- The Activist Cookbook
A Hands-on Manual for Organizers, Artists and Educators who want to get their message across in powerful, creative ways
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1999
Spicey recipes for fighting economic injustice.
- Against multiculturalism
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2002
Multiculturalism is an authoritarian, anti-human outlook. True political progress requires not recognition but action, not respect but questioning, not the invocation of the Thought Police but the forging of common bonds and collective struggles.
- Anarchism vs. Marxism: A few notes on an old theme
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1978
Anarchist critiques of Marxism typically reveal a lack of knowledge of what Karl Marx actually wrote, resulting in sterile denunciations of a straw-man opponent.
- Another world is possible if...
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2004
Susan George suggests that we can create a new and better world -- if we act together to bring about changes. She discusses the ifs and hows.
- As We Don't See It
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
A clarification of Solidarity London's 1968 pamphlet, "As We See It." Distinction is placed between real socialism and the "exploitative privileged minorities" who controll(ed) the USSR and China, as well as the importance of controlling the means of production.
- Beating Back the Corporate Attack
Socialism and the struggle for global justice
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2000
Our movement is calling for a new direction -- for democratic control of our political life, and for democratic control over the most important aspects of the economy. Why should handful of the super-rich run the planet, and, moreover, run it into the ground?
- A Better World: Programme of the Worker-communist Party of Iran
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
The actual lives and actions of people themselves reveal a deep-seated belief in the possibility and even the certainty of a better future.
- Beyond the Fragments
Feminism and the Making of Socialism
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1980
A call for various fractions of the left to unite and work for a socialism through grass-roots activism.
- Blocking Progress
Consensus Decision Making In The Anti-Nuclear Movement
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1983
Howard Ryan maintains that consensus is wrong in principle and in practice: "The problem is not so much that individuals are being irresponsible or somehow abusing the consensus process. The problem lies in giving individuals that kind of power in the first place. Consensus turns majority rule into minority rule. That's not democracy."
- Building Bridges
The Emerging Grassroots Coalition of Labor and Community
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1990
- The collective decides...
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1991
The obsession with 'process politics' leads to an obsession with all aspects of internal structure and its working. As a result, the collective can often lose sight of its larger political objectives and the primacy of the form of organisation over the political objectives it was set up to meet. This often occurs in two stages. At the outset the collective process is regarded as equally important to whatever political purposes the group might have. Later the process itself often comes to be seen as of primary importance
- Common Sense for Hard Times
The Power of the Powerless to Cope with Everyday life and Transform Society in The Nineteen Seventies
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1976
Presents a vision of society as it is and as it could be. Putting the problems of contemporary daily life in historical perspective, it reveals that they have their roots in the way our society is organized, and thereby enables us to re-examine our own situation and experience.
- The Communist Manifesto
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1848
Written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as the theoretical and practical platform of the Communist League, a workers' association.
- Critique of Nonviolent Politics
From Mahatma Gandhi to the Anti-Nuclear Movement
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2002
Ryan accepts that sometimes nonviolence can be effective, but says that sometimes it is not: "a principled insistence on nonviolence can in some circumstances be dangerous to progressive social movements." He says that nonviolence theory "is troubled by moral dogma and mechanical logic."
- Diagnosis, Goals and Methods of Social Change
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1976
Outline of several diagnoses of the state of social systems and institutions.
- Diemer, Ulli
Connexipedia Article
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2010
Canadian socialist publisher, writer, and archivist.
- The Enemy of Nature
The End of Capitalism or the End of the World?
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2007
We live in and from nature, but the way we have evolved of doing this is about to destroy you. Capitalism and its by-products -- imperialism, war, neoliberal globalization, racism, poverty, and the destruction of community -- are all playing a part in the destruction of our ecosystem.
- Facing Reality
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1974
Inspired by the October 1956 Hungarian workers' revolution against Stalinist oppression, as well as the U.S. workers' "wild-cat" strikes (against capital and the union bureaucracies), the authors looked ahead to the rise of new mass emancipatory movements by African Americans as well as anti-colonialist/anti-imperialist currents in Africa and Asia. Virtually alone among the radical texts of the time, Facing Reality also rejected modern society's mania for "conquering nature," and welcomed women's struggles "for new relations between the sexes."
