Mehring Books

A unique collection of film reviews, essays on film and interviews with directors and film critics by WSWS Art and Culture Editor David Walsh spanning the 20 years from 1992-2012. Learn More

Since April 2011 when the musicians of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra reluctantly returned to work after a bitter six-month strike, orchestras in more than a dozen American cities have faced lockouts and threats of bankruptcy.

Calling for the re-emergence of the “socially engaged artist,” Arts Editor of the World Socialist Web Site, David Walsh, places the Detroit Symphony musicians’ strike in its historical and cultural context. (PDF)

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In this essay WSWS writer Tom Mackaman examines the significance for the working class of the 1981 strike by PATCO air traffic controllers in the US.

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A fighting revolutionary program for the American working class, adopted by the First National Congress of the Socialist Equality Party in August 2010, this document lays out an analysis of the global economic crisis, its political implications and the tasks of the working class. The SEP program outlines a series of basic social rights for jobs, education and culture, health care and democratic rights—all of which are under attack within the current capitalist system—and can only be won by the mobilization of the working class.

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David North, in three lectures delivered within a few months of the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, argues that the rapid growth of social inequality rooted in the historic crisis of the capitalist system, will bring on titanic class struggles internationally. The crisis of 2008 represented a turning point in American and world capitalism.

Published in 2012, and drawing attention to the mass upsurges of 2011, the themes in these lectures are indispensable for workers and youth currently entering onto the stage of history.

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In these two essays Russian Marxist Historian Vadim Rogovin refutes the claim that the rise of Stalinism in the USSR was the inexorable product of the October Revolution. He demonstrates that there existed a strong movement led by Leon Trotsky which offered a realistic alternative to Stalinism and that a struggle against this movement was the primary function of the Stalinist terror.

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One hundred years after the outbreak of World War One, mankind confronts the danger of a new and even greater catastrophe. An imperialist bloodbath is not only possible; it is inevitable unless the international working class intervenes on the basis of a revolutionary Marxist program. The International Committee of the Fourth International insists that the struggle against war is inseparable from the struggle for socialism. This pamphlet contains statements and resolutions of the ICFI, the Socialist Equality Party (US) and the Partei für Soziale Gleichheit of Germany on the fight against imperialist war. Learn More

This bundle contains a selection of the writings on the crisis in Detroit, the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history. Detroit is being used as a test case for carrying out unprecedented attacks on the working class. The writings contained in this bundle chronicle the opposition waged by the Socialist Equality Party to these attacks.

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This bundle contains The Revolution Betrayed, Trotsky’s unsurpassed analysis of Stalinism, and In Defense of Leon Trotsky, David North’s defense of Trotsky against contemporary falsifiers. Both of these works are indispensable reading for those wishing to develop understanding of the significance of the life and work of Trotsky, the co-leader of the Russian Revolution and the indefatigable opponent of Stalin.

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