The British Socialist Workers Party once commanded real industrial power. In 1972, SWP members coordinated flying pickets during the miners' strike and ran workplace papers across engineering, education, and the docks. Over 300,000 shop stewards operated with genuine autonomy from the union bureaucracy, and the IS tradition provided the political glue binding militant sections together. They didn't just theorize rank-and-file organization; they built it.Then came Tony Cliff's "down...

In 1973 the British International Marxist Group issued a forty-pence pamphlet that tried to do something unusually ambitious: not to retell the story of permanent revolution, but to prove it — to derive Trotsky's theory from Marx's own economics of the world market.The result is one of the boldest short statements the Trotskyist tradition produced. Across five tightly argued sections, "John Robens" grounds permanent revolution in the law of uneven and combined dev...

When mass demonstrations erupted across Iran in December 2025, they represented the most profound challenge to the Islamic Republic since the revolutionary upheaval of 1979. This was no "economic riot" staged by foreign actors. It was a revolt against dictatorship in all its forms: a manifestation of the law of uneven and combined development, wherein the most advanced contradictions of global financial capital collide with the archaic, theocratic structures of a semi-colonial state.

The January 2026 U.S. military extraction of Nicolás Maduro forced every tendency on the international left to show its cards. No more theoretical abstraction, no more equivocation about "objective conditions." The Venezuelan crisis divided the global left into three irreconcilable camps, and this ebook maps exactly where each organization stood when it mattered most.Category A organizations—the Fourth International, International Socialist Tendency, Liga Internacional de los...

Written in July 1955, Livio Maitan's 'Relations Between the Communist Vanguard and the Mass Movement' addresses the central problem of Marxist politics: how does a revolutionary organisation relate to the class it seeks to lead?Maitan was thirty-three years old and working under conditions of deep entry into the Italian Communist Party when he wrote this document for the Fourth International's internal discussion. The result is one of the clearest systematic treatments of the vangu...

This essay collection presents a compelling and insightful analysis of the Palestinian freedom movement from a socialist perspective.In Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, contributors examine a number of key aspects in the Palestinian struggle for liberation. These essays contextualize the situation in today's polarized world and offer a socialist perspective on how full liberation can be won.Through an internationalist, anti-imperialist lens, this book exp...

The revolutionary wave that swept the Middle East in 2011 was marked by spectacular mobilization, spreading within and between countries with extraordinary speed. Several years on, however, it has caused limited shifts in structures of power, leaving much of the old political and social order intact. In this book, noted author Asef Bayat—whose Life as Politics anticipated the Arab Spring—uncovers why this occurred, and what made these uprisings so distinct from those that came bef...

‘In these hard times for liberty, On Freedom makes the case that freedom, once explored and understood, is the way forward’ PRESIDENT ZELENSKY'Visionary ... Buy or borrow this book, read it, take it to heart' OBSERVERA brilliant exploration of freedom – what it is, how it’s been misunderstood, and why it’s our only chance for survival from the acclaimed, bestselling author of On TyrannyToo...

This comprehensive history lays out the essential background for understanding Palestine and its place in the struggle for socialism. Unlike many accounts that focus simply on Israel's on-going human rights atrocities, Joseph Daher situates Palestine in the context of more than a century of imperialist intervention in the Middle East. An important contribution that not only makes sense of the current moment, but also helps us think about future paths to liberation.Adam Hani...

Philosophy for busy people. Read a succinct account of the philosophy of Karl Marx in just one hour.Karl Marx's philosophical critique of capitalism and his solution of communism directly led to the formation of the communist state in the Soviet Union. Whilst this great venture has now all but completely failed, Marx’s philosophy has proved to be arguably the most influential of the twentieth century; the influence of Marxism can be seen in subjects as diverse as the infamous polic...

How can one European capital be responsible for most of the West’s intellectual and cultural achievements in the twentieth century?Viennese ideas saturate the modern world. From California architecture to Hollywood Westerns, modern advertising to shopping malls, orgasms to gender confirmation surgery, nuclear fission to fitted kitchens—every aspect of our history, science, and culture is in some way shaped by Vienna.The city of Freud, Wittgenstein, Mahler, ...

Why is the Middle East a crisis factory, and how can it be fixed? What does the future look like for its 500 million people? And what role should the West play? Iyad El-Baghdadi and Ahmed Gatnash tell the story of the modern Middle East as a series of broken promises. They chart the entrenchment of tyranny, terrorism and foreign intervention, showing how these systems of oppression simultaneously feed off and battle each other. Exploring demographic, economic and social trends, the authors...