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Fifty-five years ago a young historian published American Negro Slave Revolts, a book that initially met fierce resistance from established historians but came to change the way African American history is understood and to have a wide impact on the writing of history in general. Herbert Aptheker went on to edit the massive 7-volume Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States. A close friend and colleague of W. E. B. Du Bois, Aptheker for years served as custodian of the Du Bois papers, arranged for their deposit at the Unversity of Massachusetts, and meticulously edited for publication a multivolume set of the Du Bois writings and a three-volume collection of his correspondence.
Contents: Analyses of African American historiography and Aptheker's role. Essays by 18 scholars, including Sterling Stuckey (U. Calif., Riverside): "Taken together, American Negro Slave Revolts and Documentary History constitute a contribution to history from the bottom up that is second to none"; Manning Marable (Columbia U.): "For an entire generation of young African-Americans, our entry into learning about our own people's experience in this country was Herbert's Documentary History." Discussion by Eric Foner, Jesse Lemisch, and Manning Marable on Aptheker's historical scholarship. Plus stories of personal and career influence. Staughton Lynd on Yale historians' attempt to block an Aptheker seminar on Du Bois. Essays with the "radical eye" of the Aptheker tradition: Barbara Bush on Anglo-Saxon representations of Afro-Cubans; Gerald Horne on gangsters and capitalism; Gary Okihiro on colonialism; others on Truman and the start of the Cold War, and on "political correctness" today.
These essays examine anti-Communism in the United States during the Red Scare of 1919-20, through World War II, and into the present and demonstrate the effects anti-Communism has on areas as disparate as sociological research, public-school education, and the media treatment of Korean Air Lines flight 007. The book also documents the use of anti-Communism as a weapon to discredit the civil rights movement.
What is the origin of mathematics? Where did symbols and terms used by Bronze Age scribes come from? Gerdes finds the answer in human work-the activity of making tools, objects, and utensils-and the subsequent dynamic evolution to abstract concepts. He traces geometrical thinking in early history and also finds it in indigenous peoples-social activities that have survived colonization.
In his foreword, Dirk Struik sees Gerdes's work as having wide application in improving school instruction in mathematics.
The most comprehensive Marxist study of the intellectual currents that have arisen out of the social and economic crisis of capitalist society?written by one of Europe's leading Marxist philosophers. In this much translated work, Gedo skillfully analyzes the historical sources and modern schools of the leading life philosophers. Discussed in detail are Kierkegaard, Husserl, Dewey, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, Toynbee, Spengler, Gadamer, and others. Also examined are the sociotechnological theories characteristic of industrial capitalist society, including the views of Weber, Wilson, Keynes, Galbraith, Mannheim, Parsons, Aron, Popper, Lipset, Kahn, Wiener, Hayek, Bell, and Toffler. Though published in 1982, this book is as timely as ever.
The author studies the methodical destruction of the Navajo domestic economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when combined military force and federal Indian-bureau policies ensured dominance over the Navajo economy by non-Navajo merchant and industrial capital. He shows how merchant capital was used to drain off to an external capitalist economy the surplus produced by Navajo artisans and shepherds so that this surplus product would not be available for Navajo investment. Weiss traces the transformation of the Navajos into wage laborers for largely non-Navajo employers.
The evolutionary development of physical, biological, and social systems is increasingly the subject of intense research. Dialectical methods are particularly suited to dealing with conceptual and theoretical problems arising from such research. This work contains a comprehensive survey of debates among Marxists about the theory of dialectical contradictions and an application of this theory to the analysis of contradictions in physics, in law, and in socialist society. A unique collection of essays by philosophers from the U.S., Canada, the Soviet Union, and the German Democratic Republic.
Mitchell Franklin (1902-1986) is described by the Buffalo Law Review as the foremost Marxist legal philosopher in the English-speaking world. In these selected writings, Franklin, a professor of law at Tulane University for 37 years, discusses how the development of natural law from an idealist to a materialist concept in the transition from feudalism to capitalism is reflected in the drafting of the U.S. Constitution and its interpretation today.
Schneiderman was brought to the U.S. from Russia as a baby, lived in the slums of Chicago and Los Angeles, joined the communist movement at 16, worked as a Communist Party organizer, and finally was state Party chair in California.
