Books

Though the POUM were socialists, he wrote "as far as my purely personal preferences went I would have liked to join the Anarchists."

His vivid descriptions of classless anarchist Barcelona following the revolution and terrorised Stalinist Barcelona after the counter-revolution are a timeless reminder that a 'revolutionary state' is a contradiction in terms.

It is now mostly out of print. However, he writes extensively on many trends and schools of thought related to Cuba and its history.

Thanks to See Sharp Press for permitting this book to be posted online. This text was taken and slightly edited by libcom.org from the Anarchist People of Colour (US) website.

Clearly written and interesting, it is a good introduction to CW's ideas, though we at libcom.org would have several important disagreements with it. Notably on the issues of class and nationalism

Text taken from the Anarchy Archives

Anarchism: From Theory to Practice
Daniel Guerin

The Incomplete Marx
Felton C. Shorthall

Anti-Parliamentary Communism --
The movement for workers councils in Britain, 1917-45

by Mark Shipway
online version from: http://af-north.org/

Deported American anarchist Emma Goldman travels to Russia for the first time in 30 years. She provides a revealing picture on the rampant opportunism throughout the Soviet government and its steady roots throughout the bureacracy.

July 19th was the anniversary of the day on which a gang of militarist adventurers rose against the republican regime in Spain and, with the assistance of outside powers and foreign troops, plunged the country into a bloody war.

:> Buy Portugal: The Impossible Revolution? now

After Marx's death, in rumaging through Marx's manuscripts, Engels came upon Marx's precis of Ancient Society -- a book by progressive US scholar Lewis Henry Morgan and published in London 1877. The precis was written between 1880-81 and contained Marx's numerous remarks on Morgan as well as passages from other sources.

The 1848 uprisings in Germany put Engels in mind of the last great peasant rebellions of of 1500s. As he would later write: "The parallel between the German Revolution of 1525 and that of 1848-49 was too obvious to be altogether ignored at that time."

This is a synopsis of Capital, Volume I, written by Engels in 1868. Upon Capital's release, Engels began constructing a comprehensive summation

Engels' last major work

As the 1870s drew to a close, the temporary peace between the English classes grew shakey. The Great Depression of the 1870s swept the western world and was, as always, particularly rough on the proletariat. The capitalist cycle downturn set in motion familiar attacks by the capitalist class against what reformist compromises within the capitalist system existed.

During the 1870s, a major polemical debate unfolded in Germany's worker/democratic press on the shortage of housing available to workers in major industrial centres. The influx and increase of the proletariat created a housing crisis.

On June 26 1872, Engels contributed the first of a series of articles to the Volksstaat, entitled "The Housing Question." The last appeared on February 22 1873. Engels' central point was that the revolutionary class policy of the proletariat cannot be replaced by a policy of reforms, because "it is not that the solution of the housing question simultaneously solves the social question, but that only by the solution of the social question, that is, by the abolition of the capitalist mode of production, is the solution of the housing question made possible."

First published in 1886 in Die Neue Zeit. It was intended to rebut a resurgence of neo-Idealism in German ruling class circles. It was reprinted in Stuttgart two years later, with some changes made by Engels.

Engels considered this something of a summation or closure of the post-Hegelian criticism Marx and he had initiated in The German Ideology 43 years before -- which work was never published in their lifetimes.

A Study in Modern Revolutionary Thought

By Richard Gombin (1979)

This book was first published as Les Origines du gauchisme (Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1971). This translation by Michael K. Perl was published by Penguin (London, 1975). Gombin wrote a number of other books including The Radical Tradition.