Radical Ebook Archive

Where to find us

2011-09-02T21:06:00.000-07:00

We're still uploading books. Mostly out-of-print and hard to find ones, but straight to venues like library.nu

If we upload anything exciting, we'll inform you here, but check there for our handiwork. We'll try to update links and make sure everything we've already posted on this blog stays alive, but consider this our last communique for a while.

Coming soon...

2011-08-13T17:46:00.000-07:00

We just scanned and formatted the first version of E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class that's designed for easy e-book reader reflow.

Expect it soon. You're welcome.

UPDATE: Made some changes, fixed a few broken links, expect a redesign and those promised new releases soon.

Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton

2011-04-24T17:37:00.001-07:00

In this combative, controversial book, Terry Eagleton takes issue with the prejudice that Marxism is dead and done with. Taking ten of the most common objections to Marxism—that it leads to political tyranny, that it reduces everything to the economic, that it is a form of historical determinism, and so on—he demonstrates in each case what a woeful travesty of Marx's own thought these assumptions are. In a world in which capitalism has been shaken to its roots by some major crises, Why Marx Was Right is as urgent and timely as it is brave and candid. Written with Eagleton's familiar wit, humor, and clarity, it will attract an audience far beyond the confines of academia.

Download

http://tinyurl.com/3k3v7t5

Zizek on Revolutionary Violence

2011-04-22T10:28:00.001-07:00

A snippet preview of the new issue of Jacobin.

Citing Badiou, Žižek determines that democratic procedures, under capitalist conditions, conceal the further perpetuation of institutional domination (or violence) over the oppressed: “In “democratic” procedures (which, of course, can have a positive role to play), no matter how radical our anti-capitalism, solutions are sought solely through those democratic mechanisms which themselves form part of the apparatuses of the “bourgeois” state that guarantees the undisturbed reproduction of capital. In this precise sense, Badiou was right to claim that today the name of the ultimate enemy is not capitalism, empire, exploitation, or anything similar, but democracy itself. It is the “democratic illusion,” the acceptance of democratic mechanisms as providing the only framework for all possible change, which prevents any radical transformation of capitalist relations.”

Furthermore:

Closely linked to this need to de-fetishize democracy is the need to de-fetishize its negative counterpart, namely violence. Badiou has recently proposed the formula of “defensive violence”: renounce violence as the principal modus operandi, and focus instead on creating free spaces at a distance from state power (like the early Solidarno in Poland); resort to violence only when the state itself uses violence to crush and subdue these “liberated zones.” The trouble with this formula is that it relies on a deeply problematic distinction between the “normal” functioning of the state apparatuses and the “excessive” exercise of state violence. In contrast, the Marxist notion of class struggle — more precisely, of the priority of class struggle over classes conceived as positive social entities — proposes the thesis that “peaceful” social life is itself sustained by (state) violence, i.e., that it is an expression or effect of the predominance of one class over another. In other words, one cannot separate violence from the state conceived as an apparatus of class domination: from the standpoint of the oppressed, the very existence of a state is a violent fact (in the same sense in which Robespierre claimed there was no need to prove that the king had committed any crime, since the very existence of the king was a crime in itself, an offense against the freedom of the people). In this sense, every act of violence against the state on the part of the oppressed is ultimately “defensive.” Not to concede this point is, nolens volens, to “normalize” the state and accept that its own acts of violence are merely contingent excesses to be dealt with through democratic reforms. This is why the standard liberal motto — that violence is never legitimate, even though it may sometimes be necessary to resort to it — is insufficient. From a radical emancipatory perspective, this formula should be reversed: for the oppressed, violence is always legitimate (since their very status is the result of the violence they are exposed to), but never necessary (it will always be a matter of strategy whether or not use violence against the enemy)

Spicy Stuff!

Read the entire excerpt here.

The Plague of Fantasies by Slavoj Zizek

2011-03-21T09:23:00.001-07:00

The Plague of Fantasies: Zizek explores the relations between fantasy and ideology and the intensifying antagonism between the ever greater abstraction of our lives—whether through digitization or the market—and the deluge of pseudo-concrete images which surround us.

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mirror 1

Jacobin + Spring 2011 issue

2011-03-19T22:11:00.001-07:00

The best new journal to come out of the left, especially the North American student left, in a while…

Editor's Note

"And Yet It Moves"

Essays

Burn the Constitution — Seth Ackerman

Beyond the Fields — Steve Early

The Superman Conditional — Peter Frase

Storm the Ivies! — Connor Kilpatrick

Letter to the Next Left — Chris Maisano

Reflections on the Second International — Ian Morrison

In Defense of Grand Narratives — Jason Schulman

Book Reviews

James Petras M.I.A. — Max Ajl

on Zionism, Militarism and the Decline of U.S. Power by James Petras

Pessimism of the Will — Mike Beggs

on How to Change the World by Eric Hobsbawm

Culture

Lil B and the Based Mode of Production — Gavin Mueller

Debate

Lenny Bruce is Not Afraid — Jake Blumgart

a reply to James Heartfield

Jacobin magazine – Winter 2011

2010-12-28T15:12:00.001-08:00

“Jacobin is a magazine of culture and polemic that Edmund Burke ceaselessly berates on his Twitter page. Each of our issue's contents are poured over in taverns and other houses of ill-repute and best enjoyed with a well-shaken can of lukewarm beer.

