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When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921 explores one of the most tumultuous times in United States history. Self-organized workers recomposed their power by devising new strategies and tactics to disrupt the capitalist economy and extract concessions. Mine, railroad, steel, and iron workers pursued a strategy of tension that sometimes erupted into militant class conflict and general strikes in which workers took over and ran a number of cities. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, When Workers Shot Back argues that the escalation of working-class conflict drives rather than reacts to the consolidation and reorganisation of capital and economic and political reform of the state. Studying the class composition of this period illustrates why workers escalated the intensity of their tactics, even using tactical violence, to extract concessions and reforms when all other efforts to do so were blocked, co-opted or repressed.

New feminist essays for the #MeToo era from the international best-selling author of Men Explain Things to Me.
Who gets to shape the narrative of our times? The current moment is a battle royale over that foundational power, one in which women, people of color, non-straight people are telling other versions, and white people and men and particularly white men are trying to hang onto the old versions and their own centrality. In Whose Story Is This? Rebecca Solnit appraises what's emerging and why it matters and what the obstacles are.

New feminist essays for the #MeToo era from the international best-selling author of Men Explain Things to Me.
Who gets to shape the narrative of our times? The current moment is a battle royale over that foundational power, one in which women, people of color, non-straight people are telling other versions, and white people and men and particularly white men are trying to hang onto the old versions and their own centrality. In Whose Story Is This? Rebecca Solnit appraises what's emerging and why it matters and what the obstacles are.

Danny Katch is an activist and humorist often accused of not knowing the difference. He writes a regular column for SocialistWorker.org and his articles have appeared in Truthout, ZNet, and the New York Daily News. He is the author of Socialism . . . Seriously: A Brief Guide to Human Liberation and America’s Got Democracy! The Making of the World’s Longest Running Reality Show.

A first-hand account of the death penalty's wholly destructive nature. 
In Witness, Lyle C. May offers a scathing critique of shifts in sentencing laws, prison policies that ensure recidivism, and classic "tough on crime" views that don't make society safer or prevent crime. These insightful and analytical essays explore capital punishment, life imprisonment, prison education, prison journalism, as well as what activism from inside looks like on the road toward abolishing the carceral state. 
No outside journalist can adequately report what happens inside death row or what it is like to live through thirty-three executions of people you know. May's grounded writings in Witness challenge the myths, misconceptions, and misinformation about the criminal legal system and death in prison, guiding readers on a journey through North Carolina's congregate death row, where the author has spent over twenty years of his life. 
With a foreword by activist, lawyer, and professor Danielle Purifoy, and drawing on the work of Angela Y. Davis, Mariame Kaba, and other abolitionist scholars, Witness shows there is more to life under the sentence of death than what is portrayed in crime dramas or mass media. Lyle C. May's life, journalism, and activism are a guidebook to abolitionism in practice.

A first-hand account of the death penalty's wholly destructive nature. 
In Witness, Lyle C. May offers a scathing critique of shifts in sentencing laws, prison policies that ensure recidivism, and classic "tough on crime" views that don't make society safer or prevent crime. These insightful and analytical essays explore capital punishment, life imprisonment, prison education, prison journalism, as well as what activism from inside looks like on the road toward abolishing the carceral state. 
No outside journalist can adequately report what happens inside death row or what it is like to live through thirty-three executions of people you know. May's grounded writings in Witness challenge the myths, misconceptions, and misinformation about the criminal legal system and death in prison, guiding readers on a journey through North Carolina's congregate death row, where the author has spent over twenty years of his life. 
With a foreword by activist, lawyer, and professor Danielle Purifoy, and drawing on the work of Angela Y. Davis, Mariame Kaba, and other abolitionist scholars, Witness shows there is more to life under the sentence of death than what is portrayed in crime dramas or mass media. Lyle C. May's life, journalism, and activism are a guidebook to abolitionism in practice.

Woman: History and Critique of a Polemical Concept follows the changes in the concept of ‘woman’ from the Early modern to the post-colonial age, using the words of women who challenged its patriarchal definition to understand its transformations.
Rudan convincingly argues that the concept of ‘woman’ is doubly polemical. It affirms sexual difference as political difference, while denying the universal character of modern political concepts that emphasize the unity of the political and social order by exposing its fundamental division. At the same time, ‘woman’ is a concept marked by differences—of race, class, culture—that continually redetermine its content. To trace the history of the concept of ‘woman’ is thus to affirm a different perspective on history itself, a partial perspective that lays the groundwork for the feminist critique of the present.