Twice he stood trial for his beliefs. In 1939 the Justice Department tried to have his citizenship revoked, and a federal court ruling against him made him subject to deportation. Wendell Willkie, the Republican Party presidential candidate in 1940, won his appeal in the Supreme Court, a decision that benefited seven million naturalized citizens. In 1952 Schneiderman was a key defendant in the Los Angeles Smith Act trial. The eventual victory on appeal to the Supreme Court vindicated the California Communist leaders and checked the persecutors of the militant Left in the U.S.
"This book is a valuable document covering the defense of the working class, their unions, and their allies," writes Harry Bridges, the late veteran leader of the West Coast longshoremen in his Foreword. And Pele De Lappe says in a People's World review, "Schneiderman's political life-and his way of telling about it-make a fascinating read."
Translation of a new analysis of revolutionary Marxism by an influential German theorist. Professor Holz examines, in particular, the rise and fall of socialism in Eastern Europe and the USSR. He outlines a theoretical basis for continuing the tradition of revolutionary Marxism in developed capitalist countries.
Hans Heinz Holz, a German journalist turned philosopher (Ph.D. University of Leipzig 1969) is coeditor with Domenico Losurdo of the European philosophy journal Topos and is author of several books on philosophy and art. Arguing for the validity of Marxism-Leninism, and emphasizing what he sees as its many achievements, Holz is sharply critical of the shortcomings of its practitioners in the past, culminating in their failure to extend their theoretical understanding of capitalist and socialist society in the light of a changing social reality.
In this latest of three volumes depicting the Central American peoples' struggle for self-determination, Marc Zimmerman weaves revolutionary poetry, testimonial chronology, and analysis in a rich portrayal of a nation; this book is both poetry anthology and prose history. Probing the causes of repression, insurrection, and U.S. intervention, this book presents the endurance and aspirations of the Salvadoran people as they attempt to transform their world.
E. San Juan, called by Fredric Jameson "a scholar of remarkable range and varied talents," has been praised by Manning Marable for his "challenging perspective" on racial issues and by Alan Wald and Paul Buhle for a rare sense of personal commitment. He has written often on the "Third World" as a "permanent political-cultural agency of global transformation." including Writing and National Liberation: Essays on Critical Practice (Univ. of Hawaii Press) and Racial Formations/Critical Transformation: Articulations of Power in Ethnic and Racial Studies in the United States (Humanities Press). His works appear in Chinese, French, German, Russian, Spanish, and other languages. He holds graduate degrees from the University of the Philippines and Harvard University.
Nugugi's Petals of Blood: The African Novel as a Weapon of Decolonization
Palestine, Incarnation of Our Desire: Texts from Fawaz Turki
Toward an Aesthetics of National Liberation: On Sergio Ramirez and Roque Dalton
Beyond Postcolonial Theorizing: The National-Popular in Philippine Writing
The Third World Artist in the Postmodern Age . . . . and seven other essays.
In a time when sociological analyses of class have emphasized subjectivist approaches under the guise of cultural analysis, this book seeks to return the orthodox Marxist understanding of class to the forefront of class analysis. The book is centered on the influential work of Georg Lukacs and his concept of imputed class consciousness..
Lanning takes the view that this Marxist concept remains viable because of its capacity to mediate the relation between individuals and political movements intent on working-class organizing. The author critiques contemporary studies of class as well as aspects of work by E. P. Thompson, Meszaros, and others. Central to this analysis is a theoretical discussion of the potential and significance of the individual in the conscious struggle for socialism.
Robert Lanning teaches sociology at Mount Saint Vincent University and Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of The National Album: Collective Biography and the Formation of the Canadian Middle Class (Carleton University Press, 1996).
Essays by scholars, writers, teachers, and librarians from the United States, Canada, England, Cuba, and the USSR view children's literature against the social order from which it arises, exploring the ways it expresses or challenges dominant social, economic, political, and moral values. Topics include folk and fairy tales, the Huckleberry Finn controversy, reading Donald Duck, political economy for eight-year-olds, and children's literature under socialism.
Choice calls this book "a useful introduction to the ways in which capitalist societies transmit racial and class bias through children's books."
Cuban, Grenadian, Puerto Rican, and U.S. scholars examine the struggle for independence and social transformation in Central America and the Caribbean and the reflection of this struggle in economic theory, literature, and philosophy. The Cuban contributions focus on the consolidation of the Cuban Revolution and the continuing expansion of its democratic content. Dessima Williams, ambassador from Grenada to the United Nations and the Organization of American States, 1979-83, analyzes the significance of the Grenadian Revolution as a movement for democratic self-determination.
