Written two years after the commencement of the Second World War, the chapters in this book succinctly put forward the case for reorganizing the foundations of the social order, by rejecting capitalism and historical equilibrium, both in Europe and further afield in the British Empire, in favour of building a Socialist civilization.

Through the double clamour of Big Ben and the shrill sound of the bell rang a revolver shot. A financier is found shot in the House of Commons. Suspecting foul play, Robert West, a parliamentary private secretary, takes on the role of amateur sleuth. Used to turning a blind eye to covert dealings, West must now uncover the shocking secret behind the man's demise, amid distractions from the press and the dead man's enigmatic daughter. Originally published in 1932, this was the only mystery ...

Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968 by Heda Margolius Kovály (68,000 words and 8 photographs)"A story of the human spirit as its most indomitable... one of the outstanding autobiographies of the century." San Francisco Chronicle"Once in a rare while we read a book that puts the urgencies of our time and ourselves in perspective, making us confront the darker realities of human nature... Mrs. Kovaly experienced the ...

In Trouble in Paradise, Slavoj Žižek, one of our most famous, most combative philosophers, explains how by drawing on the ideas of communism, we can find a way out of the crisis of capitalism.There is obviously trouble in the global capitalist paradise. But why do we find it so difficult to imagine a way out of the crisis we're in? It is as if the trouble feeds on itself: the march of capitalism has become inexorable, the only game in town.Setting out to diagnose t...

"A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism." So begins one of history's most important documents, a work of such magnitude that it has forever changed not only the scope of world politics, but indeed the course of human civilization. The Communist Manifesto was written in Friedrich Engels's clear, striking prose and declared the earth-shaking ideas of Karl Marx. Upon publication in 1848, it quickly became the credo of the poor and oppressed who longed for a society "in which ...

Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) was a Russian revolutionary and theorist, and has often been called the father of anarchist theory. Bakunin studied philosophy, finding himself drawn to works by Fichte and Hegel, eventually converting himself entirely to Hegelianism. Bakunin gained criminal status after being deported from France where he met George Sand, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Karl Marx and later being arrested for his involvement in the Czech rebellion of 1848. His unfinished 1871 work, "...

Leon Trotsky, born Lev Davidovich Bronshtein, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and theorist, Soviet politician, and the founder and first leader of the Red Army. After leading a failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing role of bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, Trotsky was successively removed from power, expelled from the Communist Party, deported from the Soviet Union and assassinated on Stalin's orders. An ear...

These days, it is easy to be cynical about democracy. Even though there are more democratic societies now (119 and counting) than ever before, skeptics can point to low turnouts in national elections, the degree to which money corrupts the process, and the difficulties of mass participation in complex systems as just a few reasons why the system is flawed. The Occupy movement in 2011 proved that there is an emphatic dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs, particularly with the e...

The anarchist desire to abolish the State at one blow, and to abolish money, etc., in much the same way, springs from their inability to understand the institutions of capitalist society. To many of them the State is simply the result of people having faith in authority. Give up this belief and the State will cease to exist. It is a myth like God and rests entirely on faith. The anarchist's desire for the abolition of the State arises from entirely different concepts to that of the communi...

Crowds and Party channels the energies of the riotous crowds who took to the streets in the past five years into an argument for the political party. Rejecting the emphasis on individuals and multitudes, Jodi Dean argues that we need to rethink the collective subject of politics. When crowds appear in spaces unauthorized by capital and the state-such as in the Occupy movement in New York, London and across the world-they create a gap of possibility. But too many on the Left remain...

It has seemed to me that there should be a history of the development, the revolt, and the tragedy of Anarchy in Chicago. This history I have written as impartially and as fairly as I knew how to write it. I have kept steadily before my eyes the motto,— "Nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice." It will be found in the succeeding pages that neither animosity against the revolutionists, nor partiality to the State, has influenced the work. I have dealt with this episode in Chicago's...

The global impact of Asian production of the wage goods consumed in North America and Europe is only now being recognized, and is far from being understood. Asian women, most only recently urbanized and in the waged work force, are at the center of a process of intensive labor for minimal wages that has upended the entire global economy. First published in 1997, this prescient study is the best available summary of this crucial process as it took hold at the very end of the twentieth centu...