This reprint of a groundbreaking history that traces American women’s struggle for freedom, equality and unity in the labor movement follows the triumphs and set backs of this fight from the early Colonial labor associations to the late twentieth century.

Women and the American Labor Movement gives voice to the women who had to battle on the shop floor and in the union movement for dignity and respect and who through courage and tenacity won significant victories in struggle for equal rights.

Steve Shone 's Women of Liberty explores the many overlaps between ten radical, feminist, and anarchist thinkers: Tennie C. Claflin, Noe Itō, Louise Michel, Rose Pesotta, Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mollie Steimer, Lois Waisbrooker, Mercy Otis Warren, and Victoria C. Woodhull. In an age of great and understandable dissatisfaction with governments around the world, Shone illuminates both the lost wisdom of the anarchists and the considerable contribution of women to intellectual thought, influences that are currently missing from many classes documenting the history of political theory.

Words of the Prophets treats graffiti as a form of political prophecy.

Whether we consider austerity in Thessaloniki, Camorra infiltration in Naples, the fall of Communism in Gdansk, or the rise of gang warfare in Chicago, graffiti is a form of democratic self-expression that dates back to Periclean Athens and the Book of Daniel. Words of the Prophets offers close readings of 400 original photographs taken between 2014 and 2021 in Philadelphia, Venice, Milan, Florence, Syracuse, and Warsaw, alongside literary works by Pawel Huelle, films by Andrezj Wajda, Antonio Capua, and music videos by Natasha Bedingfield and Beyoncé.

A third of the book is dedicated to interviews with Krik Kong, Iwona Zajac, Ponchee.193, Jay Pop, Ser, Simoni Fontana, and Mattia Campo Dall’Orto.

In Workers ' Self-Management in Argentina, Marcelo Vieta homes in on the emergence and consolidation of Argentina 's empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (ERTs, worker-recuperated enterprises), a workers ' occupy movement that surged at the turn-of-the-millennium in the thick of the country 's neo-liberal crisis. Since then, around 400 companies have been taken over and converted to cooperatives by almost 16,000 workers. Grounded in class-struggle Marxism and a critical sociology of work, the book situates the ERT movement in Argentina 's long tradition of working-class activism and the broader history of workers ' responses to capitalist crisis. Beginning with the voices of the movement 's protagonists, Vieta ultimately develops a compelling social theory of autogestión -- a politically prefigurative and ethically infused notion of workers ' self-management that unleashes radical social change for work organisations, surrounding communities, and beyond.

div>"Hoffrogge has done historians of the German Revolution and the Weimar Republic a valuable service by reconstructing the trajectory of a key figure in the revolution (and one of its most important early historians), and by enabling us to see these events through the different focus afforded by a leading protagonist of the workers’ councils"
—Andrew G. Bonnell, Labour History, Australia
“In this study of Richard Müller’s role in the German Revolution, Ralf Hoffrogge sheds light on one of the most important, and yet understudied, aspects of the upheaval: the role of revolutionary shop stewards and workers’ councils in the overthrow of the old order and the establishment of the new one…[T]his work provides a much-needed perspective on the German upheaval from the bottom up. It places Richard Müller’s long neglected role in the revolution at center stage, and reminds us of the revolutionary promise that was the German Revolution."
—William Smalldone, Against the Current
“Hoffrogge’s biography differs from those written about revolutionary icons like Liebknecht or Luxemburg for very practical reasons. The latter were from middle-class backgrounds and used to writing letters and articles offering biographers insights into their political but also private lives. An ordinary worker like Müller did not leave comparable records…Hoffrogge’s book is a first-rate invitation to think about a link between Richard Müller and the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and today’s still unfocused struggles against imperialist wars and capitalist exploitation”
—Ingo Schmidt, WorkingUSA
"The merit of Hoffrogge’s contribution is a capacity to translate his extensive research into a wide-ranging historical analysis and narrative of the role of the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and Richard Müller. "
—Dario Azzellini
"Ralf Hoffrogge has authored an invaluable addition to the literature of German radicalism by detailing the life of one of the key leaders of the Revolutionary Shop Stewards."
—William A. Pelz
"Ralf Hoffrogge ... explores the complicated relationship between the Stewards and the various socialist political parties with great skill and discusses the emergence of a new kind of socialism amongst Müller and his colleagues, which did not focus on state power and centralization but rather on grassroots democracy and workers’ control, sometimes known as council communism."
—Dick Geary
"This study deserves special consideration because it addresses two of the main puzzles of modern German history: how did a supposedly strong state collapse in 1917 and 1918, and how did the SPD subsequently assume power? Already in the 1920s, Arthur Rosenberg pointed out that the Social Democrats followed a dual tactic of propagating but also preventing revolution. By clarifying the roles played in all this by Müller and the shop stewards, Hoffrogge has moved the discussion forward, showing the way in which revolutionary unrest spread and forced the Social Democrats into a much more active role than they had previously adopted."
–Central European History