- Facing Reality 45 Years Later
Critical Dialogue with James/Lee/Chaulieu
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2003
According to Goldner, "In 1958, Facing Reality was an important book, uncannily anticipatory of the historical period which would unfold over the following 15 years. Its main assertions are still being debated.... What I find most interesting in Facing Reality is not so much the answers it offers as the questions it asks. Those questions revolve around the role of the revolutionary Marxist party today.
- Farm Gate Defence
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1986
Describes how farmers have been driven to come together to defend their farms in the face of high interest rates,mounting production costs and low prices.
- Fighting for Hope
Organizing to Realize Our Dreams
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1990
Detailed information and advice on how to organize a group for social change.
- For a Worker's Recovery Plan - The Causes and Cures of a New Great Depression
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2009
Economics is now not just for the experts. If anything is clear from the panic that started in mid- September, 2008, it is that workers must understand the economy. For clearly the 'experts' have no idea what they are doing.
- Global Thoughts, Local Actions
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1985
A wealth of information for those seeking ways to link global problems to everyday life.
- Global Visions
Beyond the News World Order
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1993
This book seeks to establish how our diverse globalizing world can be turned into a common home. The authors create a dialogue about the two types of globalization occurring in the world: globalization from above and globalization from below.
- Globalization from Below
The power of solidarity
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2002
When tens of thousands of protestors brought the World Trade Organization in Seattle to a halt in November 1999, it marked the "coming out party" for a new global movement. Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidaritydraws on the history of past movements and their own experience as activists to propose strategies for building this powerful coalition into a successful movement for global democratization.
- Inclusion or exclusion
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2008
People who advocate a vision of distinct communities that speak different languages, keep apart from each other, and communicate with the structures of the larger society only through interpreters, are doing more harm than good. What they are advocating is not diversity but entrenched division.
- Israel: Boycott, divest, sanction
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2009
The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa.
- The Joy of Revolution
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2007
Knabb says "What is needed, I believe, is a worldwide participatory-democracy revolution that would abolish both capitalism and the state. This is admittedly a big order, but I'm afraid that nothing less can get to the root of our problems. It may seem absurd to talk about revolution; but all the alternatives assume the continuation of the present system, which is even more absurd."
- Karl Marx
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1938
It is the purpose of this book to restate the most important principles and contents of Marx's social science in the light of recent historical events and of the new theoretical needs which have arisen under the impact of those events. In so doing we shall deal throughout with the original ideas of Marx himself rather than with their subsequent developments brought about by the various 'orthodox' and 'revisionist, dogmatic and critical, radical and moderate schools of the Marxists on the one hand, and their more or less violent critics and opponents on the other hand.
- Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution
Volume I: State and Bureaucracy
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1977
A wide-ranging and thorough exposition of Marx's views on democracy.
- Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution
Volume II: The Politics of Social Classes
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1978
Draper ranges through the development of the thought of Marx and Engels on the role of classes in society.
- Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution
Volume III: The Dictatorship of the Proletariat
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1986
Hal Draper examines how Marx and Marxism dealt with the issue of dictatorship in relation to the revolutionary use of force and repression, particularly as this debate has centered on the use of the term "dictatorship of the proletariat." Draper strips away the layers of misinterpretation and misinformation that have accumulated over the years to show what Marx and Engels themselves meant by the term.
- Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution
Volume IV: Critique of Other Socialisms
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1990
Much of Karl Marx's most important work came out of his critique of other thinkers, including many socialists who differed significantly in their conceptions of socialism. Draper looks at these critiques to illuminate what Marx's socialism was, as well as what it was not.
- Leading Principles of Marxism: A Restatement
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1937
Marx's study of society is based upon a full recognition of the reality of historical change. Marx treats all conditions of existing bourgeois society as changing, ie more exactly, as conditions in the process of being changed by human actions. Bourgeois society is not, according to Marx, a general entity which can be replaced by another stage in a historical movement. It is both the result of an earlier phase and the starting point of a new phase, of the social class war which is leading to a social revolution.