Published in the District of Columbia four times per year, we feature a wide-range of writers and artists who aim to inspire critical dialogue in the age of Fukuyama.”

download

torrent

The Minimal Self by Christopher Lasch

2010-09-23T20:25:00.001-07:00

DOWNLOAD

mirror 1

Jacobin + a magazine of culture and polemic

2010-09-17T22:09:00.001-07:00

Some good reads here, in particular:

Take This Job and Share It — Chris Maisano

Why We Loved the Zapatistas — Bhaskar Sunkara

Let Them Eat Diversity — an interview with Walter Benn Michaels

Some more uploads coming soon, stay frosty my friends.

[requested] The Century by Alain Badiou

2010-09-07T17:25:00.001-07:00

As requested … I have some more Badiou around, not a fan personally though.

Everywhere, the twentieth century has been judged and condemned: the century of totalitarian terror, of utopian and criminal ideologies, of empty illusions, of genocides, of false avant-gardes, of democratic realism everywhere replaced by abstraction.

It is not Badiou's wish to plead for an accused that is perfectly capable of defending itself without the authors aid. Nor does he seek to proclaim, like Frantz, the hero of Sartre's Prisoners of Altona, 'I have taken the century on my shoulders and I have said: I will answer for it!' The Century simply aims to examine what this accursed century, from within its own unfolding, said that it was. Badiou's proposal is to reopen the dossier on the century - not from the angle of those wise and sated judges we too often claim to be, but from the standpoint of the century itself.

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mirror 1 (some pages may be missing, mostly from Ch. 2)

The Origin of Capitalism by E.M. Wood

2010-09-06T20:24:00.001-07:00

In this original and provocative book Ellen Meiksins Wood reminds us that capitalism is not a natural and inevitable consequence of human nature, nor is it simply an extension of age-old practices of trade and commerce. Rather, it is a late and localized product of very specific historical conditions, which required great transformations in social relations and in the human interaction with nature. This new edition has been substantially revised and expanded, with several new chapters. It contains extensive new material, especially on imperialism, anti-Eurocentric history, capitalism and the nation-state and the differences between capitalism and non-capitalist commerce. The author also traces links between the origin of capitalism and contemporary conditions such as 'globalization,' ecological degradation and the current agricultural crisis.

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mirror 1

The Myth of Mondragon by Sharryn Kasmir

2010-09-03T13:25:00.001-07:00

This is the first critical account of the internationally renowned Mondragon cooperatives of the Basque region of Spain. The Mondragon cooperatives are seen as the leading alternative model to standard industrial organization; they are considered to be the most successful example of democratic decision making and worker ownership. However, the author argues that the vast scholarly and popular literature on Mondragon idealizes the cooperatives by falsely portraying them as apolitical institutions and by ignoring the experiences of shop floor workers. She shows how this creation of an idealized image of the cooperatives is part of a new global ideology that promotes cooperative labor-management relations in order to discredit labor unions and working-class organizations; this constitutes what she calls the "myth" of Mondragon.

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ifile.it (archived .html)

Debating Empire (ed. Gopal Balakrishnan)

2010-08-27T10:27:00.001-07:00

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book Empire has been hailed as a latter day Communist Manifesto. As much as it has seduced and delighted some, however, it has enraged and frustrated others. In this collection, a series of some of the most acute international theorists and commentators of our times subject the book to trenchant and probing analysis from political, economic and philosophical perspectives, and Hardt and Negri respond to their questions and criticisms.

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Ifile.it (scanned, djvu, OCR, 4.037 MB)

The Communist Hypothesis by Alain Badiou

2010-08-10T04:49:00.001-07:00

The Meaning of Sarkozy was okay, but I don’t really mess with the man. I’ll try to parse through this new little red book at some point, but Badiou’s prose is usually too convoluted for my Anglo-American mind and post-Maoists tend to unnerve me. Here’s something generic from the publisher:

Alain Badiou’s formulation of the “communist hypothesis” has traveled around the world since it was first aired in early 2008, in his book The Meaning of Sarkozy. The hypothesis is partly a demand to reconceptualize communism after the twin deaths of the Soviet Union and neoliberalism, but also a fresh demand for universal emancipation. As “third way” reforms prove as empty in practice as in theory, Badiou’s manifesto is a galvanizing call to arms that needs to be reckoned with by anyone concerned with the future of our planet.

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Mediafire

If anyone can convert this double-page scan into an ebook compatible single page scan, it’d be most appreciated.

The Parallax View by Slavoj Zizek

2010-07-16T12:26:00.001-07:00

The Parallax View is Slavoj Zizek's most substantial theoretical work to appear in many years; Zizek himself describes it as his magnum opus. Parallax can be defined as the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position. Zizek is interested in the "parallax gap" separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an "impossible short circuit" of levels that can never meet. From this consideration of parallax, Zizek begins a rehabilitation of dialectical materialism.

