by LINDSEY GERMAN
These books are a small selection of works by Marxists. All of them are a great read if you have some time over Xmas, or an ideal present for comrades. Most are still in print, if not, hunt them out second hand.
Stuart Macintyre, A Proletarian Science: Marxism in Britain 1917-1933 (Lawrence and Wishart 1986)
The author’s recent death prompted me to get this down from the shelves. It is theoretical but accessible, and tells the story of who the Marxists were in this period, and what were the ideas that influenced them. Many were self-taught worker intellectuals, miners and engineers, formed through the combination of activism and working class-education at a time when even secondary education was denied to many.
Cathy Porter, Alexandra Kollontai (revised edition, Merlin Books 2013)
The women’s liberation movement inspired many to look back at women in history. A stand-out was Alexandra Kollontai, the Russian revolutionary who headed up the Women’s Department for the Bolsheviks after 1917. Her writings on free love, women and the family, and much more, are still relevant. Porter tells her story as one of a very brave generation of women who fought Tsarist repression and deep misogyny in Russian society.
EH Carr, What is History? (Penguin 1961)
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