The Russian Revolution and the subsequent establishment of the USSR as a "workers' state" has dominated political thinking for more than three generations. In the past, it seemed enough for communists to define their radical separation with much of the "left" by denouncing the Soviet Union as state capitalist. This is no longer sufficient, if it ever was. Many Trotskyists, for example, now feel vindicated by the 'restoration of capitalism' in Russia. To transform society we not only have to understand what it is, we also have to understand how past attempts to transform it failed. In What Was The USSR?, Aufheben explores the inadequacies of the theory of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state and the various versions of the theory that the USSR was a form of state capitalism. Aufheben is a UK-based libertarian communist journal that has been active since 1992. What Was The USSR? was a series of articles published by them in issues #6-9 between 1997 and 2000. The Radical Reprint by Pattern Books is made to be as accessible and as close to manufacturing cost as possible.

What Was The USSR?: Towards a Theory of Deformation of Value Under State Capitalism (Radical Reprint)

Aufheben Collective

Pattern Books

The Proletarian's Pocketbook (Radical Reprint)

Originally published in 1883, Paul Lafargue says this word here and another word here to pad out the description to make it at least 200 characters long. Yes, I know it is still not at 200 characters long. This is a Radical Reprint book, please steal this book, please just take the files from Internet Archive and just redistribute the book yourself if you want. Okay, cool, the description has been finished.

The Right To Be Lazy (3)

Politics & Social Sciences

Lafargue, Paul

Philosophy

Un Monde Sans Argent: Le Communisme was originally published in three parts, as three separate pamphlets, in France, between 1975-6. It was produced by Dominique Blanc, shortly after the dissolution of the Organisation des Jeunes Travailleurs révolutionnaires. The name Quatre Millions de Jeune Travailleurs was apparently 'adopted' from a 1971 PSU youth publication (Parti Socialiste Unifié - a French Socialist Party), presumably to satisfy French publishing laws, and texts continued to be published under this name through the 1970's including the widely distributed tract A Bas Le Proletariat/Vive Le Communisme. Whatever, though, the book speaks for itself. Just read it.

A World Without Money: Communism (16)

The Friends of 4 Million Young Workers

Politics & Government

The Ego and Its Own is an 1844 work by Max Stirner. It presents a radically nominalist and individualist critique of, on the one hand, Christianity, nationalism and traditional morality, and on the other, humanism, utilitarianism, liberalism and much of the then-burgeoning socialist movement, advocating instead an amoral (although importantly not inherently immoral or antisocial) egoism. Ego emphasizes owness as self-description, past fixed conceptions of the Self and Other, through the recognition of power relations and self-discovery of mind. Johann Kaspar Schmidt (1806-1856), also known as Max Stirner, was a German philosopher who is often considered as one of the pioneers in anarchism, nihilism, existentialism, and postmodernism, and one of the many people who Karl Marx wrote an entire book on just to publicly criticize denounce.

The Ego and Its Own: The Case of The Individual Against Authority (Radical Reprint)

Max Stirner

Theories of Surplus Value is a book that, unlike Marx, actually needs an introduction. Theories was intended to be collected and published as the fourth volume to Marx's Capital, but after Engels had successfully collected and published volumes two and three after Marx's death, Engels died before he could publish it. Theories has had a long history of being in-and-out of publication, and particularly in-and-out of being an actually accessible publication. In 1905, the infamously-hated-by-Lenin Karl Kautsky, published the first edition of the manuscript in three volumes separated and rearranged by Adam Smith in volume one, to David Ricardo in the other two volumes, with the breakup of the Ricardian school as the third volume. Kautsy's version circulated in print and was translated to many languages over the decades, remaining the sole version of Theories until The Institute of Marxism-Leninism published a new German version. \nThis arrangement, while still relatively close to Kautsy's narrative arrangement of tracing surplus value from Smith to the Ricardian split into "vulgar economics," annotated the manuscript with different topic headings. This version was then translated into English by Progress Publishers and this is the version of the book which circulates today and is considered to be the most accurate version to Marx's notebooks. This Radical Reprint by Pattern Books is made to be accessible and as close to only manufacturing cost as possible.\nThis second volume of Theories of Surplus Value covers Smith, Ricardo, and Rodbertus' theories of rent, to the theory of cost-price, to growth and productivity in agricultural labor, to extensive diagrams on rent and the influence of machines. \nThese three volumes, in totality, are to show how the classical theories of value led to a theory stuck within the market paradigm and caught in the loop of capitalist circularity. For Marx, the current ontology of political economy only ruled within the scope of pragmatism within the market system, and these programs no longer offered any integrated theory of capitalism.

