Far-left political ideologies and movements Books

Book SynopsisEnglish edition.Das Kapital is "a groundbreaking work of economic analysis, but also an unfinished literary masterpiece which, with its multi-layered structure, can be read as a Gothic novel, a Victorian melodrama, a Greek tragedy or a Swiftian satire." Francis Wheen, The Guardian.Though he died in 1883, Karl Marx''s Das Kapital, "the Bible of the working class," has been the book that most shaped twentieth-century history. His theories divided much of the world into two blocs, one embracing communism and the other fearing it, and cast a shadow into the twenty-first century.Although Marx writes as a philosopher and economist presenting an analysis of an economic system, the book is surprisingly readable. It reads like a Gothic novel "whose heroes are enslaved and consumed by the monster they created."Though many disagree with Marx''s conclusions, his analysis has been almost universally respected. Surprisingly, it is Marx, and not Adam Smith who understood the central role of capital. The historian Gareth Stedman Jones wrote:"What is extraordinary about Das Kapital is that it offers a still-unrivalled picture of the dynamism of capitalism and its transformation of societies on a global scale. Das Kapital has now emerged as one of the great landmarks of nineteenth century thought."Das Kapital is a revolutionary book; forged during the political and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century, it became the keystone of many Communist revolutions of the twentieth century. In this comprehensive analysis of capitalist economics and articulation of his theory of class conflict, Karl Marx (1818-1883) relentlessly argues that the accumulation of capital can only be achieved by bourgeoisie exploitation of the working classes. Das Kapital has not only changed history, but also human thought, becoming a foundational text in materialist philosophy, economics and politics.This volume includes The Communist Manifesto, written with his friend and colleague, Frederick Engels, which not only envisions a wholly equal society in which neither property nor money exist, but suggests that this will be a natural and inevitable consequence of the class struggle that dominates human history.Karl Heinrich Marx (1818 - 1883) was a German-born philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist. He lived in poverty with his wife and four young children in a two-room flat in Soho, London, while writing Das Kapital. In 1845, he wrote, "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it," words that capture his spirit and are inscribed on his grave. Later in 1848, in The Manifesto of the Communist Party, with Engels, he famously wrote: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite!"Had he lived to see the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, he would have felt vindicated!

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Book SynopsisIn this fiery, theoretical tour de force, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant offer an overview of life and death under capitalism and argue for a new global left politics aimed at severing the ties between capital and one of its primary tools: health.Written by co-hosts of the hit "Death Panel" podcast and longtime disability justice and healthcare activists Adler-Bolton and Vierkant, Health Communism first examines how capital has instrumentalized health, disability, madness, and illness to create a class seen as "surplus," regarded as a fiscal and social burden. Demarcating the healthy from the surplus, the worker from the "unfit" to work, the authors argue, serves not only to undermine solidarity but to mark whole populations for extraction by the industries that have emerged to manage and contain this "surplus" population. Health Communism then looks to the grave threat capital poses to global public health, and at the rare movements around the world that have successfully challenged the extractive economy of health.Ultimately, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue, we will not succeed in defeating capitalism until we sever health from capital. To do this will require a radical new politics of solidarity that centers the surplus, built on an understanding that we must not base the value of human life on one's willingness or ability to be productive within the current political economy.Capital, it turns out, only fears health.Trade ReviewThis book changed the way I think about health, power, state capacity, extraction, social welfare, and resistance. It is an immensely useful tool for wrestling with the most urgent questions facing our movements in these terrifying times. Readable and filled with concise histories and clear examples to illustrate nuanced analysis, it will no doubt become required reading among those struggling against the death cult that is racial capitalism. -- Dean Spade, author of Mutual AidBeatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant bring us a galvanizing proposition: Unlike the rest of us, capital is not alive; it merely animates itself through our host bodies. This book shares the impressive truth that we are all surplus in the political economy of health, whether we are presently 'healthy' or 'sick.' Adler-Bolton and Vierkant teach that our shared condition of vulnerability is ever ready to transform into our collective strength. -- Jules Gill-Peterson, author of Histories of the Transgender ChildBeatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant have been a lifeline for many during the COVID-19 pandemic through their Death Panel podcast, deconstructing the failed American response with a knife that cuts like truth. Here, they do something even more remarkable: imagine a better future. Health Communism doesn't tinker around the edges. It makes a direct assault on the idea that health can survive under capitalism, where the sick are simply disposable, while the system making a killing along the way. No one talks like Adler-Bolton and Vierkant do - those in public health and medicine are too deeply embedded in the status quo to even acknowledge the searing logic of their words. They stake out the far edge of what is possible and remind us that only the journey towards that horizon will make us free. -- Gregg Gonsalves, Yale School of Public Health and Yale Law SchoolHealth against health! I can't remember the last time I learned so much in under 200 pages. Nor can I imagine a more needful book for the pandemic we are still in, let alone the pandemics yet to come. This exquisitely researched 'surplus manifesto' made me cry tears of rage, but demonstrated powerfully to me that our collective illness can be 'turned into a weapon.' In my view, everyone new to disability liberation should read this text. Everyone who wants to stop the destruction of their bodies by capitalism should join the Death Panel community. If we let them, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant will teach the left how to really understand capitalism, at the cellular and somatic levels. So, if you are holding this book, congratulations. Here is deep wisdom to arm a struggle towards forms of human embodiment as yet undreamed-of; inspiration for a million insurgencies of communist health. -- Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the FamilyI could not help but cheer as I read Health Communism. The most analytically sharp analysis of the relations between capitalism and disability since the pioneering work of Marta Russell, this powerfully explicative work is a rousing manifesto for the sick and becoming-surplus to unite. -- Jasbir Puar, author of The Right to MaimHealth Communism illustrates how people are viewed as fuel from which to extract profits through the medicalization and financialization of health outputs...[it] serves as a wake-up call for the dehumanization of healthcare delivery. -- Roberta E. Winter * The New York Journal of Books *In Health Communism, [Adler-Bolton and Vierkant] show how members of the 'unproductive' surplus class are cast as burdens even as health capitalism sets up entire cottage industries (e.g. for-profit nursing homes, prisons) to extract value from this very population. -- Charlie Markbreiter * Bookforum *This seamless book fills an urgent void in leftist theories of illness...the achievement of such a concise yet cogent framework (aided by the fact that the past years have only confirmed its conclusion) is a marvel. -- Selen Ozturk * PopMatters *Surveying a century of sickness under an increasingly privatized system, in Health Communism Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue that we have to demand much more than Medicare for All in order to fix health care. -- Spencer Green * The New Republic *This is a book you should read before you die, because the ideas synthesized by Adler-Bolton and Vierkant could save our collective lives. Health Communism diagnoses our shared social sickness correctly. Rooted in the contemporary reality of mass death and disability, it reworks our familiar, commonsense concepts of sickness and health, care and cure, labor and waste to show how capitalist biomedicine wrings every last drop of productive labor from us before discarding us into the trash heap of 'surplus population' to carelessly be picked over and plundered until our death...Indeed, we are all ill under capitalism. Read this book. Care for your neighbors. Smash capitalism. Malingerers of the world unite. -- Jon Shaffer * Peste Magazine *Health Communism is itself a blueprint, in the (roughly translated) words of SPK, for turning illness into a weapon. -- Jess McAllen * The Baffler *[Health Communism] is a new way to find the universal in the particular, which is the kind of thinking tool we are in desperate need of at the moment. Turning those ideas into practice is a greater challenge. Where to start? Health communists begin with a compelling vision of society not as divided between abled and disabled or sick and well but as a vast web of people, all of whom have both abilities to contribute and needs to meet. -- Malcolm Harris * New York Magazine *Heath Communism is not "well-behaved": It is not interested in sober consideration, dry pontifications. It thrives through a sense of optimism. There is a joy to a manifesto that sits alongside its anger. If it is birthed from complaint and fury, these emotions are funneled through a hope that things could be otherwise-most of all, an optimism for a new collective. -- Jon Venn * Full Stop *Best Books of 2022 -- Joshua Frank * Counterpunch *If you have ever gone to work sick because you need the job to treat the sickness, you know the basic argument of Health Communism to be true: health under capitalism is an impossibility. -- Natalie Adler * LUX Magazine *Health Communism is, most fundamentally, a call for a new and expansive concept of health as a commons, a collective experience, and a collective commitment to human flourishing, freed from the ideological and financial strictures of market discipline. -- Abby Cartus * The New Republic *This creative, wide-ranging book would be important under any circumstances since it helps readers understand widespread social processes that are genuinely violent in their operations yet often curiously bloodless in their ideological depictions. The book is especially urgent in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Health Communism helps make clear both the fundamental social patterns that gave rise to the pandemic, and stresses that any real solutions to those patterns will require far-reaching social change. -- Nate Holdren * Theory & Event *An exciting contribution to materialist disability studies * Critical Inquiry *

