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From International Socialism (1st series), No.72, October 1974, p.32.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
CHRISTOPHER FARMAN’s The General Strike is now out in paperback, at £1.00, from Panther Books. This journal should have reviewed it when it came out in hardback, except that the reviewer absconded with the book. According to all accounts, including that in Socialist Worker, it is a useful book to have around.
Pluto Press has an interesting autumn and winter programme. Due out any time now is Michael Kidron’s collection of essays, Capitalism and Theory (£1.50 paperback). Many of the essays appeared in old issues of this journal, are now out of print, and still worth reading. There are two new essays, on Waste, and on modern imperialism, which are a must, although far from easy reading.
October promises well, with a reissue of Tony Cliff’s most original and enduring contribution to Marxist theory, State Capitalism in Russia (£1.00 paperback); Chris Harman’s Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe, a mighty labour (£1.50 paperback); and the Minutes of the Bolshevik Central Committee in the actual process of the revolution (£2.70 paperback). Also due are three plays by Steve Gooch, 1975’s Big Red Diary (on the theme of 1945, the year that saw our very unbright new world stagger out of Hot War), and a cheap edition of Sheila Rowbotham!s Hidden from History (75p). Sheila’s Women, Resistance and Revolution, incidentally, has just been paperbacked by Penguin Books this month, at 60p, as has the full edition of that masterpiece of satire, The Good Soldier Sveyk (£1.25).
Back to Pluto. In January comes the second of their Workers’ Handbooks. Pat Kinnersly’s Hazards of Work has, by any standards, been a best seller. It will be joined, hopefully with equal success, by Christopher Hird’s Your Employer’s Profits: a Workers’ Guide to Company Accounts. Like Hazards, this will cost 90p in bookshops, and less in bulk orders. Also out in January, the first volume of Tony Cliff-s long-awaited, everlastingly announced Lenin. Volume One is entitled Building the Party. Two more volumes will follow, the second on the October Revolution, and the third on the revolution’s isolation and defeat.
Colin Barker Archive | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 13.3.2008