Theories of Surplus Value: Volume 2 (Radical Reprint)

Karl, Marx

Results of the Direct Production Process (Radical Reprint)

Results of the Direct Production Process(otherwise known as Results of the Immediate Production Process) is part of a third draft of Capital which Marx wrote between the summer of 1863 and the summer of 1864, based on a plan Marx made for the work in December 1862. This manuscript has been lost, apart from a few pages from what would become the first five chapters of Capital, some related footnotes, and what was to become the sixth chapter. The pagination and content of this sixth chapter indicate that it followed on from five previous chapters. By the time Capital was completed however, this chapter had not been not included. The content of the chapter ranges over a variety of subjects, but most particularly deals in greater detail than elsewhere with (i) the "formal" and "real" subsumption of the labour process by capital, and (ii) productive and unproductive labour. Results of the Direct Production Process is to be read with the preceding five books in the Radical Reprints series: Theories of Surplus Value Volumes 1 - 3 by Karl Marx, Essays on Marx's Theory of Value by I.I. Rubin, and Capital and Community by Jacques Camatte, for these, along with Results, add onto the project of realizing and dismantling capital as a totality that Marx was unable to complete with only the three volumes of Capital that were finished and published. It is in this work that Marx's theory is illuminated, piecing together the fragments of Marx's total conception of Capital. As Camatte wrote in Capital and Community, "In a way it provides a key, not to understand Capital which is self-sufficient, but to the entire work surrounding it." This Radical Reprint by Pattern Books is made to be accessible and as close to only manufacturing cost as possible

The workingman, whose strength and muscles are so admired by the pale, puny off-springs of the rich, yet whose labour barely brings him enough to keep the wolf of starvation from the door, marries only to have a wife and house-keeper, who must slave from morning till night, who must make every effort to keep down expenses. Her nerves are so tired by the continual effort to make the pitiful wages of her husband support both of them that she grows irritable and no longer is successful in concealing her want of affection for her lord and master, who, alas! soon comes to the conclusion that his hopes and plans have gone astray, and so practically begins to think that marriage is a failure.

Anarchy and the Sex Question (7)

GOLDMAN, Emma

Rhiza

Women's Studies

A collection of both of the Manifestoes of Surrealism written by Andre Breton in 1924 and 1929. The pocket book size to make the two manifestoes more accessible in print without being part of some collected works.

Manifestoes of Surrealism (4)

BRETON, André

Reference

History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics is a 1923 book by the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács, in which the author re-emphasizes the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's influence on Karl Marx, analyses the concept of "class consciousness", and attempts a philosophical justification of Bolshevism.\nLukács attempts a philosophical justification of Bolshevism, stressing the distinction between actual class consciousness and "ascribed" class consciousness, the attitudes the proletariat would have if they were aware of all of the facts. Marx's idea of class consciousness is seen as a thought which directly intervenes into social being. Claiming to return to Marx's methodology, Lukács re-emphasizes the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's influence on the philosopher Karl Marx, emphasizes dialectics over materialism, makes concepts such as alienation and reification central to his theory, and argues for the primacy of the concept of totality. Lukács depicts Marx as an eschatological thinker. He develops a version of Hegelian Marxism that contrasted with the emerging Soviet interpretations of Marxism based on the work of the philosopher Georgi Plekhanov and the dialectics of nature inspired by the philosopher Friedrich Engels.\nWhile reading, it is important to note that later in his life Lukács believed he misunderstood Marx's conception of alienation and conflated it with Hegel's conception. It is important to understand, too, that Lukács believed orthodox marxism "refers exclusively to method." As such, this book should not be read to keep one foot into the ivory tower but to understand this as another addition to a long historical conversation had on the philosophical implications of class consciousness, not so much a radical history of it as the title may be interpreted as.

History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Radical Reprint)

György Lukács

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