A centralized location for your leftist literature

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Sibt-e Hassan, Mazi Ki Mazar | سبط حسن، ماضی کے مزار

Formats Available: .PDF Read online (transliteration) 

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پاکستان میں تہزیب کی ارتقاء

سید سبط حسن 

The Evolution of Culture in Pakistan (1976)

Syed Sibte Hassan 

PDF

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"بھگت سنگھ اور اس کے ساتھی"

اجے کمار گھوش کے قلم سے

تعارف از سیّد سبطِ حسن

PDF (1) 

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Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (2005)

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In Conquest, Smith places Native American women at the center of her analysis of sexual violence, challenging both conventional definitions of the term and conventional responses to the problem.

Beginning with the impact of the abuses inflicted on Native American children at state-sanctioned boarding schools from the 1880s to the 1980s, Smith adroitly expands our conception of violence to include environmental racism, population control and the widespread appropriation of Indian cultural practices by whites and other non-natives. Smith deftly connects these and other examples of historical and contemporary colonialism to the high rates of violence against Native American women—the most likely women in the United States to die of poverty-related illnesses, be victims of rape and suffer partner abuse.

Essential reading for scholars and activists, Conquest is the powerful synthesis of Andrea Smith’s intellectual and political work to date. By focusing on the impact of sexual violence on Native American women, Smith articulates an agenda that is compelling to feminists, Native Americans, other people of color and all who are committed to creating viable alternatives to state-based “solutions.”

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Audre Lorde, I Am Your Sister: Uncollected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde (2011)

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Audre Lorde was not only a famous poet; she was also one of the most important radical black feminists of the past century. Her writings and speeches grappled with an impressive broad list of topics, including sexuality, race, gender, class, disease, the arts, parenting, and resistance, and they have served as a transformative and important foundation for theorists and activists in considering questions of power and social justice. Lorde embraced difference, and at each turn she emphasized the importance of using it to build shared strength among marginalized communities. I Am Your Sister is a collection of Lorde's non-fiction prose, written between 1976 and 1990, and it introduces new perspectives on the depth and range of Lorde's intellectual interests and her commitments to progressive social change. Presented here, for the first time in print, is a major body of Lorde's speeches and essays, along with the complete text of A Burst of Light and Lorde's landmark prose works Sister Outsider and The Cancer Journals. Together, these writings reveal Lorde's commitment to a radical course of thought and action, situating her works within the women's, gay and lesbian, and African American Civil Rights movements. They also place her within a continuum of black feminists, from Sojourner Truth, to Anna Julia Cooper, Amy Jacques Garvey, Lorraine Hansberry, and Patricia Hill Collins. I Am Your Sister concludes with personal reflections from Alice Walker, Gloria Joseph, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, and bell hooks on Lorde's political and social commitments and the indelibility of her writings for all who are committed to a more equitable society.

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Carlos Martínez, ‎Michael Fox, ‎JoJo Farrell, Venezuela Speaks!: Voices from the Grassroots (2010)

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Hans Bennett: Voices of Participatory Democracy in Venezuela: A Review of Venezuela Speaks! Voices from the Grassroots (2010)

A collection of interviews with activists and other contributors, this compelling oral history details Venezuela’s uprising and reorganization. For the last decade, Venezuela’s triumphant and ongoing Bolivarian Revolution has captured international attention. Poverty, inequality, and unemployment have all substantially dropped, while health, education, and living standards have seen a commensurate rise—and this chronicle is the real, bottom-up account. The stories shed light on the complex facets within the revolution, detailing the change in such realities as community media to land reform, cooperatives to communal councils, and the labor movement to the Afro-Venezuelan network. Offering a different perspective than that of the international mainstream media, which has focused predominantly on Hugo Chávez, these examples of democracy in action illustrate the vast cultural, economic, and racial differences within the country—all of which have impacted the current South American state.

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Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny, Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union (2006)

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Interview with Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny (2008)

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Himani Bannerji, Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti-Racism (1995)

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Himani Bannerji, The Dark Side of the Nation: Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism, and Gender (2000)

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[theshellofvenus-deactivated2013]

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theshellofvenus:

Gail Dines, Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality (2011)

I. http://ressourcesfeministes.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/pornland-introduction.pdf

II. http://ressourcesfeministes.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/pornland-part-2.pdf

III. http://ressourcesfeministes.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/pornland-part-3.pdf

Articles by Gail Dines on New Left Project

Gail Dines: Pornography is a Left Issue (2005)

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Learn a Language: Persian (Farsi) (Dari and Tajik included)

As Engels famously said, it’s “rather pleasing to read dissolute old Hafiz in the original language” (Engels to Marx in London, June 9 1853) 

Shaista Wahab, Beginner's Dari with Audio CD (PDF)

Persian Grammar, AK.S. Lambton (PDF)

John R. Perry, A Tajik Persian Reference Grammar  (PDF)

Dominic Parviz Brookshaw, Pouneh Shabani Jadidi, The Routledge Introductory Persian Course: Farsi Shirin Ast (Persian is Sweet) (PDF) (link to be fixed in future)

Did you know the word ‘balcony’ comes from the Persian word ‘balakhaneh’ (بالاخانه)? 

The language of Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and parts of Iraq, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Pakistan and northern parts of India! Languages like Urdu/Hindi, Pashto, Azeri, and Balochi have its root from Persian. Languages like Dari (Afghan Persian) and Tajik (Russianifed) are a few of the many dialects of Persian. It is written in the Nastaliq (Arabic) script. 

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Phillip Pomper, Yuri Felshtinsky, Trotsky's Notebooks, 1933-1935: Writings of Lenin, Dialectics and Evolutionism 

Formats Available:

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An excerpt of Trotsky's Notebooks is also available on the Socialist Appeal (IMT). 

From Amazon: 

"These two notebooks were discovered while Philip Pomper was doing research at Harvards Russian Research Center for a book on Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin after the Russian Revolution and were published by Columbia University for the first time in 1986. They present fascinating new insights into Trotskys philosophy, politics, and psychology and this volume is a significant addition to an understanding of his revolutionary career. They shed new light on his relationship to Lenin and Bolshevism, his criticism of dialectics and Darwin evolutionism, and his reflections of Freudian psychology as he ponders the relationship of the unconscious mind to the philosophical issues surrounding dialectics. The original Russian text of the notebooks, prepared and annotated by Felshtinsky, is also presented here to make the material available to readers of Russian."

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Daniel F. Vukovich, China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C. (2012)

Formats Available

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Fabio Lanza's helpful review of China and Orientalism

The New Orientalism: An Interview with Dan Vukovich in Two Parts: Part I / Part II (2013) — Fantastic interview that contributed greatly towards our recent project (here) focusing on Mao/GPCR-era/Post-Mao-era anti-revisionism

Dan Vukovich's exceptional China and Orientalism argues that there is a new, Sinological form of orientalism at work in the world. It has shifted from a logic of ‘essential difference’ to one of ‘sameness’ or general equivalence. "China" is now in a halting but inevitable process of becoming-the-same as the USA and the West. Orientalism is now closer to the cultural logic of capitalism, even as it shows the afterlives of colonial discourse. This shift reflects our era of increasing globalization; the migration of orientalism to area studies and the pax Americana; the liberal triumph at the "end" of history and the demonization of Maoism; an ever closer Sino-West relationship; and the overlapping of anti-communist and colonial discourses.

To make the case for this re-constitution of orientalism, this work offers an inter-disciplinary analysis of the China field broadly defined. Vukovich takes on specialist work on the politics, governance, and history of the Mao and reform eras, from the Great Leap Forward to Tiananmen, 1989; the Western study of Chinese film; recent work in critical theory which turns on ‘the China-reference"; and other global texts about or from China. Through extensive analysis, the production of Sinological knowledge is shown to be of a piece with Western global intellectual political culture.

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Edited by Susan Brownell, Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, and Thomas Laqueur, Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader (2002)

Formats Available

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.PDF (alternative link)

The past two centuries have witnessed tremendous upheavals in every aspect of Chinese culture and society. At the level of everyday life, some of the most remarkable transformations have occurred in the realm of gender. Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities is a mix of illuminating historical and ethnographic studies of gender from the 1700s to the present.

The essays in this highly creative collection are organized in pairs that alternate in focus between femininity and masculinity, between subjects traditionally associated with feminism (such as family life) and those rarely considered from a gendered point of view (like banditry). The chapters provide a wealth of interesting detail on such varied topics as court cases involving widows and homosexuals; ideal spouses of early-twentieth-century radicals; changing images of prostitutes; the masculinity of qigong masters; sexuality in the era of reform; and the eroticization of minorities. While most of the essays were specifically written for this volume, a few are reprinted as a testament to their enduring value.

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Joel Andreas, Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China's New Class (2009)

Formats Available

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Joel Andreas: "Changing Colours in China" (2008) -- An outstanding contribution towards a dialectical understanding of the tumultuous development of China's economy post-Mao to present-day capitalism. Here, he "traces the path of property relations, social services and income distribution in the PRC since the late seventies."

Rise of the Red Engineers explains the tumultuous origins of the class of technocratic officials who rule China today. In a fascinating account, author Joel Andreas chronicles how two mutually hostile groups—the poorly educated peasant revolutionaries who seized power in 1949 and China's old educated elite—coalesced to form a new dominant class. After triumphantly dispossessing the country's propertied classes, Mao and the Communist Party took radical measures to eliminate class distinctions based on education and, by 1966, the Cultural Revolution, aggravating antagonisms between the new political and old cultural elites. Ultimately, however, such attacks on both groups during the Cultural Revolution spurred an intriguing inter-elite unity, paving the way—after Mao's death—for the consolidation of a new class that soon combined their political and cultural resources. This story is told through a case study of Tsinghua University, which—as China's premier school of technology—was at the epicenter of these conflicts and became the party's preferred training ground for technocrats, including many of China's current leaders. Rise of the Red Engineers is a welcome contrast to scholarship on contemporary China that dismisses the Mao years as crazy or as irrelevant to the reform period. Andreas takes the ideology and policies of the Mao era seriously and judges the results of Mao's programs by their own stated goals.