Most mainstream economists view capitalism’s periodic breakdowns as nothing more than temporary aberrations from an otherwise unbroken path toward prosperity. For Marxists, this fundamental flaw has long been acknowledged as a central feature of the free-market system. This groundbreaking volume brings together Marxist scholars from around the world to offer an empirically grounded defense of Marx’s law of profitability and its central role in explaining capitalist crises.

“World in Crisis has a specific aim: to provide empirical validity to the hypothesis that the cause of recurring economic crises or slumps in output, investment, and employment in modern economies can be found in Marx’s law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit. Marx believed, and we agree, that this is ‘the most important law in political economy.’” —from the preface

“Fanning combines memoir, travelogue, political tract, and history lesson in this engaging account of his 3,000-mile solo walk from Virginia to California” (Publishers Weekly).
 
Just days after the US military covered up the death by friendly fire of Pat Tillman, Rory Fanning—who served in the same unit as Tillman—left the Army Rangers as a conscientious objector. Disquieted by his tours in Afghanistan, Fanning sets out to honor Tillman’s legacy by crossing the United States on foot. The generous, colorful people he meets and the history he discovers help him learn to live again.
“Fanning’s descriptions of the hardships and highlights of the trip comprise the bulk of the book, and he infuses his left-wing politics into a narrative peppered with historical tidbits, most of which describe less-than-honorable moments in American history, such as the terrorist actions of the Ku Klux Klan and the nation’s Indian removal policies. What stands out most, though, is the selflessness and generosity―which come in the form of stories, hospitality, and donations for the foundation―of the people Fanning encountered during his journey.” ―Publishers Weekly
 
“Rory Fanning’s odyssey is more than a walk across America. It is a gripping story of one young man’s intellectual journey from eager soldier to skeptical radical, a look at not only the physical immenseness of the country, its small towns, and highways, but into the enormity of its past, the hidden sins and unredeemed failings of the United States. The reader is there along with Rory, walking every step, as challenging and rewarding experience for us as it was for him.” —Chicago Sun-Times

This comprehensive collection of fiction, poetry, and reportage by revolutionary women of the 1930s lays to rest the charge that feminism disappeared after 1920. Among the thirty-six writers are Muriel Rukeyser, Margaret Walker, Josephine Herbst, Tillie Olsen, Tess Slesinger, Agnes Smedley, and Meridel Le Sueur. Other voices may be new to readers, including many working-class Black and white women. Topics covered range from sexuality and family relationships, to race, class, and patriarchy, to party politics. Toni Morrison writes that the anthology is “peopled with questioning, caring, socially committed women writers.”

This comprehensive collection of fiction, poetry, and reportage by revolutionary women of the 1930s lays to rest the charge that feminism disappeared after 1920. Among the thirty-six writers are Muriel Rukeyser, Margaret Walker, Josephine Herbst, Tillie Olsen, Tess Slesinger, Agnes Smedley, and Meridel Le Sueur. Other voices may be new to readers, including many working-class Black and white women. Topics covered range from sexuality and family relationships, to race, class, and patriarchy, to party politics. Toni Morrison writes that the anthology is “peopled with questioning, caring, socially committed women writers.”

How do the commitments of the revolutionary and the artistic aspirations of the writer fit together? Using literary texts from French, German, Russian and American pro-revolutionary writers, Sheila Delany examines the dialectic of politics and rhetoric, aesthetic and social conviction.

In Writing Revolution we are introduced to writers who truly gave voice to the hopes of their time. Some were leaders who fanned the flames in person as well as through their writings; others played less prominent roles but also helped build movements. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Mao, Sylvain Maréchal, Boris Lavrenov, Bertolt Brecht and others all make their appearances: consummate rhetoricians all; not necessarily on the same page politically but all active boosters of the revolutions of their day.

