Rosa Luxemburg writings for just 3.25

We've just taken delivery of a new 240-page selection of Rosa Luxemburg's writings.. Dover have the edition on sale and, even after the bulk shipping costs are added in, we are still able to sell the book for less than four pounds. It's 3.25 if you buy it from us face-to-face in London, and a pound more if you want it by post inside Britain. Just email us a Paypal payment for 4.25.

We're selling the book at cost, so no volume discounts are available. If you're ordering more than ten, we recommend you order direct from Dover, who sell other classics by Marx, Lenin and Trotsky.

The title of the collection "'Reform or Revolution' and Other
Writings" comes from her best known work about which they write "This 1899 polemic by the famous "Red Rosa" Luxemburg explains why capitalism can never overcome its internal contradictions. An effective refutation of revisionist interpretations of Marxist doctrine, it defines the position of scientific socialism on the issues of social reforms, the state, democracy, and the character of the proletarian revolution."

Progress disrupted by Kautsky

Socialist Resistance had its AGM last weekend; the first year of our book project was felt to have gone well. Many thanks to you, our readers, for your support.

The incoming steering committee has just been given a report on our growing online sales, through bookshops like Amazon.com. Phil Hearse's book is our best-seller over the last three months, selling more than three times more than any other book. In the US, Celia Hart's book is selling very strongly, as is Permanent Revolution.

However, we've found some problems in our first digital printing of Karl Kautsky's book, 'Foundations of Christianity'. Most importantly, in David Packer's afterword the footnote numbers and italics are missing.

Luckily, we have sold fewer than a dozen wholesale, and we are withdrawing that edition from public sale. Folk can return the book to us at any time for a replacement; the major printing of the book will be out next month.

Even large publishers have similar issues with small-scale books. Because it's important to us that readers get the most from our books, we are in the habit of making small initial runs like this to allow us to get books quickly to reviewers and activists who have an urgent need for the book. That allows us to correct, in a second edition, errors that get past our editors.

We have started to circulate to readers a list of the corrections we are making. All the errors identified so far will be corrected in that second edition.

The LCR and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan: First issue of 'Notebooks of the Crab'

Our next book will be a title in French: is the first number of Les Cahiers du crabe (Notebooks of the Crab): "l'intervention soviétique en Afghanistan (1979)". The documents which are reproduced there, in a chronological order, all come from the bulletins interior, known as BI, of the LCR (internal discussion bulletins , in theory relatively confidential) and of its publications, Rouge (weekly of the LCR, whose files are gradually made available in DVD), Critique Communiste (theoretical review of the LCR), Inprecor (International Press Correspondance, news review of the Fourth International).

A further set of themes "On the PCF", reproducing criticisms of the LCR on the standpoint of the Communist Party in France, is placed after the other articles. At the end of the review, a special booklet of the LCR on the question of Afghanistan, published in mid-February 1980, is reproduced just as it is (this section has the least aesthetic quality).

The editors decided, for practical reasons (availability of the files and a number of pages of the review), to stop at the date of March 1980. However, a Critique Communiste article of December 1981 gives the reader a critical review with respect to the initial position of the LCR.

Notebooks of the Crab

The Notebook is published by the 'Association to safeguard of the memory of the French section of the Fourth international' (ASMSFQI). It has two wishes: to save the files of this political current, by collecting them and by digitizing them, and to allow their access. With this intention, in addition to its Internet site, it publishs a review which reproduces various documents, all resulting from the French section of the Fourth international ( at different times known as the Internationalist Communist Party, communist league, and now LCR) and all related to a specific topic.

The idea of the Notebook is this : to reproduce articles of Rouge, La Verite, and Inprecor, extracts from discussion bulletins, and posters to allow the readers and to know reader what the internal debates of the French section of the Fourth international were and what was its public positioning on such questions. It does not have any further scientific or analytical aiming. the task of the ASMSFQI is making documents known. The Notesbooks do not aim to be a place of study or criticism. Simply they aim to be able to support certain studies, reflections, and personal training, by giving access to documents.

The 104-page A4 book will be available in mid-September for £7, €10 or $14 from Amazon. You will be able to use its ISBN number (9780902869905) to order the book from bookstores.

Book list: ISBNs, authors and prices

With the ISBN numbers given below, you can find our books in any bookstore. The prices shown below were the lowest available new prices on Amazon when we last checked.

