and instructive review of the revolutions of the twentieth century, with separate chapters on the Russian, Chinese, Guinea-Bissau, and Vietnamese revolutions, and examines the various currents of Marxism active in the revolutions of our times. A second section is devoted to the United States, and provides a survey of the class forces in American history as well as the authors' ideas on the objects and means of an American Revolution. | more…
Amilcar Cabral, who was the Secretary–General of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and the Cape Verde Islands (PAIGC), was assassinated by Portuguese agents on January 20, 1973. Under his leadership, the PAIGC liberated three–quarters of the countryside of Guinea in less than ten years of revolutionary struggle. Cabral distinguished himself among modern revolutionaries by the long and careful preparation, both theoretical and practical, which he undertook before launching the revolutionary struggle, and, in the course of the preparation, became one of the world’s outstanding theoreticians of anti–imperialist struggle. | more…
This collection of Colletti’s (1924-2001) principal Marxist essays will be welcomed by non-Italian readers. Colletti’s concern as a Marxist was twofold: to interpret Marxism as profoundly and as flexibly as possible; and to investigate the relationships between Marx’s thought and that of a number of other thinkers as widely separated in time as Rousseau and Marcuse. His thought ranges widely through philosophy, history, sociology, politics, and economics, without pausing at boundaries. Colletti’s work from his Marxist period attempted to place the work of Marx in a line of descent that de-emphasizes Hegel, while giving a novel focus to the relationship between Marxism and Kant. | more…
Bukharin completed this work in 1914; it represented an attempt to grapple with the Austrian School of political economy, as represented chiefly by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. Bukharin interprets the school as reflecting the social position of the rentier stratum of the capitalist class, which tends to view the economy from the point of view of consumption rather than production. His discussion, while it does not deal with the many changes and refinements of neoclassical economics, does contrast, in polemical form, Marxism with the fundamental premises of modern academic economics. | more…
These three essays by the independent German Marxist Karl Korsch offer expositions, often in polemical form, of basic Marxist ideas. Since they cover both sociology and economics, they are excellent guides for the student on the most introductory, though not the most elementary, level. They include “Leading Principles of Marxism,” his introduction to the 1932 German edition of Capital, “Why I Am a Marxist.” | more…
In this book, Mandel discusses the development of Marx’s economic ideas from their beginnings to the completion of the Grundrisse. He combines a historical retrospective and a review of current discussions on each of the subjects and problems central to Marxist economic theory. He traces the development of the concept of “alienation” in Marx, and its fate in the hands of succeeding generations, down to the present discussion in East and West Europe, summarizes the fascinating debates over the “Asiatic mode of production,” and discusses labor theory of value, the problem of periodic crises, the theory of wages and the polarization of wealth and poverty, and the problem of progressive “disalienation” through the building of socialist society. | more…
In 1938, a year after his death in Spain at the age of thirty, Christopher Caudwell’s Studies in a Dying Culture was published, to be followed eleven years later by a second volume, Further Studies in a Dying Culture. This volume makes available both important works by one of the foremost Marxist critics of the thirties. | more…
“One of the ablest leaders and writers of the French New Left describes the two realms of 'anarchism'?its intellectual substance, and its actual practice through the Bolshevik Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Italian Factory Councils, and finally the role in workers' self-management in Yugoslavia and Algeria… An important contemporary definition of New Left aims and their possible directions in the future.” — Publishers Weekly | more…
These essays by the author of The Political Economy of Growth and co-author of Monopoly Capital cover the working range of a strong and original mind. They are as diverse as his well-known discussion of Marxism and psychoanalysis, and his expert handling of the politics and economics of development. | more…
This introduction to socialist thought is by two men perhaps better qualified than any other Americans to have written it. Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, founding editors and publishers of the independent socialist magazine Monthly Review, built an impressive reputation as keen observers, acute analysts, and lucid writers on the world and domestic scenes. In this book, they present in clear and direct language the basic elements of the socialist critique of capitalist society. | more…