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ifile.it

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

2010-04-08T16:55:00.001-07:00

Darkness at Noon is a novel by the Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940. His best-known work, it tells the tale of Rubashov, a Bolshevik old guard and 1917 revolutionary who is first cast out and then imprisoned and tried for treason by the Soviet government he once helped create.

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http://ifile.it/cflqp62/koestler__arthur_-_darkness_at_noon.txt

Commonwealth by Hardt and Negri

2010-03-28T15:03:00.001-07:00

Commonwealth, last and richest of the Empire trilogy, is a powerful and ambitious reappropriation of the whole tradition of political theory for the Left. Clarifying Foucault's ambiguous notion of biopower, deepening the authors' own proposal for the notion of multitude, it offers an exhilarating summa of the forms and possibilities of resistance today. It is a politically as well as an intellectually invigorating achievement.
--Fredric Jameson, Duke University

I approach this skeptically, but I’m due to reread the trilogy at some point. I was introduced to Empire and Multitude by a few professors when I entered college a couple of years ago, but I was far more impressed by reading Marx, those from the Trotskyist tradition and the ‘humanist’ writing of the Praxis school and Marshall Berman. That being said, I’m willing to give it another shot. The series is too influential to be completely ignored.

DOWNLOAD:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=U105FFP9 (quality PDF, OCRed)

State, Power, Socialism by Nicos Poulantzas

2010-03-10T13:24:00.001-08:00

Developing themes of his earlier works, Poulantzas here advances a vigorous critique of contemporary Marxist theories of the state, arguing against a general theory of the state, and identifying forms of class power crucial to socialist strategy that goes beyond the apparatus of the state. This new edition includes an introduction by Stuart Hall, originally published in New Left Review, which critically appraises Poulantzas's achievement.

DOWNLOAD

http://www.gigasize.com/get.php?d=9t4krlqjxqb

11.8mb rar, expands to 13mb pdf scan, OCRed

March 4 National Day of Action

2010-03-03T23:08:00.001-08:00

See here for more information about the national day of action.

Related reading:

Alex Callinicos’ short book Universities in a Neoliberal World

James Turley’s review of that book

The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935

2010-03-02T23:25:00.001-08:00

Can’t take credit for the scan and the upload, but I’ve been looking for Gramsci’s selected writings forever so I thought I’d share it. Use it well and make the man proud (no ‘Eurocommunist’ bastardizations please).

DOWNLOAD

http://ifile.it/2mkez7t

The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir

2010-02-23T20:41:00.001-08:00

The book follows the personal lives of a close-knit group of French intellectuals from the end of WWII to the mid fifties. The title refers to the scholar-bureaucrats of imperial China. The characters at times see themselves as ineffectual "mandarins" as they attempt to discern what role, if any, intellectuals will have in influencing the political landscape of the world after WWII. As in De Beauvoir's other works, themes of Feminism, Existentialism, and personal morality are explored as the characters navigate not only the intellectual and political landscape but also their shifting relationships with each other.

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ifile.it

Against the Law: Labour Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt by Ching Kwan Lee

2010-02-21T01:36:00.001-08:00

In a superb recent piece in the London Review of Books, Perry Anderson described this work as the following: “Although quite different in mode and scale, in power nothing like it has appeared since E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class. In fact, it could well have been called The Unmaking and Remaking of the Chinese Working Class. The product of seven years’ research and interview work on the ground, it is an ethnographic and analytic masterpiece.” High enough praise for me. Be sure to buy a hardcopy if you can afford it. Comrade Lee’s scholarship should be supported.

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ifile.it

Ends in Sight by Gregory Elliott

2010-02-19T16:35:00.001-08:00

Reading through this now, also planning to read Elliott’s older work on Perry Anderson at some point. Description and links below…

***

Following the disappearance of the Soviet Union, scholars across the political spectrum tackled the world-historical significance of the end of communism. This book addresses the balance-sheets of modern political history offered by three writers -- Francis Fukuyama, Eric Hobsbawm and Perry Anderson -- comparing them with the future projected by Marx in The Communist Manifesto. Gregory Elliott argues that Marx is central to all three accounts and that, along with the Manifesto, they form a quartet of analyses of the results and prospects of capitalism and socialism, which are of enduring significance for the Left. This book provides a readable survey of key historical and political thinkers that will appeal to anyone interested in modern political thought.

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rapidshare (formatted, ebook-ready PDF)

History and Class Consciousness by György Lukács

2010-02-14T22:36:00.001-08:00

In between hitting on other people’s girlfriends I’ve spent a portion of my Valentine’s weekend reading Louis Althusser and buying his "epistemological break" argument. I’m more of a fan than I should be, perhaps I should reread this 1923 classic to cleanse my system? See Wikipedia for more info.

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ifile.it (scanned PDF)

Who’s Gerardo?

2010-02-12T13:50:00.001-08:00

The mildly amusing poll on the right sidebar has prompted this question a few times. I’ve never been more disappointed in my life.

Listen and learn: