Writing in collaboration with Cornelius Castoriadis and Grace Lee, C.L.R. James examines the practical process of social revolution in the modern world.
"Springing forth from the utopian flames of
self-emancipation kindled by the workers councils of the Hungarian Revolution,
this pivotal book offers a socialist indictment of the miserabilism of state
capitalism and calls for the ongoing rejection of both vanguardism and the
bureaucratic rationalism of state power." - Ron Sakolsky, author of
Creating Anarchy
In this celebrated "underground classic," also
known as "C. L. R. James's most anarchist book," the author of The
Black Jacobins, History of Pan-African Revolt and Beyond a Boundary examines the
practical process of social revolution in the modern world. Inspired by the
October 1956 Hungarian workers' revolution against Stalinist oppression, as
well as the U.S. workers' "wild-cat" strikes (against Capital and the
union bureaucracies), James and his co-authors looked ahead to the rise of new
mass emancipatory movements by African Americans as well as
anti-colonialist/anti-imperialist currents in Africa and Asia. Virtually alone
among the radical texts of the time, Facing Reality also rejected modern
society's mania for "conquering nature," and welcomed women's
struggles "for new relations between the sexes."