An understanding of the issues considered in this volume can help point the way, as historian Herbert Aptheker says in his introduction, to transforming our hemisphere into "a shining light and a zone of prosperity, equality, and peace."
Anthropologists from India, the United States, the German Democratic Republic, and the Soviet Union apply Marxist methods of analysis to a number of fundamental topics in anthropology. Topics include Marxist perspectives on terminology, dialectical-and historical-materialist traditions in anthropology, theories of state formation, and ethnographic studies.
"U.S. anthropologists with an interest in Marxist anthropology have often felt that they had to reinvent it on their own, being cut off from the history of Marxist thought. International Perspectives on Marxist Anthropology should go a long way toward re-establishing links between Marxist scholars around the world and help lay the basis for a truly international Marxist anthropology."
-David Hakken, SUNY College of Technology, Past Chairperson, Council for Marxist Anthropology
The story of the continuing Irish freedom struggle is incomplete without a reassessment of the role of James Connolly. Connolly was prominent in the Irish, British, and U.S. labor movements, a Marxist socialist, and a militant Irish patriot. Executed by the British as a leader of the Easter Rising in 1916, he was also one of the first theoreticians of the labor movement to come from the working class.
Connolly's dramatic career corresponded roughly to the life span of the Second International (1889-1914). His dedication to Irish socialist politics began with the founding of the Irish Socialist Republican Party in 1896. He was the first to link the fight for socialism in Ireland to the struggle for national liberation. In the United States from 1903 to 1910, Connolly learned strike strategy working as an IWW organizer and contended with Daniel De Leon over socialist priorities.
On his return to Ireland, the evolution of his thought placed him in the left wing of the Second International during World War I and led to his participation in the Easter Rising. Connolly wrote primarily on immediate issues, but dimensions of his thought survive. In addition to Irish independence and revolutionary theory, political problems relating to religion and to the emancipation of women were of serious concern to Connolly. Above all, Connolly's intellectual legacy makes an outstanding contribution to a socialist understanding of the national question.
This book traces briefly the history of calculus and describes Marx's efforts to clarify its logical structure. While living in London, Marx was attracted to this problem but was hampered by the antitheoretical tendencies that prevailed in British mathematics at the time. He was therefore unfamiliar with the successful solution of the problem on the continent. His own solution, nevertheless, is a rich example of the power of conscious application of dialectical methods in research.
The author concludes the book with his experiences in using Marx's approach to teach mathematics. He includes a number of hypothetical student-teacher dialogues.
The book is accessible to anyone with a knowledge of algebra, although familiarity with calculus would facilitate the reading. It is of interest to students beginning a study of calculus or to the lay reader wishing to learn its basic principles.
Militarism and Organized Labor focuses on the period in which finance capital began to determine the course of U.S. military intervention in the western hemisphere. Foner describes the reaction within the labor and socialist movements to the new imperialism. The emerging conflict between anti-imperialism and opportunism within the labor movement weakened the struggle against use of the National Guard as a strike-breaking force.
The book also includes extensive excerpts from George Kirkpatricks War?What For? Despite its popularity during 1910-1914, War-What For? has long been difficult to obtain.
A clear, accessible account of the shaping of the human personality. Presents the concepts of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Vygotsky as tools for the critical examination of mainstream schools of psychology (Skinnerian, humanist, and cognitive) in an eminently useful form for teaching, as well as for theoretical work. This book makes a needed contribution to the science of human behavior.
Depicting everyday life in the revolution, this book is shaped by a respect for the deeper structures of national, regional, and international development, as well as for the way in which Sandinista culture and ideology have evolved in the context of ruthless U.S. intervention. The book explores every major theme of the revolution in detail while showing how culture production is integral to economic, social, and political transformation; it may well be the richest and most dramatic presentation of the Sandinista struggle yet to appear.
Poetry and revolution are explored in this brilliant bilingual collage of poems. The great poets of Nicaragua and all Latin America, such as Neruda, Cardenal, Rugama, and Belli, express the dialectics of verse and struggle as they portray the Nicaraguans' long campaign against the Samoza regime and U.S. domination, from the days of Sandino to the successful revolution of 1979. Includes historical notes on the poets, and commentary.