- Let's Stop Kidding Ourselves About the NDP
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1989
Canadian socialists are terribly reluctant to give up their illusions about the NDP.
- Manifestos, Programs, Visions
Selected Manifestos - Political Statements - Programs
Resource Type: Internet WWW site
Published: 2009
A selection of left manifestos, programs, poltical statements and visions from the 1600s to today.
- The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1906
Luxemburg writes that "the mass strike in Russia [in 1905] has been realised not as means of evading the political struggle of the working-class, and especially of parliamentarism, not as a means of jumping suddenly into the social revolution by means of a theatrical coup, but as a means, firstly, of creating for the proletariat the conditions of the daily political struggle and especially of parliamentarism. The revolutionary struggle in Russia, in which mass strikes are the most important weapon, is, by the working people, and above all by the proletariat, conducted for those political rights and conditions whose necessity and importance in the struggle for the emancipation of the working-class Marx and Engels first pointed out, and in opposition to anarchism fought for with all their might in the International."
- Modern Capitalism and Revolution
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1975
For revolutionaries one central point must be grasped to understand how the system works: the struggle of human beings against their alientation, and the ensuing conflict and split in all spheres, aspects and moments of socia life. As long as this struggle is there there ruling strata will continue to be unable to organise their system in a coherent way, and society will lurch from one accident to another. These are the conditions for revolutionary activity in the present epoch -- and they are amply sufficient.
- Naming the Moment
Political Analysis for Action: A Manual for Community Groups
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1989
A given moment - this moment - is unlike any other moment in time. Howe can we understand what it offers so that we can make the best use of it? How have people used moments in the past to push toward greater social justice?
- The National Question
Selected Writings by Rosa Luxemburg
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1976
In her penetrating analysis of nationalism, Rosa Luxemburg argues that the formula, -- the right of nations to self-determination -- is essentially not a political and problematic guideline in the nationality question, but only a means of avoiding that question.
- A New Weave
Popular Education in Canada and Central America
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1987
A resource for educators working for social change in community groups, trade unions, churches, the peace movement, women's groups, international development organizations, Central America and other solidarity networks.
- A New Weave
Popular Education in Canada and Central America
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1986
A resource for educators working for social change in community groups, trade unions, churches, the peace movement, women's groups, international development organizations, Central American and other solidarity networks.
- News & Letters: Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2006 - 2007
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2006
We aim to help fill the void on the question of "what happens after" by creatively rethinking and restating his concept of "revolution in permanence" for today.
- On Organization
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Discusses the democratic organizational forms appropriate to libertarian socialist organizations.
- One Vote for Democracy
Consensus vs. democracy
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1986
Makes the case that the democratic model is better than the consensus model for activist group decision-making.
- Ontological "Difference" and the Neo-Liberal War on the Social
Deconstruction and Deindustrialization
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2001
We have today legions of people with a smattering of knowledge turning out reams of books filled with buzz words that could be (and have been) produced by a computer program, and could be (and are) picked up in peer-group shop talk in a few months at the nearest humanities program or academic conference. Everyone these people don't like is trapped in a "gaze"; everyone "constitutes" their "identity" by "discourse"; to the fuddy-duddy "master narratives" that talk about such indelicate subjects as world accumulation these people counterpose "pastiche" and "bricolage", the very idea of being in any way systematic smacking of "totalitarianism"; it is blithely assumed that everyone except heterosexual white males now and for all time have been "subversives" (one wonders why we are still living under capitalism); a crippling relativism makes it somehow "imperial" to criticize public beheadings in Saudi Arabia or cliterodectomy practiced on five-year old girls in the Sudan.
- Perspective for Conscious Change in Everyday Life
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1961
Guy Debord says that to study everyday life would be a completely absurd undertaking, unable even to grasp anything of its object, if this study was not expressly for the purpose of transforming everyday life.