9780902869936, Foundations of Christianity: A study in Christian origins, Karl Kautsky. $22, £11.
9780902869943, Take the Power to Change the World: globalisation and the debate on power, Phil Hearse. $12, £6.
9780902869929, The Permanent Revolution & Results and Prospects, Leon D Trotsky. $20, £9.
9780902869950, Cuba: Beyond the Crossroads. New Expanded Edition, Ron Ridenour. $14, £9.
9780902869967, MIDDLE EAST: war, imperialism, and ecology, Gilbert Achcar. $26, £13.
0902869973, Ecosocialism or Barbarism, Jane Kelly. $14, £7.
0902869981, Cuba: Beyond the Crossroads (First edition) Ron Ridenour. $11, £6.
9780902869998, It's never too late to love or rebel, Celia Hart. $11, £6.

All our books are printed on archive-quality acid-free paper. Most are demy octavo, the regular paperback size. Karl Kautsky's book is textbook sized (Crown Octavo).

'Foundations of Christianity' is now out!

Foundations of Christianity is now on sale: online buyers can get it from amazon.co.uk for £11 or amazon.com for $22 US.

We're also very happy that many socialist organisations are showing a lot of interest in the book, including our friends at Socialistische Alternatieve Politiek. Dutch readers can now get all our books from them.

In the meanwhile, we remain interested in reading from readers and authors who have ideas about new or classic works they think we should get into print. Current suggestions include works on socialist feminism, life in Palestine's refugee camps and the evolution of Trotskyism.

If these sound like good ideas, or of you have other ideas, then just let us know.

Coming soon: Foundations of Christianity

We've just completed the set-up for our next book, Foundations of Christianity. Reading over Michael Lowy's introduction, it's clear that this work will be very significant, and in demand for a long time.

Karl Kautsky is probably the first Marxist to interest himself both in the movement and the enigmatic personality of the crucified prophet.

His 1908 book Foundations of Christianity is a rather impressive attempt at a Marxist analysis. The book is rather original, innovative and has been translated into nine languages.

Kaustky made his Foundations of Christianity into one of the most popular Marxist theoretical works. Its popular success is probably due to the interest of socialist militants to see a vision of the origins of Christianity which permits the modern workers' movement to appropriate to itself the figure of Jesus as a prophet and martyr for the proletarian cause.

Kautsky wanted to interpret early Christianity as a precursor of the contemporary working class socialist movement. His friend, and later his opponent, Rosa Luxemburg, in an article of 1905 called “The Church and Socialism insisted that the first Christian apostles were Communists who denounced injustice and the cult of the Golden Calf". He counterposed a materialist account of the new religion against the Christian mythology and showed the capacity of the Marxist method to give an account of a complex historical process, interpreting a religious phenomenon in terms of the class struggle.

The book is divided into four sections:
1) Society at the time of the Roman Empire: the slave economy, the absolutist forms of the state, the different manifestations of cultural and religious crisis.
2) Judaism: the class conflicts of Israelite society and the various political-religious currents (Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots and Essene.
3) The beginnings of Christianity: the early Christian communities, the idea of the messianic Christ and Christian communism.
4) The fourth section is dedicated to the “personality of Jesus”.

According to Kautsky, what distinguishes Jesus' messianism from the other rebellious Jewish prophets of the era - all of whom had a strictly national character - is its social character, its calling as an international redeemer. "Only the social Messiah, not the national, could transcend the limits of Judaism", survive the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and, above all, find a hearing among the poor of all nations.

By associating the hostility of the oppressed classes to the rich with proletarian solidarity, the messianism of the Christian communities promised the redemption of the poor, and so it could gain followers beyond the Jewish world.

In the last analysis, Jesus, "the crucified proletarian Messiah" managed to defeat Rome and conquer the world, but in the course of this process the Christian movement suffered an "inverse dialectic": it lost its proletarian and communist character and was transformed into a state religion, under the control of a vast dominating and exploiting apparatus - the Church.

Earlier editions of this book have been massive: 480 pages, in the case of the most recent edition. By using the larger Crown Quarto size used by many textbooks, we have been able to reduce the book to under 300 pages. That has reduced our production costs by two-fifths. As a result, the book will retail for just £12 -- rather than the £20 associated with the regular Demy Octavo size.

We're looking forward to readers comments on the new format.

'Permenant Revolution' back in general distribution

In July we'll also be publishing Leon Trotsky's The Permanent Revolution in a new edition. It will combine Results and Prospects, where the theory of permanent revolution was first explored. Both works are introduced by major essays by Michael Lowy.

We've also taken the time to update the translation a little: readers should not have to cope with old-fashioned term, such as milliard (the old term for what we now call billion).

Now that pathfinder has taken the book off their list, we hope this bright design, new typesetting and modern introductions bring this look to a new audience.

Take the Power to Change the World

Take the Power to Change the World, which the IIRE is publishing jointly with Resistance, looks set to become our best-selling book yet.

In this 144-page collection of essays, some of the world's most dynamic progressive thinkers discuss how to change the world: including John Holloway, Daniel Bensaid, and Michael Lowy.