Nicaragua is a nation of poets; all the more natural that this book, telling a history of struggle through the voices of its poets, should exist. It is an important and exciting contribution!
-Margaret Randall, poet and essayist
About the Epic/Collage Genre: The book above and the two described below employ variants of a new epic/collage genre in which verse, slogan, speech, graffiti, and song are woven with chronology and analysis to create a vivid, multilayered portrait.
This way of realizing books is magnificent. . . .Such books are necessary to penetrate the mentality of people today. . . .that is, books where all the literary genres mix to produce something new.
-José Roberto Cea, Salvadoran poet
The clustering of poems around certain events like Sandino's murder or the Managua earthquake makes it possible to see the variety of temperament and response that makes the history of a people, and that is ultimately necessary to sustain a political movement.
-Charles Sugnet, University of Minnesota
Organizing the anthology in this way allows for the creation of something like a collective national poetic voice.
-John Beverley, University of Pittsburgh
In 1930 Alabama, the Great Depression was pushing both sharecroppers and urban workers from poverty into starvation. Jim Crow segregation and lynch law perpetuated semifeudal conditions; Black civil and political rights were nonexistent. Into this nightmare came 24-year-old James S. Allen and his wife Isabelle as organizers. Combining stealth and bravado, they started the weekly Southern Worker, published in secrecy but widely circulated as an open publication of the Communist Party.
Their aim was "subversive," to change the social order, to uproot its remnants of slavery, and to humanize relations between Blacks and whites with socialism as a future goal. The Southern Worker became the organizing tool to shatter taboos with nonsegregated trade-union and civil rights meetings, to form the first racially integrated unions of sharecroppers, and to rescue victims of Southern courts.
The Allens were eyewitness to the brutality, murder, and arson endured and resisted by African Americans in the Deep South. Covering the Scottsboro case as a reporter, James Allen learned details (included here) unrecorded in standard histories.
This political memoir records the heavy toll paid, in arrests, beatings, and lynchings, by Black and white Communists and their allies in struggle. James and Isabelle Allen's front-line soldiering suggests reconsideration of the starting date conventionally assigned to the Civil Rights movement.
As liason between the CPUSA and the Philippine Communists before World War II, Allen helped bring about the merger of the Socialist and Communist parties, a unity that later contributed to the strength of the left-led Hukbalahap, the most effective guerrilla movement against the Japanese. Includes an introduction by William Pomeroy.
This work is the first available in English that examines philosophical problems in classical and modern physics from the dialectical-materialist viewpoint. A team of five outstanding philosophers of natural science in the German Democratic Republic examine such questions as the nature of physical concepts, physical properties and quantities, elementary particles, and the fundamental interactions. This revised English-language edition is suitable for natural scientists having little previous contact with philosophy.
A distinguished philosopher and experienced teacher presents an accessible yet not simplistic account of basic Marxist philosophy. Reprint of the popular 1967 edition. "The best introduction to Marxist philosophy available," says James Lawler, SUNY/Buffalo, and Bertell Ollman, from NYU, calls it "a clear, outstanding job of presenting Marxism to young inquiring minds."
The author covers the influence of William James on John Dewey, demonstrates the pseudoscientific basis of the concept of intelligence, and relates mass compulsory education to the development of the forces of production. Gonzalez studies the harm Dewey's thought and the rise of intelligence testing have done to the Chicano community in Los Angeles. Progressive Education: A Marxist Interpretation was selected by the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) Critics Panel as one of the outstanding books in educational studies of 1985.
Marxist scholars in several disciplines examine topics such as ethnicity and urban stratification, anthropology and the demystification of racism, the labor movement and racism in the South, the role of Blacks in the struggle for educational opportunities in Cincinnati, and the fallacies of the multicultural educational movement.
The book makes important, correct points about the emergence, history, practice, and exploitation of racism. It also points out the tendency . . . to substitute the term "ethnicity" for "race" as a way of avoiding confronting societal and personal realism...
-Choice
Racism and the Denial of Human Rights was selected by the Critics Panel of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA) as among the outstanding books in educational studies of 1985.
These essays by Herbert Aptheker address such topics as the abolitionist movement, racism and the writing of history, sterilization and imperialist, and the life of W. E. B. Du Bois. They provide an approach to the problems of contemporary U.S. society that will be valued by teachers, activists, researchers-anyone who struggles against racism.