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Book SynopsisSamir Amin, one of the twentieth century's leading radical intellectuals, has lived his personal and political life at the intersection of various cultures and international progressive currents - from Egypt to France to West Africa, from communism to national-liberation socialism, Maoism and finally a mature anti-imperialism. His memoirs are not only a fascinating personal narrative but a penetrating historical-political analysis, as well as an introduction to his most important theoretical contributions. They offer a unique vantage point for observing the operations of global capitalism and the evolution, crises and potentialities of radical movements, especially in the third world. This book will be invaluable not only to readers interested in Amin's profoundly influential work or in the history of the global left but to anyone concerned with today's worldwide struggles against capitalist globalization.Trade Review'This world-class economist is a serious Nobel Prize contender.' Economic Development and Cultural Change 'Samir Amin needs no introduction...he always remains apposite and, to the mind of this particular left-thinking academic, accurate, prescient, and to the point.' John Saul, African Studies ReviewTable of Contents 1. Childhood 2. A Student in Paris 3. Cairo 1957-1960 4. Parisian Interlude, January-September 1960 5. Bamako 1960-1963 6. Professor of Political Economy 1963-1970 7. The Political Context 1960-1998 8. Director of the Institute for Economic Planning and Development (IDEP) 1970-1980 9. The Third World Forum 10. Towards a Common Front of the World's Peoples?

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Book SynopsisWladyslaw Gomulka was a key player within Polish politics for over four decades and one of the most influential of the East European Communist Party leaders. As the architect of the 'Polish road to socialism', he claimed for Poland the right to define its own model of economic and political development, yet he was nevertheless committed to Poland's membership of the Soviet bloc. Anita Prazmowska here traces Gomulka's progression from a poorly educated worker in the Krosno district of Poland, to his election as First Party Secretary in 1956 and finally to his forced resignation in 1970. She considers Gomulka's pivotal role in building a communist-led resistance in occupied Poland during World War II as well as the critical part he played in post-war Polish politics and the 'de-Stalinization' process. Incorporating recently released and previously unpublished sources, this book provides a vivid picture of how Communism functioned in Poland and an original analysis of Poland's international role in the Cold War era.Table of ContentsAbbreviations Introduction 1 Family and Early Childhood 2 Political Maturing 3 The 1930s and entry into national politics 4 The Reconstruction of the Polish Communist Party during the Second World War 5 From conspiracy to power in post war Poland 6 The Establishment of Communist power in Poland 1944-48 7 1948-56 The Dark Years 8 The People’s Secretary 9 The Polish Road to Socialism 10 Nemesis Epilogue Bibliography

