Digital Publications

This bundle includes the ePub versions of The Russian Revolution and the Unfinished Twentieth Century and In Defense of Leon Trotsky by David North, chairman of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site.

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One hundred years after the outbreak of World War I and the Russian Revolution, none of the problems of the twentieth century—devastating wars, economic crises, social inequality, and the threat of dictatorship—have been solved. In fact, they are posed even more sharply today. David North argues against contemporary historians who maintain that the dissolution of the USSR signaled the “end of history” (Fukuyama), or the “short twentieth century”(Hobsbawm). Learn More

David North defends Trotsky’s legacy against the campaign of historical falsification begun by Stalin and continuing to this day. While Stalin assassinated Trotsky in 1940, he was unable to silence the Fourth International, founded to embody the revolutionary heritage of 1917. This work contains a devastating refutation of biographies of Trotsky published in recent years by three British historians: Ian Thatcher, Geoffrey Swain and Robert Service. The significantly expanded edition contains a new foreword, four new chapters and two appendices. Learn More

Globalization and the International Working Class is a polemic that stands the test of time. Mehring Books is pleased to now offer this out-of-print title, first published in 1998 as a reply to the Spartacist League’s attack against the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), in ePub and Kindle formats.

This work analyzes the transformation of multi-national corporations into massive transnational entities, facilitated by the development of computer technology and telecommunications. Assessing the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the ICFI statement examines the role of the international labor movement, including the trade unions in the capitalist countries, under these changed conditions. The statement points out that the left petty-bourgeois tendencies (the “pseudo-left”) adopted a nationalist standpoint, adapting “to the Stalinist and social democratic bureaucracies in the advanced capitalist countries.”

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Globalization and the International Working Class is a polemic that stands the test of time. Mehring Books is pleased to now offer this out-of-print title, first published in 1998 as a reply to the Spartacist League’s attack against the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), in ePub and Kindle formats.

This work analyzes the transformation of multi-national corporations into massive transnational entities, facilitated by the development of computer technology and telecommunications. Assessing the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the ICFI statement examines the role of the international labor movement, including the trade unions in the capitalist countries, under these changed conditions. The statement points out that the left petty-bourgeois tendencies (the “pseudo-left”) adopted a nationalist standpoint, adapting “to the Stalinist and social democratic bureaucracies in the advanced capitalist countries.”

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The polemical essays in this volume examine the complex interaction between history, philosophy and politics. The author defends historical materialism against contemporary anti-Marxist philosophical tendencies related to the Frankfurt School and postmodernism.

Among the topics covered are the irrationalist assault on the traditions of the Enlightenment, the reactionary character of modern utopianism, and the importance of a historically-directed consciousness in the understanding of objective political reality. The book evaluates the work of such neo-utopian theoreticians as Hendrik de Man, Ernst Bloch, Wilhelm Reich, and Herbert Marcuse.

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Mehring Books is pleased to bring back to a new audience Leon Trotsky’s critical work, The War and the International (1915). The version we present here was originally published in Colombo, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), as a Young Socialists Publication, in 1971 This booklet was written in 1914 during Trotsky’s two month stay in Zurich where he had arrived from Vienna, which he left on the evening of August 3rd, the day Germany declared war against France. It contains an unsurpassed analysis of the driving forces of imperialist war.

Trotsky wrote, “World production revolts not only against the confusion produced by national and state divisions but also against the capitalist economic organizations, which has now turned into barbarous disorganization and chaos. ... The War of 1914 is the most colossal breakdown in history of an economic system destroyed by its own inherent contradictions.”

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A collection of writings by Leon Trotsky on the question of fascism. Trotsky reviews the experience of the rise of fascism in Germany
as well as the struggle in France against the emergence of armed fascist bands in the wake of the German catastrophe.

In these essays Trotsky examines the political and social origins of fascism and elaborates the strategical and tactical methods for the defense of the working class against this deadly menace. Among the topics covered by Trotsky is the use of the united front and the arming of the working class for self defense. In all his writings he stresses the need for a revolutionary orientation by the working class as the basis for winning vacillating elements of the middle class to the side of socialism.

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The eruption of mass opposition to US President Trump is an event of enormous importance. It poses the question of the program and leadership that will guide the mass social anger at the militaristic and socially reactionary policies of this administration.

Trump is the true face of the capitalist oligarchy. The coming to power of his administration is not an aberration in an otherwise peaceful and democratic society, but the outcome of decades of social cuts, growing inequality and unending war, under both Democrats and Republicans.

The series of articles in this pamphlet outline the political foundations for understanding the origin of Trump's victory and advance a socialist strategy for the working class, the only social force that can defeat the drive toward dictatorship and war. (Order 5 or more for $3/copy)

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