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Following his hugely popular book, The Wisdom of Donkeys, Andy Merrifield breathes new life into the Marxist tradition.

Magical Marxism demands something more of traditional Marxism - something more interesting and liberating. It asks that we imagine a Marxism that moves beyond debates about class, the role of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In escaping the formalist straitjacket of orthodox Marxist critique, Merrifield argues for a reconsideration of Marxism and its potential, applying previously unexplored approaches to Marxist thinking that will reveal vital new modes of political activism and debate.

This book will provoke and inspire in equal measure. It gives us a Marxism for the 21st century, which offers dramatic new possibilities for political engagement.

The surprising story of how Minnesota politicians in the 1950s helped redirect American politics—now in paperback

How did a largely white state like Minnesota become a springboard for leadership in civil rights? Why did it produce a generation of liberals—Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Donald Fraser, Orville Freeman, and Eugene McCarthy—whose ideals transformed the Democratic party?

In Making Minnesota Liberal, Jennifer A. Delton delves into the roots of Minnesota politics for the answer, tracing the change from the regional, third-party, class-oriented politics of the Farmer-Labor party to the national, two-party, pluralistic liberalism of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party (DFL). While others have examined how anticommunism and the Cold War shaped this transformation, Delton takes a new approach, showing the key roles played by antiracism and the civil rights movement. In telling this story, Delton contributes to our understanding not only of Minnesota’s political history but also of the relationship between antiracism and American politics in the twentieth century.

Making Minnesota Liberal combines political history with a discussion of the symbolic role played by race in political battles between whites. Delton recounts the creation of Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor party, its merger with the Democrats, and the acrimonious battle for control of the DFL just after World War II. She argues that the Humphrey liberals won this battle in part because antiracism activities enabled previously antagonistic groups, divided by ethnicity, religion, and class, to unify around a common cause.

Delton contends that although liberal Minnesotans’s concern for racial justice was genuine, it also provided them with national political relevance and imbued their bid for power with a sense of morality. Ultimately the language of tolerance and diversity that emerged from antiracism prepared Minnesotans for Humphrey’s vision of a pluralistic and state-centered liberalism, which eventually became the model for Democratic politics nationwide. Making Minnesota Liberal is an absorbing and trenchant account of a key moment in American history, one that continues to resonate in our time.

Workers' self-management was one of the unique features of communist Yugoslavia. Goran Musić has investigated the changing ways in which blue-collar workers perceived the recurring crises of the regime. Two self-managed metal enterprises, one in Serbia another in Slovenia, provide the frame of the analysis in the time span between 1945 and 1989. These two factories became famous for strikes in 1988 that evoked echoes in popular discourses in former Yugoslavia. Drawing on interviews, factory publications and other media, local archives, and secondary literature, Musić analyzes the two cases, going beyond the clichés of political manipulation from the top and workers' intrinsic attraction to nationalism.
The author explains how, in the later phase of communist Yugoslavia, growing social inequalities among the workers and undemocratic practices inside the self-managed enterprises facilitated the spread of a nationalist and pro-market ideology on the shop floors. Yet rather than being a mass taken advantage of by populist leaders, the working class Musić presents is one with agency and voice, a force that played an important role in shaping the fate of the country. The book thus seeks to open a debate on the social processes leading up to the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

The Independence Trilogy
The American Revolutionary War began when Massachusetts militiamen and British troops clashed at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. Two months later, a much larger engagement occurred at Bunker Hill in Boston. The conflict then expanded into a continent-wide war for independence from Great Britain. Or so we are taught. A closer look at events in the South in the eighteen months following Lexington and Concord tells different story. The practice of teaching the Revolutionary War as one generalized conflict between the American colonies and Great Britain assumes the South’s support for the Revolutionary War was a foregone conclusion. However, once shots were fired, it was not certain that the southern colonies would support the independence movement. What is clear is that both the fledgling American republic and the British knew that the southern colonies were critical to any successful prosecution of the war by either side.
In March to Independence: The American Revolution in the Southern Colonies, 1775–1776, historian Michael Cecere, consulting primary source documents, examines how Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia ended up supporting the colonies to the north, while East Florida remained within the British sphere. South Carolina, Georgia, and East Florida all retained their royal governors through the summer of 1775, and no military engagements occurred in any of the southern colonies in the six months following the battles in Massachusetts. The situation changed significantly in the fall, however, with armed clashes in Virginia and South Carolina; by early 1776 the war had spread to all of the southern colonies except East Florida. Although their march to independence did not follow the exact route as the colonies to the north, events in the South pulled the southern colonists in the same direction, culminating with a united Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. This book explores the crucial events in the southern colonies that led all but East Florida to support the American cause.
 

