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Georg Lukács and Organizing Class Consciousness

by Robert Lanning

ISBN 978-0-930656-77-5, cloth $40, 209 pages, 2009

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 Lukács 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, Mészáros, 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).

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James Connolly and the Reconquest of Ireland

by Priscilla Metscher

ISBN 0-930656-74-1, cloth only $47.50, 256 pages, 2002

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.

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Organizing in the Depression South: A Communist's Memoir

by James S. Allen

ISBN 0-930656-73-3, cloth only $39.95, 155 pages, 2001

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.

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Dialectics of the U.S. Constitution: Selected Writings of Mitchell Franklin

edited by James M. Lawler

ISBN 0-930656-65-2, cloth only $55.00, 200 pages, 2000

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.

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African American History & Radical Historiography: Essays in Honor of Herbert Aptheker

edited by Herbert Shapiro

ISBN 0-930656-72-5, cloth only $29.95, 368 pages, 1998

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 University 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.

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Reds, Racial Justice, and Civil Liberties: Michigan Communists during the Cold War

by Edward C. Pintzuk

ISBN 0-930656-70-9 cloth $39.95 225 pages 1997

ISBN 0-930656-71-7 paper $14.95 225 pages 1997

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.

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