First published in 1937, What is Ahead of Us? is a collection of essays, which were originally presented as lectures before the Fabian Society. Conceived in an era of growing fascism and economic despair, the essays urge the reader to imagine more equitable alternatives to capitalism. The authors offer socialism as a solution but what is more interesting is their criticism of capitalism and the connections they draw between capitalism and fascism using examples from the West. This...

Vladimir Lenin created this hugely significant Marxist text to explain fully the inevitable flaws and destructive power of Capitalism: that it would lead unavoidably to imperialism, monopolies and colonialism. He prophesied that those third world countries used merely as capitalist labour would have no choice but to join the Communist revolution in Russia.GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each ot...

A classic work in political philosophy, intellectual history and economics, The Road to Serfdom has inspired and infuriated politicians and scholars for half a century. Originally published in 1944, it was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would lead not to a utopia but to the horrors of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy....

Featuring an extensive, provocative introduction by historian Martin Malia, this authorized English translation of The Communist Manifesto, edited and annotated by Engels, with prefaces to editions published between 1872 and 1888, provides a new opportunity to examine the document that shook the world.In 1848, two young men published what would become one of the defining documents of modern history, The Communist Manifesto. It rapidly realigned po...

This Very Short Introduction provides an analytical narrative of the main events and developments in Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1936. It examines the impact of the revolution on society as a whole--on different classes, ethnic groups, the army, men and women, youth. Its central concern is to understand how one structure of domination was replaced by another. The book registers the primacy of politics, but situates political developments firmly in the context of massive economic, social...

James Burnham’s 1964 classic, Suicide of the West, remains a startling account on the nature of the modern era. It offers a profound, in depth analysis of what is happening in the world today by putting into focus the intangible, often vague doctrine of American liberalism. It parallels the loosely defined liberal ideology rampant in American government and institutions, with the flow, ebb, growth, climax and the eventual decline and death of both ancient and modern civilizations....

Liberty is not, as the German precursors of Nazism asserted, a negative ideal. Whether a concept is presented in an affirmative or in a negative form is merely a question of idiom. Freedom from want is tantamount to the expression striving after a state of affairs under which people are better supplied with necessities. Freedom of speech is tantamount to a state of affairs under which everybody can say what he wants to say. At the bottom of all totalitarian doctrines lies the belief that t...

A compelling history of liberalism from the nineteenth century to todayDespite playing a decisive role in shaping the past two hundred years of American and European politics, liberalism is no longer the dominant force it once was. In this expanded and updated edition of what has become a classic history of liberalism, Edmund Fawcett traces its ideals, successes, and failures through the lives and ideas of exemplary thinkers and politicians from the early nineteent...

Rudolf Rocker’s classic survey of anarcho-syndicalism was written during the Spanish Civil War to explain to the wider reading public the ideology which inspired the social revolution in Spain. It remains unsurpassed as a general introduction to anarchist thought and an authoritative account of the early history of international anarchism by one of the movement’s leading figures.The present edition is unique in giving a complete facsimile reproduction of the 1938 edition as well as...

Originally published in 1916, it was one of the first attempts to account for the increasing importance of the world market in the twentieth century. The essay is a synthesis of Lenin’s modifications and developments of economic theories that Karl Marx formulated in ‘Das Kapital’. This remarkable Marxist text explains fully the inescapable flaws and destructive power of Capitalism.Lenin offers a predictive scenario of a world shaken by competitive instability, warfare and crisis, dominated...

The book has an active table of contents for readers to access each chapter directly. In the spring of 1916, Lenin wrote Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) in Zürich. This thesis pointed out that the merging of banks and industrial cartels gave rise to finance capital, the basis of imperialism and the zenith of capitalism. In pursuing greater profits than the home market can offer, business exports capital, which, in turn, leads to the division of the wor...

Lenin wrote "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism" in the spring of 1916, though it was not published until the summer of 1917. The timing was fortuitous for what had been a minority view of interest to few when he wrote it had come to be a powerful message with resonance with many by the time it was published. So, although one of Lenin's shorter works, it is widely recognised as being one of his most immediately influential.The work marked a new turn in Lenin's ideology an...