In this book Marx's observations on history, which are found scattered throughout his voluminous writings, are brought together and subjected to searching analysis.

D. Ross Gandy writes in refreshingly direct language, without resorting to jargon. For the first time we have a thoughtful assessment of Marx's views on all the epochs that cross his historical vision. Gandy treats Marx's ideas on primitive societies, on ancient Roman and Asiatic civilization, on the structure of feudalism, on strategies for overthrowing capitalism, and on the hypothetical communist future. Among the author's departures from traditional readings of Marx are his interpretations of class struggle, his conception of social strata, and his cogent analysis of the "new Marxism."

Since many aspects of Marxist historical theory have been neglected or distorted, Gandy's remarkably clear commentary, based on extensive research—including an exhaustive study of the forty-volume Marx-Engels Werke—will doubtless stimulate debate among sociologists and other students of social change, political scientists, and historians.

The secret life of a Palestinian Communist activist during the leadup to World War II.

In the public eye, Najati Sidqi was known as a journalist and writer, a translator of Russian classics, and an outspoken opponent of Nazism. However, Sidqi concealed a critical component of his life from the world and his family. He was an underground activist for the Palestinian Communist Party, a risky and influential pursuitthat took him to early Bolshevik Moscow, British courts and prison cells in Palestine, Nazi Germany, intrigue-heavy interwar Paris, and Civil War Spain, Morocco, and Algeria. Throughout his journey, Sidqi continued to write, even as he faced fascism, intense surveillance, active warzones, the death of friends, and exile.

Memoirs of a Palestinian Communist brings Sidqi’s incredible life and work to light, wryly narrating his international travels, his work as an activist, and his political dealings at a crucial moment for Palestine and the international fight against fascism. Translated from Arabic into English for the first time, it is a riveting firsthand account of an often-overlooked aspect of the history of the global left. Generous supplementary materials make the memoir accessible to students and non-specialist scholars: a preface by Sidqi’s grandson, a foreword by renowned historian Joel Beinin, a translators’ introduction that presents new research on Sidqi’s family history, a map of his travels, and a timeline, as well as a bibliographic essay offering pointers for further research.

A survey of the far-reaching measures the U.S. government brought to bear against the CPUSA, from poison-pen letters to the Red Scare and beyond.
 

Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century and ending only with the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the U.S. government and major elements in the wider society waged an unrelenting campaign to suppress and criminalize domestic communism. This long-overdue book details the longest and most extensive repressive operation ever undertaken by U.S. authorities against a domestic political organization that, however problematic, was largely operating within the scope of constitutionally mandated freedoms. Beyond that, this is the story of how systemic measures against U.S. communists—in contrast to the vaunted claims of American political freedom—defined the political landscape of the last century.

Menace of Our Time tracks the suppression efforts aimed at the group, including the state laws of the twenties that imprisoned the fledgling communist leadership; the tactics used by police and local authorities against communists as they fought for unions, racial equality, and the unemployed; the trials and imprisonment of communist leaders mid-century; the extra-legal efforts of the Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) in the sixties; and the ongoing, relentless surveillance by the FBI that followed. In examining the far-reaching measures the government brought to bear against the Communist Party USA, Aaron J. Leonard provides a clearer picture of the mechanics of social and political repression that abound in the society we still inhabit. 

Strongman governments are back. What becomes of their economies?

Autocracy has once again become a rising force. Today, two thirds of the world’s population live under regimes where electoral democracy is either absent or debased. Moreover, even many functioning democracies are now facing a significant share of their citizens who favor switching to authoritarian rule. But as states return to their old authoritarian ways, what happens to their still-modernized economies?

