Bertell Ollman is a professor of politics at NYU. He received his D.Phil. at Oxford University in 1967, and has also taught at the University of the West Indies (Jamaica) and been a Visiting Professor at Oxford and Columbia Universities. Since 1970, he has given about 250 lectures on different aspects of Marxist theory in a dozen countries.

Professor Ollman has written and edited fifteen books, including Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, Social and Sexual Revolution: Essays on Marx and Reich, Dialectical Investigations, How to Take an Exam...and Remake the World, and most recently Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method.

He is also the creator of Class Struggle, the world's first Marxist board game, and from 1978-1983 was president of Class Struggle, Inc., the company that produced and marketed the game. In 1978, after being offered and then denied the chairmanship of the Government Department at the University of Maryland, he became the principal in one of the most important academic freedom struggles of the last half century. BALLBUSTER? True Confessions of a Marxist Businessman (2002) offers an autobiographical account—missing neither the politics or the humor—of both struggles.

In 2001, Bertell Ollman won the first Charles McCoy Life Achievement Award from the New Political Science section of the American Political Science Association. And in 2005, he became President of the International Endowment for Democracy (I.E.D.), a new foundation that seeks help from people throughout the world to bring real democracy to the country that needs it most, the U.S.A.

To learn more about the I.E.D. and its unique Critical Democracy Library (over 250 articles, book chapters, documents, quotes and cartoons) criticizing capitalist democracy, and especially the form it has taken in the U.S., see www.iefd.org.