More on our half-price book offer

Submitted by AWL on 14 December, 2021 - 4:48 Author: Martin Thomas
Workers' Liberty placards

The coming weeks of fewer labour-movement meetings and activities are a good time to read our longer books, and within our general half-price offer we’re doing a special deal on The Fate of the Russian Revolution volume 1 and The Two Trotskyisms Confront Stalinism: both large books for £10 post free.

If you’ve already read those, or want something easier, the half-price offer also makes many shorter texts more available.

Socialism Makes Sense is an attempt to allow anti-socialist ideas full voice and then refute them in favour of the idea of socialism which was advocated by the mass socialist movement before Stalinism and which (we think) is sketched and pointed to by large-scale working-class struggles. That’s an idea different from the Stalinist counterfeit.

Democracy, Direct Action, and Socialism takes off from that argument to explore the debate between revolutionary socialism and reformism: it centres on an exchange between Sean Matgamna of Workers’ Liberty and Michael Foot, Labour Party leader 1980-3.

We have tagged The Left in Disarray, our longest book after The Fate and Two Trotskyisms, as a third “companion volume”. It moves on from the general case for revolutionary working-class socialism to explore what that requires in building a movement of adequately clear politics, and what we must learn from previous mis-steps and failures.

Two big experiences of the British left, in particular, are reviewed inCorbynism: What Went Wrong? (a newer book, so not in the half-price offer, but only £4) and in the introduction to In Defence of Bolshevism, which covers the left upsurge of 1979-85.

Class Against Class covers the miners’ strike of 1984-5, whose defeat marked the end of that upsurge. In Defence of Bolshevism, a larger book, has as its core a long-lost text by Max Shachtman on why Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution are to be built on and learned from rather than dismissed.

The Russian Revolution: When Workers Took Power reviews, in the light of recent research, the revolution and the ideas which radiated out from it into the world labour movement.

Can Socialism Make Sense? is an older version of Socialism Makes Sense. It combines an earlier draft of the defence of socialism via “imaginary dialogue” with a collection of short fundamental texts on socialism and the record of real-life debates we’ve done with anti-socialists.

What Is Capitalism? and Marxist Ideas To Turn the Tide, recently reprinted, were produced for our 2012 and 2013 summer schools. They are collections of shorter pieces, useful as introductory or “reference” texts. What Is Capitalism? includes, for example, an explanation of what we mean by “workers’ government”, a summary of what we see as our “tradition”, and short illustrations of what we mean by “Third Camp” independent working-class politics, in contrast to left politics geared instead to a negatively-defined “anti-imperialist” camp.

Marxist Ideas To Turn The Tide includes succinct summaries on the united front, the “workers’ government”, and transitional demands.

Why Socialist Feminism, Otto Rühle’s abridgement ofCapital, Mark Osborn’s account of Solidarnosc,Gramsci In Context,Working-Class Politics and Anarchism, and 1919: Strikes, Struggles, and Soviets, are all good sellers on our bookstalls, with their content well-flagged by their titles.

In an Era of Wars and Revolutions is a different sort of book. It is a selection of cartoons published in the US Trotskyist press in the mid-20th century, with succinct explanation and commentary. To the reader it thus brings three things: basic arguments for socialism, presented pictorially rather than at length; something of US and world working-class history of that time; and a picture of the US Trotskyist movement of that time, probably the world’s strongest, as a living movement.

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