NEW FROM MEP PUBLICATIONS
Awakening of Geometrical Thought in Early Culture
by Paulus Gerdes
ISBN 0-930656-75X, cloth only $49.50, 200 pages, 2003
What is the origin of mathematics? Where did
symbols and terms used by Bronze Age scribes come from? Gerdes finds the answer
in human work?the activity of making tools, objects, and utensils?and the
subsequent dynamic evolution to abstract concepts. He traces geometrical
thinking in early history and also finds it in indigenous peoples? social
activities that have survived colonization.
In his foreword, Dirk Struik sees Gerdes's work as
having wide application in improving school instruction in mathematics.
James Connolly and the Reconquest of Ireland
by Priscilla Metscher
ISBN 0-930656-74-1, cloth only $47.50, 256 pages, 2002
The story of the continuing Irish freedom struggle is incomplete without a
reassessment of the role of James Connolly. Connolly was prominent in the
Irish, British, and U.S. labor movements, a Marxist socialist, and a militant
Irish patriot. Executed by the British as a leader of the Easter Rising in
1916, he was also one of the first theoreticians of the labor movement to come
from the working class.
Connolly's dramatic career corresponded roughly to the life span of the
Second International (1889-1914). His dedication to Irish socialist politics
began with the founding of the Irish Socialist Republican Party in 1896. He was
the first to link the fight for socialism in Ireland to the struggle for
national liberation. In the United States from 1903 to 1910, Connolly learned
strike strategy working as an IWW organizer and contended with Daniel De Leon
over socialist priorities.
On his return to Ireland, the evolution of his thought placed him in the
left wing of the Second International during World War I and led to his
participation in the Easter Rising. Connolly wrote primarily on immediate
issues, but dimensions of his thought survive. In addition to Irish
independence and revolutionary theory, political problems relating to religion
and to the emancipation of women were of serious concern to Connolly. Above
all, Connolly's intellectual legacy makes an outstanding contribution to a
socialist understanding of the national question.
Organizing in the Depression South: A Communist's
Memoir
by James S. Allen
ISBN 0-930656-73-3, cloth only $39.95, 155 pages, 2001
In 1930 Alabama, the Great Depression was pushing both sharecroppers and
urban workers from poverty into starvation. Jim Crow segregation and lynch law
perpetuated semifeudal conditions; Black civil and political rights were nonexistent.
Into this nightmare came 24-year-old James S. Allen and his wife Isabelle as
organizers. Combining stealth and bravado, they started the weekly Southern
Worker, published in secrecy but widely circulated as an open publication
of the Communist Party.
Their aim was "subversive," to change the social order, to uproot
its remnants of slavery, and to humanize relations between Blacks and whites
with socialism as a future goal. The Southern Worker became the
organizing tool to shatter taboos with nonsegregated trade-union and civil
rights meetings, to form the first racially integrated unions of sharecroppers,
and to rescue victims of Southern courts.
The Allens were eyewitness to the brutality, murder, and arson endured and
resisted by African Americans in the Deep South. Covering the Scottsboro case
as a reporter, James Allen learned details (included here) unrecorded in
standard histories.
This political memoir records the heavy toll paid, in arrests, beatings, and
lynchings, by Black and white Communists and their allies in struggle. James
and Isabelle Allen's front-line soldiering suggests reconsideration of the
starting date conventionally assigned to the Civil Rights movement.
Dialectics of the U.S. Constitution: Selected
Writings of Mitchell Franklin
edited by James M. Lawler
ISBN 0-930656-65-2, cloth only $55.00, 200 pages, 2000
Mitchell Franklin (1902?1986) is described by the Buffalo Law Review
as the foremost Marxist legal philosopher in the English-speaking world. In
these selected writings, Franklin, a professor of law at Tulane University for
37 years, discusses how the development of natural law from an idealist to a materialist
concept in the transition from feudalism to capitalism is reflected in the
drafting of the U.S. Constitution and its interpretation today.
African American History & Radical
Historiography: Essays in Honor of Herbert Aptheker
edited by Herbert Shapiro
ISBN 0-930656-72-5, cloth only $29.95, 368 pages, 1998
Fifty-five years ago a young historian published American Negro Slave
Revolts, a book that initially met fierce resistance from established
historians but came to change the way African American history is understood
and to have a wide impact on the writing of history in general. Herbert
Aptheker went on to edit the massive 7-volume Documentary History of the
Negro People in the United States. A close friend and colleague of W. E. B.
Du Bois, Aptheker for years served as custodian of the Du Bois papers, arranged
for their deposit at the University of Massachusetts, and meticulously edited
for publication a multivolume set of the Du Bois writings and a three-volume
collection of his correspondence.
Contents: Analyses of African American historiography and Aptheker?s
role. Essays by 18 scholars, including Sterling Stuckey (U. Calif., Riverside):
?Taken together, American Negro Slave Revolts and Documentary History
constitute a contribution to history from the bottom up that is second to
none?; Manning Marable (Columbia U.): ?For an entire generation of young
African-Americans, our entry into learning about our own people?s experience in
this country was Herbert?s Documentary History.? Discussion by Eric
Foner, Jesse Lemisch, and Manning Marable on Aptheker?s historical scholarship.
Plus stories of personal and career influence. Staughton Lynd on Yale
historians? attempt to block an Aptheker seminar on Du Bois. Essays with the
?radical eye? of the Aptheker tradition: Barbara Bush on Anglo-Saxon
representations of Afro-Cubans; Gerald Horne on gangsters and capitalism; Gary
Okihiro on colonialism; others on Truman and the start of the Cold War, and on
?political correctness? today.
Reds, Racial Justice, and Civil Liberties: Michigan
Communists during the Cold War
by Edward C. Pintzuk
ISBN 0-930656-70-9 cloth $39.95 225 pages 1997
ISBN 0-930656-71-7 paper $14.95 225 pages 1997
This book calls into question commonly held assumptions about the U.S.
Communist Party by examining its work in Michigan in the decades immediately
after World War II. As Cold War ideologies hardened, 1945-1960 was a difficult
period in the history of the Left, and Edward C. Pintzuk demonstrates that this
history has continued to be misunderstood. He delves into unpublished papers in
library archives and private collections, examines FBI files, analyzes court
decisions, interviews participants. He weighs the charge of Soviet domination.
His specific concerns are the concrete details of what Michigan Communists
did-their goals and methods, as well as what they actually accomplished-during
those years.
Working through the Civil Rights Congress, the Michigan District of the
CPUSA organized the defense of victims of racial injustice, perhaps the most
searing case being that of Lemas Woods, an African American soldier convicted
of murder on flimsy evidence. Government efforts to deport almost 60
Michiganders for political reasons were another focus of activity. Michigan
Communists also joined such significant national campaigns as that against the
House Un-American Activities Committee.
The Party made political misjudgments that damaged its own effectiveness,
caused in part by unrelentingly hostile media and government persecution.
Pintzuk argues that nonetheless Communist activities during the Cold War were
able to challenge racial bigotry and oppression, strengthen Bill of Rights
protections, and raise left and liberal political consciousness.
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