Simon Commander and Saul Estrin examine the scale of this change—and the unevenly distributed economic consequences that will soon accompany it. Modern Autocracy reveals how authoritarian economies generally perform worse than economies in democratic states, in part because many authoritarian states are centralized around a leader whose economic stewardship facilitates political favor and cronyism. In all, these features, combined with the likelihood of repression, sap economic vitality and stymie competition, innovation, and, ultimately, growth.

The exception, the authors reveal, is that autocracies can perform better when they’re built around an institutional framework rather than simply a leader. That is because they can pursue strategic goals, including innovation; even so, their autocratic foundations open up major vulnerabilities and tensions. Brimming with political relevance, Modern Autocracy is a defining taxonomy of economies and their natures in this century.

There is no mystery shrouding the toppling pillars of Western civilization and human culture, and George Marlin can no longer watch. Like many readers who are seeing the same destructive forces roaming unchecked and wish to confront them, Marlin has with keenness composed a kind of response that contextualizes the problem and its historical masters, these so-called post-modern "monsters." Among these are Martin Luther, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, Comte, Mussolini, Hitler, and Marx. His treatment of Antonio Gramsci's "anti-Church" is particularly jolting and redeems the underrepresented efforts of two Catholic popes to defend human dignity. Marlin is notorious for making sense sting a bit in the reader who has been too complacent, and encouraging those who wish to fortify and steel the intuitions of the intellect.
            Modern Monsters exposes the lack of coherency and bitterness (the only 'natural' attributes of ideology) and claims that ideological thinking in the post-modern era is waging open war with the foundations of Judeo-Christian society. Its chief target is the Catholic Church. Marlin rightly calls out the irony in ideologues, as theirs is simply another kind of idolatry and "secular religion."
            This concise review of the fatal attraction to ideologies and their applications takes the reader quickly to the heart of the matter and introduces him to a plethora of voices that ought to be heard instead. Indeed, one of the delights of this book is the host of true intellects he calls upon to make his point. In that sense, despite his emphasis on a society in ruin, Marlin's lasting effect is leaving us in the company of those who model what it is to live as worthy heirs of the Western tradition.
 

An exploration of how monuments—both physical and conceptual—shape memory, identity, and public debate across cultures and time.

This compelling volume invites readers to reimagine how monuments shape history, identity, and public space. Monumentality is explored as a dynamic and contested idea—one that moves beyond grand buildings and enduring structures to understand how societies remember the past and envision the future.

Engaging scholarly essays, accompanied by focused reflections on objects held in Getty collections, analyze the emotional, ideological, and technological dimensions of monuments by tracing their changing meanings across cultures and historical periods. Spanning themes of destruction, circulation, territorialization, and empire, the book investigates topics such as the ruin aesthetic of the Paris Commune, the material remnants of Buddhism in India, the construction of Cold War dams, and the influence of Almohad minaret architecture. Throughout, readers will encounter the enduring effects of colonialism, modernization, and settlements on societies around the world—from nineteenth-century West Africa to postwar Japan and Guam to present-day Israel and Ukraine.

Together, these studies integrate histories of art, architecture, and urban landscapes to examine the role of monuments in contemporary life. Monumentality offers fresh perspectives on what we choose to honor, why the past is preserved (or forgotten), and how the complex narratives embedded in memorials or public art condition our experience of the present.

A new perspective on how beliefs about abortion and gay rights reshaped American politics.

Many believe that religious and partisan identities undergird American public opinion. However, when it comes to abortion and gay rights, the reverse may be closer to the truth.

Drawing on wide-ranging evidence, Paul Goren and Christopher Chapp show that views on abortion and gay rights are just as durable and politically impactful—and often more so—than political and religious identities. Goren and Chapp locate the lasting strength of stances on abortion and gay rights in the automatic, visceral emotions that the media has primed since the late 1980s. Moral Issues examines how attitudes toward these moralized issues affect, and can sometimes even disrupt, religious and partisan identities. Indeed, over the last thirty years, these attitudes have accelerated the rise of the religious “nones,” who have no religious affiliation, and promoted moral sorting into the Democratic and Republican parties.