Larisa Reisner (1895–1926), fighter, commissar, and diplomat, was one of the most brilliant and popular writers of the Russian Revolution. Her journalism from her travels in Russia and Ukraine, Germany, Persia and Afghanistan was read by millions in the new mass circulation Soviet press. Together here for the first time in translation are the six books of her journalism, The Front, Afghanistan, Berlin October 1923, Hamburg at the Barricades and In Hindenburg's Country, all written in the last nine years of her life, before her death at the age of thirty.

This volume is published as the companion to Cathy Porter's Larisa Reisner. A Biography.

In Yellow Earth, John Sayles introduces an epic cast of characters, weaving together narratives of competing agendas and worldviews with lyrical dexterity, insight, and wit.
When rich layers of shale oil are discovered beneath the town of Yellow Earth, all hell breaks loose. Locals, oil workers, service workers, politicians, law enforcement, and get-rich-quick opportunists—along with an earnest wildlife biologist—commingle and collide as the population of the town triples overnight. Harleigh Killdeer, chairman of the tribal business council of the neighboring Three Nations reservation, entertains visions of "sovereignty by the barrel" and joins forces with a fast-talking entrepreneur. From casino dealers to activists and high school kids, everyone in the region is swept up in the unsparing wave of an oil boom.
Sayles’s masterful storytelling draws an arc from the earliest exploitation of this land and its people all the way to twenty-first-century privatization schemes. Through the intertwining lives of its characters, Yellow Earth lays bare how the profit motive erodes human relationships, as well as our living planet. The fate of Yellow Earth serves as a parable for our times.

In Yellow Earth, John Sayles introduces an epic cast of characters, weaving together narratives of competing agendas and worldviews with lyrical dexterity, insight, and wit.
When rich layers of shale oil are discovered beneath the town of Yellow Earth, all hell breaks loose. Locals, oil workers, service workers, politicians, law enforcement, and get-rich-quick opportunists—along with an earnest wildlife biologist—commingle and collide as the population of the town triples overnight. Harleigh Killdeer, chairman of the tribal business council of the neighboring Three Nations reservation, entertains visions of "sovereignty by the barrel" and joins forces with a fast-talking entrepreneur. From casino dealers to activists and high school kids, everyone in the region is swept up in the unsparing wave of an oil boom.
Sayles’s masterful storytelling draws an arc from the earliest exploitation of this land and its people all the way to twenty-first-century privatization schemes. Through the intertwining lives of its characters, Yellow Earth lays bare how the profit motive erodes human relationships, as well as our living planet. The fate of Yellow Earth serves as a parable for our times.

This ground-breaking history of the General Jewish Labour Bund in migration investigates how the organisation transformed itself from a revolutionary protagonist in early twentieth-century Russia to a socialist institution of secular Jewish life and yidishkayt for Jews in North and South America. By following thousands of activists’ paths from the shtetls of Eastern Europe to the working-class Yiddish neighbourhoods of New York and Buenos Aires, Frank Wolff traces the networks that connected these revolutionaries on both sides of the Atlantic, resulting in a richly detailed social history of this seminal transnational movement.

Zheng Chaolin helped found the Chinese Communist Party’s European branch in Paris in 1922 and its Trotskyist Opposition in Shanghai in 1931. He held the world record in political imprisonment – seven years under Chiang Kai-shek (as a revolutionary) and 27 under Mao (as a ‘counterrevolutionary’), thus beating by a year Auguste Blanqui’s previous record. After joining the revolution in his teens, his commitment never wavered. His life – which spanned from 1901 to 1998 – was coterminous with the century and a dramatic embodiment of its vicissitudes. The writing collected in this book reflects that, and provides an indispensable record of his contribution to revolutionary thought in China.

As the author of the ground-breaking work of Marxist political economy, Finance Capital, and a leader in the German Social Democratic Party, Rudolf Hilferding was a dominant intellectual and political figure in the history of European socialism from its halcyon days in the pre-1914 era until its collapse in the 1930s.

This collection of his previously unpublished correspondence with key figures from the socialist movement allows readers to trace the evolution of Hilferding's thought as socialism's fortunes declined and his own fate became precarious. It shows how, in the face of rising Stalinism and fascism, democracy remained at the core of his socialist vision.