- Reform and Revolution
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1968
An essay taken from Andre Gorz's Le Socialisme Difficile in which he discusses how socialist strategy can aim to crate the objective and subjective conditions which will make mass revolutionary action and engagement in a successful trail of strength with the bourgeoise possible.
- Revolution Re-Assessed
Politics of Human Liberation
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1980
The political objectives and beliefs of the Australian-based Libertarian Socialist Organisation.
- Sisterhood, Interrupted
From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2007
A study of controversies in the feminist movement from the 1960s to the 2000s. Siegel wants readers to know about the multifaceted and contentious history of what is called feminism's "second wave" so that they can avoid both the trap of rebelling against its supposed stodgy "political correctness" and that of idealizing its supposedly harmonious "sisterhood".
- Social Reform or Revolution
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1908
Rosa Luxemburg's attack on reformism.
- Socialism and Revolution
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1973
Representative democracy in every industrially advanced country is in a state of profound crisis. But we have been accustomed for so long to accept democracy in the form of its outward appearances and parliamentary institutions that its decay often does not become apparent to us until those institutions have been either brushed aside or reduced to a purely decorative role.
- Solidarity As We See It
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1967
Ten Points on Solidarity's Socialist position - the compromised nature of the "Bolsheviks" and trade unions, the need to "build from below," the desire to see themselves as "merely an instrument of working class action."
- Solidarity (US) Founding Statement
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1986
Adopted at the founding national convention of SOLIDARITY in the Spring of 1986.
- Strategy for Labour
A Radical Proposal
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1967
- Thinking About Self-Determination
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1994
Does that familiar canon of the left, 'the right to self-determination', actually mean anything, or is it an empty slogan whose main utility is that it relieves us of the trouble of thinking critically?
- Traité du Savoir-Vivre for the Occupy Wall Street Generations
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2011
Once upon a time, twenty thousand people descended on Wall Street, the capitol of capital, occupied it nonviolently, and won exactly what they demanded. This is not a fairy tale. It really happened. This is the story of how it happened.
- The Two Souls of Socialism
Socialism from Above vs. Socialism from Below
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1970
It was Marx who finally brought the two ideas of Socialism and Democracy together, because he developed a theory which made the synthesis possible for the first time. The heart of the theory is this proposition: that there is a social majority which has the interest and motivation to change the system, and that the aim of socialism can be the education and mobilization of this mass-majority. This is the exploited class, the working class, from which comes the eventual motive-force of revolution. Hence a socialism-from-below is possible, on the basis of a theory which sees the revolutionary potentialities in the broad masses, even if they seem backward at a given time and place. Marxism came into being, in self-conscious struggle against the advocates of the Educational Dictatorship, the Savior-Dictators, the revolutionary elitists, the communist authoritarians, as well as the philanthropic dogooders and bourgeois liberals.
- Walking: We Ask Questions
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2003
An essay from the book We Are Everywhere by the Notes From Nowhere Collective.
- We Can Change the World
The Real Meaning Of Everyday Life
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1991
Stratman draws on his experiences as a parent in the Boston school busing battle and later as Washington director of the National PTA, interviews with British coal miners and striking American meatpackers, and wide ranging research and historical analysis, to show that fundamental social change is possible. The key to changing the world he argues, lies in a different view of ordinary people.
- What Do We Do Now? Building a Social Movement in the Aftermath of Free Trade
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1989
We have the potential to create a social movement in this country that goes beyond single-issue organizing to work toward an integrated vision of a more just and caring society.
- Who Advocates Spontaneity?
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1973
The working class can come to understand its power to act only by acting.
- Wobblies & Zapatistas
Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical Theory
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2008
Wobblies and Zapatistas offers readers an encounter between two generations and two traditions. Staughton Lynd and Andrej Grubacic meet in dialogue in an effort to bring together the anarchist and Marxist traditions, to discuss the writing of history by those who make it, and to remind us of the idea that 'my country is the world'.
Experts on Strategies for Social Change in the Sources Directory
- Michael Riordon
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