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Dongping Han, The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village (2008)

Formats Available

.PDF

Excellent Review

Dongping Han: "The Great Leap Famine, the Cultural Revolution and Post-Mao Rural Reform: The Lessons of Rural Development in Contemporary China" (2003) -- Outstanding essay painstakingly detailing the post-Mao Deng-led revisionism applied to the Great Leap Forward and 1959-61 Famine

Further Reading:

Joseph Ball: Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward? (2006) -- Another superb anti-revisionist examination of the 1959-61 Famine

The Unknown Cultural Revolution challenges the established narrative of China's Cultural Revolution, which assumes that this period of great social upheaval led to economic disaster, the persecution of intellectuals, and senseless violence. Dongping Han offers a powerful account of the dramatic improvements in the living conditions, infrastructure, and agricultural practices of China's rural population that emerged in this period. Drawing on extensive local interviews and records in rural Jimo County, in Shandong Province, Han shows that the Cultural Revolution helped overthrow local hierarchies, establish participatory democracy and economic planning in the communes, and expand education and public services, especially for the elderly. Han lucidly illustrates how these changes fostered dramatic economic development in rural China.

The Unknown Revolution documents a neglected side of China's Cultural Revolution, demonstrating the potential of mass education and empowerment for radical political and economic transformation. It is a bold and provocative work, which demands the attention not only of students of contemporary Chinese history but of all who are concerned with poverty and inequality in the world today. When looking at the 80,000 or so rural disturbances that now occur every year throughout rural China, argues Han, it is important to recognize the past as prologue.

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A Critical Retrospective of the ANC/Nelson Mandela's Contradictory Legacy, Post-Apartheid South Africa, and Piero Gleijeses' Havana’s Policy in Africa, 1959-76: New Evidence from Cuban Archives

Piero Gleijeses: Havana’s Policy in Africa, 1959-76: New Evidence from Cuban Archives -- .PDF

Further Reading:

Anthony Monteiro: Nelson Mandela, The Contradictions Of His Life And Legacies

Mike Ely: Nelson Mandela's contradictions--The need to divide one into two

Benjamin Fogel: The Two Mandelas (Jacobin)

Nepali Maoists (UCPN-M): A Critique of Negotiated Betrayal in South Africa

Ron Jacobs: Don’t Blame Mandela for Our Failure

Nigel Gibson: The Limits of Black Political Empowerment -- Fanon, Marx, 'the Poors' and the 'new reality of the nation' in South Africa

Post-Apartheid South Africa and Neocolonialism

Jemima Pierre: Reconciliation is Not Decolonization

Inequality in post-apartheid South Africa

Karen Wald: Mandela thanks Cuba for its solidarity

Nicole Sarmiento: Cuba and the South African anti-apartheid struggle

Cuito Cuanavale: How Cuba fought for Africa’s freedom

Carlos Martinez: Cuito Cuanavale 25 Years On: Revolutionary Internationalism and the Struggle Against Colonialism and Apartheid

Nelson Mandela 'proven' to be a member of the Communist Party after decades of denial

Nelson Mandela: "An ideal for which I am prepared to die" (Mandela made this statement from the dock at the opening of his trial on charges of sabotage, Supreme Court of South Africa, Pretoria, April 20, 1964)

Shiv Sethi: The Marikana Massacre — Structural failure of post-apartheid South Africa

Mike Kuhlenbeck: Obama’s hypocrisy regarding Nelson Mandela

John Millington: Liberals Cannot Claim Nelson Mandela

Brian Becker: It was the CIA that helped jail Nelson Mandela

Vishwas Satgar: Reclaiming the South African Dream: Analysis of Post-Apartheid South Africa 17 Years On

Jerome Roos: South Africa’s untold tragedy of neoliberal apartheid

Lal Khan: South Africa’s ‘freedom’ dripping in blood

Peter Murray: Unfinished Revolution -- Post-Apartheid South Africa shows the need to take on capitalism at its roots

Charlie Kimber: Brief Retrospective of Nelson Mandela, 1918-2013

Louis Proyect on Dear Mandela: An oustanding 2011 documentary on current-day struggles in South Africa

A brief look at 2011 documentary, Dear Mandela

Patrick Bond: South Africa -- Public sector strike highlights post-apartheid’s contradictions

'Uneven and combined Marxism' within South Africa’s urban social movements

Visions of Freedom: New Documents from the Closed Cuban Archives

I came to the conclusion that as violence in this country was inevitable, it would be unrealistic to continue preaching peace and non-violence. This conclusion was not easily arrived at. It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle. I can only say that I felt morally obliged to do what I did.

--Nelson Mandela, "An ideal for which I am prepared to die" (1964)