Tag: New & Recently Released

NEW! The War Against the Commons by Ian Angus (Excerpts)

NEW! The War Against the Commons by Ian Angus (Excerpts)

February 20, 2024

The War Against the Commons: Dispossession and Resistance in the Making of Capitalism
by Ian Angus
$26.00 / 246 pages / 978-1-68590-016-8

FOR ALMOST ALL OF HUMAN existence, almost all of us were self-provisioning. Together with our neighbors, we lived and worked on the land, obtained and prepared our own food, and made our own homes, tools and clothing. After our ancestors invented agriculture, most of us lived in small communities where the land was held and farmed in common, and most production was consumed locally.

Today, almost all of us have to work for others.

Our lives depend on, and are largely defined by, our jobs. All the productive wealth is owned by a tiny minority of individuals and corporations, and most of us cannot eat unless we sell them our ability to work.

That’s how capitalism works, and we are so used to it that it seems natural and obvious….

NEW! Commune or Nothing! Venezuela’s Communal Movement and its Socialist Project by Chris Gilbert (Excerpts)

NEW! Commune or Nothing! Venezuela’s Communal Movement and its Socialist Project by Chris Gilbert (Excerpts)

February 20, 2024

Commune or Nothing! Venezuela’s Communal Movement and its Socialist Project
by Chris Gilbert
$23.00 / 208 pages / 978-1-68590-023-6

Author’s Note

Karl Marx wrote that theory becomes a material force when it grips the masses. He should have added that theory usually grips the masses because it connects with ideas, projects, and dreams they have developed themselves. This is what generally happens in revolutions, and it is certainly the case for the idea of the communal project in Venezuela.

In 2009, ten years after the Bolivarian Process began, Hugo Chávez proposed the communal path to socialism in a historic television program. That project had solid bases in the thought of Marx and István Mészáros, yet it would have been dead in the water if the idea of replacing a society dominated by the logic of capital with one based on communal relations had not connected with aspirations and values already alive and operating in Venezuelan society.

As it turned out, self-organized communities around the country seized on the communal project, which resonated both with values shaped over the longue durée in Venezuela—through its enduring campesino, Indigenous, and Afro-Venezuelan traditions of self-governance

NEW! Washington’s New Cold War: EXCERPTS

NEW! Washington’s New Cold War: EXCERPTS

February 20, 2024

How is it that the threat of global thermonuclear war is once again hanging over the globe, three decades after the end of the Cold War and at a time when the risk of irreversible climate change looms on the horizon? What approaches need to be adopted within the peace and environmental movements to counter these interrelated global existential threats? To answer these questions, it is important to address such issues as the nuclear winter controversy, the counterforce doctrine, and the U.S. quest for global nuclear supremacy….

Mészáros reading groups

Mészáros reading groups

February 20, 2024

March is the month to dig in to Mészáros. Join “Essential Discussions” with Irv Kurki, or The Marxist Education Project’s “Capital Studies Group” respectively focusing on ‘Beyond Leviathan’ and ‘The Necessity of Social Control.’

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