This stimulating collection of essays provides an excellent introduction to a brilliant intellectual who has devoted his life's work to the cause of antiracism and human liberation. The volume presents an incisive contribution to social theory and Marxist historiography.
-Manning Marable, author of Black American Politics and W. E. B. Du Bois
This book calls into question commonly held assumptions about the U.S. Communist Party by examining its work in Michigan in the decades immediately after World War II. As Cold War ideologies hardened, 1945-1960 was a difficult period in the history of the Left, and Edward C. Pintzuk demonstrates that this history has continued to be misunderstood. He delves into unpublished papers in library archives and private collections, examines FBI files, analyzes court decisions, interviews participants. He weighs the charge of Soviet domination. His specific concerns are the concrete details of what Michigan Communists did-their goals and methods, as well as what they actually accomplished-during those years.
Working through the Civil Rights Congress, the Michigan District of the CPUSA organized the defense of victims of racial injustice, perhaps the most searing case being that of Lemas Woods, an African American soldier convicted of murder on flimsy evidence. Government efforts to deport almost 60 Michiganders for political reasons were another focus of activity. Michigan Communists also joined such significant national campaigns as that against the House Un-American Activities Committee.
The Party made political misjudgments that damaged its own effectiveness, caused in part by unrelentingly hostile media and government persecution. Pintzuk argues that nonetheless Communist activities during the Cold War were able to challenge racial bigotry and oppression, strengthen Bill of Rights protections, and raise left and liberal political consciousness.
A provocative work connecting the history of art and human consciousness with changes in the social and material organization of production.
Leonard Goldstein is a U.S. scholar who taught for twenty-five years in the German Democratic Republic. His publications include a book on George Chapman and many articles on literary theory and English literature from medieval to contemporary.
From the author's Conclusions:
Linear perspective is part of a new way of thinking in the Italian Renaissance. It is a way of thinking that is the necessary consequence of emerging new production relations. . . . It made the new relations work better by changing the mentalities of those who saw such pictures and absorbed their meaning. To the extent that this art did affect the thinking of those who observed it, to that extent it accelerated the social process which was creating it.
"Goldstein extrapolates from Marxist theories of social change and of the relationship between that change and scientific change to a theory of the relationship between social change and artistic change. Herein lies the originality of the study. . . . I find this strategy extremely productive across a wide range of political and intellectual issues."
-Professor Walter Cohen, Comparative Literature, Cornell University
Harry Targ, Professor of Political Science, Purdue University, tells the stoy of U.S. foreign policy since World War II as backgroud for an analysis of foreign policy in the Carter and Reagan administrations. The text documents the use of foreign policy to open doors for capitalist penetration and to oppose socialist states and movements for social change in the industrialized and third world. Particular attention is given to the uses to which U.S. foreign policy was put directly after the war to crush trade-union militancy in the CIO.
These essays address topics such as media coverage of the 1977-78 coal miners' strike, the utilization of technology and science in agrobusiness, layoffs and union-busting in Appalachian coal fields, and a debate on the theoretical categories of unproductive and productive labor in Marxist thought.
Education in the U.S., both as an institution and as practiced, is the subject of papers in this collection. Topics include the political economyof education, racism and sexism in the curriculum, the struggle for integration, and anti-Communism and academic freedom. Jonathan Kozol calls this book "a crisp, courageous, and impressive work. We must be grateful for a book that offers students and their teachers a concrete and practical knowledge of the issues Americans must face whatever their political position or their ideological direction."
Impact of the crisis of capitalism in U.S. life. Philip Foner analyzes the transformation of the role of Black workers in the labor movement Womack Zimmerman, Coatsworth, and Barahoma discuss Mexican immigration. Crain, Bartlett, and Sipe debate dialectical-materialist vs. critical-theory approaches to mental illness in capitalist society. Other topics include social welfare, the struggle against racism in education, bilingual education, the neutron bomb, bourgeois futurology.
Philip S. Foner, a distinguished and prolific historian, tells the story of the first Marxist political organization in North America, the Workingmen's Party of the United States. Founded in Philadelphia in July 1876, it contributed greatly to the modem U.S. labor movement, influenced the Great Labor Uprising of 1877, the first nationwide strike in U.S. history, and nominated the first Black socialist candidate for public office.
The views and opinions expressed here are strictly those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy, or position of the publishers.
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