Facing Reality

Libcom

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."

Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies

Marx at the Margins

by Kevin B. Anderson

Marx’s critique of capital was far broader than is usually supposed.  To be sure, he concentrated on the labor-capital relation within Western Europe and North America.  But at the same time, he expended considerable time and energy on the analysis of non-Western societies, as well as race, ethnicity, and nationalism. While some of these writings show a problematically unilinear perspective and, on occasion, traces of ethnocentrism, the overall trajectory of Marx’s writings was toward a critique of national, ethnic, and colonial oppression and toward an appreciation of resistance movements in these spheres.

Thoughts on Kevin Anderson’s Marx at the Margins

Unity & Struggle

Marx at the Margins is an important summary of Marx’s thought concerning the relationship between the capitalist and non-capitalist world, colonialism and social development, as well as nationalism and internationalism. The book provides a general overview of Marx’s thinking about these issues, especially as Anderson draws together and gives some narrative form to an extremely wide-ranging number of Marx’s writings. However, Anderson doesn’t always step back to consider this material from a more conceptual standpoint. Therefore these notes try and synthesize Anderson’s reading in order to lay the groundwork for a more schematic understanding of the issues raised in the book.

‘Marx’s Humanism Today’

by Raya Dunayevskaya, 1965, Marxists Internet Archive

It was during the decade of the First International (1864-74) – a decade that saw both the Civil War in America and the Paris Commune – that Marx restructured^[1] the many drafts of Capital and published the first two editions of Volume I.

Raya Dunayevskaya Archive

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a Capitalist Society, 1941
An Analysis of Russian Economy , 1942
Marxism against pseudo-Marxism , 1943
A Letter on Rosa Luxemburg and Capital Accumulation , 1943
A Restatement of Some Fundamentals of Marxism against 'pseudo-Marxism' , November 1943
Marxism and Black liberation , June, 1944