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Book SynopsisLenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Hitler and Goebbels all regarded cinema as their most important weapon for mass political propaganda. This revised and expanded edition of "Film Propaganda" examines the ways in which cinema was used for political purposes by two of the most highly politicised societies in twentieth-century European history. "Film Propaganda" is still to date the only book in English to compare these two cinemas and examine both in depth. Richard Taylor demonstrates how cinema was brought under political control in each country and goes on to explore the themes and stereotypes projected by the feature films that were produced. In so doing, he highlights the means used by the authorities to condition and control the filmgoer as individual spectator and as member of a mass audience. This process is examined in greater depth in a series of detailed analyses of films selected for their particular political significance, including "October", "Alexander Nevsky", "Triumph of the Will", "The Wandering Jew" and, new to this edition, the 1949 Stalin cult film, "The Fall of Berlin". Also new to this edition are appendices with details of films viewed by Hitler and Goebbels, which were captured by the Red Army from Berlin 's ruins in 1945 and were considered by Stalin for release during the film famine years after the war.

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Book Synopsis"Against All Hope" is Armando Valladares' account of over twenty years in Fidel Castro's tropical gulag as a result of his philosophical and religious opposition to communism. He gives a picture of the Cuba that he lived in and tells of how his deep Christian faith kept him from abandoning hope during the most evil treatment.

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Book SynopsisTwenty years after the demise of the Communist Party of Great Britain, eight former members, all of whom who stayed in the party until the bitter end, reflect here on some of the personal, political and cultural changes of the last twenty years. The paths of Dave Cope, Andy Croft, Alistair Findlay, Stuart Hill, Kate Hudson, Andy Pearmain, Mark Perryman and Lorna Reith have followed very different political trajectories since 1991 - taking them into the Green Party, the Labour Party, the CPB, SLP, Respect and no party at all. But most have remained politically active. Combining personal and political history, analysis and autobiography, anecdote and argument, the contributors consider the consequences of the CP's dissolution for British political and intellectual life.Table of ContentsContents Andy Croft Introduction Mark Perryman The Revolution is Just a T-shirt Away Kate Hudson A Political Error of Vast Proportions Andrew Pearmain Towards a Marxist Theory of Love Alistair Findlay No Future without Marx Lorna Reith We Will Rebuild our Country Ten Times More Beautiful Stuart Hill The Situation is Still as it Was Dave Cope The Party is Dead - Long Live the Party! Andy Croft The Democratisation of Everything

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Book SynopsisAntonio Gramsci was an innovative and wide-ranging thinker whose interpretations of Marxism helped rescue it from determinism and economic reductionism. In the words of Stuart Hall: 'Reading Gramsci has fertilised our political imagination, transformed our way of thinking, our style of thought, our whole political project'. Gramsci's creative use of terms such as hegemony, civil society and historic block adds a new dimension to political vocabulary. But the fragmentary nature of his writings, especially in the Prison Notebooks, means that it is not always easy to grasp the full significance of his ideas. This book, completely revised in 1991 and further revised in 2015, provides an account of Gramsci's work which makes his writing accessible and comprehensible for the contemporary reader.Trade Review'A political book in the best sense - explains the most important ideas from Gramsci's works in simple, straightforward language, considering their relevance for a left strategy in Britain' Anne Showstack Sassoon 'A clear, coherent account of Gramsci's main writings' Times Literary Supplement 'A rigorous and polemical lifeline - distils from Gramsci's huge output the essence of his theoretical contribution' Marxism TodayTable of ContentsContents 1. Gramsci's Concept of Hegemony 2. The Relations of Forces 3. The Maintenance of Hegemony 4. National-popular 5. Passive Revolution 6. Three Organic Crises in Britain 7. Ideology 8. Civil Society, the State and the Nature of Power 9. The Factory Councils' Movement 10. Extending the Sphere of Politics 11. The Intellectuals 12. The Revolutionary Party

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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