The Zapatista rebels and the Seattle demonstrators were the tip of an iceberg of social and political revolt against the injustices of corporate-led globalisation. It was against this background that Irish academic John Holloway, working in Puebla, Mexico, came forward with his book Change the World without Taking Power. The book took up a phrase used by Zapatista leader Subcommandante Marcos, that the EZLN wanted to democratise Mexico, but did not seek to “take power”.

The very success of Holloway’s book, the fact that it was taken the least bit seriously, came from the political conjuncture – the ‘spirit of the times’. For tens of thousands of global justice and anti-war activists, often influenced by the ideas of NGOs, the aim was precisely to make the world fairer and curb the power of the multinational corporations, but not necessarily to end capitalism as such.

With this book, readers will see how a whole new series of experiences since the year 2000 have put Holloway's thesis to the test.

Expanded edition published of 'Cuba: Beyond the Crossroads'

Bookshops and other ditributors have reported the first sales of the new expanded edition of Ron Ridenour's book. The first edition has been one of our best-sellers, and has reached a wide audience.

Ron has expanded the book to cover Fidel's illness, and the passage of power to a team of leading Cuban communists. The book has been expanded more than ten percent, taking it to 124 pages.

The book is on sale at Amazon. and other leading online bookstores.

"Ecosocialism or Barbarism is the best introduction I’ve found"

We've had great praise from Climate and Capitalism, in its review of the best books available for red greens:

Ecosocialism or Barbarism is the best introduction I’ve found for radicals and Marxists who want to get up to speed fast on issues facing the ecosocialist movement. The essays and articles are well written, with a minimum of abstract theorizing and a laudable focus on the need to change the world, not just interpret it.

The book is now our best-seller on Amazon.com.

Resistance expands list with six new books

Resistance Books has agreed to produce six further books, most of which will be out between now and our AGM in September. We'd welcome readers' comments on how we should prioritize them.

• Take the power to change the world. A expanded version of an ebook produced by the IIRE.
  
• Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects. Pathfinder Press deserve kudos for keeping this book in print for so long: the volumes they sell of it must have been very small and so it's no surprise they have decided to drop it from their list. An excellent version has been prepared by Kunal Chattopadhyay. We hope to have more modern translation than that 1931 edition, and with essays by Michael Lowy to introduce both these classic works.
  
• Expanded edition of Cuba: Beyond the Crossroads. Ron Ridenour's books has sold well, and Fidel's illness has inspired Ron to expand his book (out in May).
  
• Foundations of Christianity. This is a classic Marxist work by Karl Kautsky, one of the most famous defenders of socialist ideas in the years before the First World War.
• Militant Carworkers is a condensed version of Alan Thornett's personal and political account of the struggle and betrayal of workers in Cowley, one of the car industry's most radical workforces, in the 1960s and 1970s. This book brings together From Militancy to Marxism and Inside Cowley (which is available online).
• Trade Unions: A strategy for socialists builds on an earlier work written by Andy Kilmister and Alan Thornett in 1997. This book faces the current challenges faced by working people in the context of the employers' offensive and Blair's attacks on the right to organise. It advances the strategy and demands needed to build the unions and connect up with the wiser radicalisation.
  

Let us know what you think!

Our new book

How was Palestine destroyed? Did the great powers create Israel? Why has Lebanon suffered war after war? What role has religion played in the Middle East? When did the region become the hub of the world’s ecological crisis? If you want answers to any of these questions, then you need our new book: Middle East: war, imperialism and ecology. You can buy it half price using the button at the end of this article.

Since the Second World War, the Middle East has suffered a seemingly unending period of war, foreign domination, ecological devastation and mass resistance to the region’s ruling classes. In this book, that resistance speaks in its own words. Roland Rance and Terry Conway have gathered together some of the most powerful articles written in the last sixty years by socialist, ecologist and anti-Zionist activists across the region.

The topics in this book include:

1. • The legacy of 1948, when Israel was created
2. • The destruction of Palestine
3. • Lebanon’s experience of war after war
4. • Iraq’s devastation
5. • The Zionist context
6. • The contradictions of religion
7. • What the ‘New World Order’ meant for globalisation, the environment and Zionism

Roland Rance has been a socialist activist in Israeli, Palestinian and British politics since the 1970s. He is a former editor of News From Within and Return Magazine, and is the convenor of Jews Against Zionism.

Terry Conway is one of the editors of Socialist Resistance and also of International Viewpoint. She is a leading member of the Fourth International, the world socialist organization founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.

Morning Star reviews Ron's book

We've just seen that the Star's review of Ron's book, Cuba: Beyond the Crossroads, is online here.

More good news gas come from Ron, who is currently working on an expanded second edition of his book. Readers can now order his book directly from Ron. It's especially good news for folk wanting to order from Denmark or the Euro-zone.