Dave Holmes
Although small, Sydney-based Resistance Books can lay claim to being Australia's largest socialist publishing house — indeed, it is really the country's only socialist publisher. Currently, its catalogue lists almost 70 books and pamphlets, and 2004 should see a very solid expansion.
Historically, Resistance Books has been associated with the Democratic Socialist Party (today the Democratic Socialist Perspective, an internal current within the Socialist Alliance) and the youth organisation Resistance (an independent affiliate of the Socialist Alliance).
Shortly heading to the printer are pamphlets presenting the DSP's positions on Cuba and China: The Cuban Revolution in the Epoch of Neo-Liberal Globalisation and The Class Nature of the People's Republic of China.
Later in the year the first volume will be released of a projected three-volume history of the DSP, by national secretary John Percy, covering the stormy period 1965-72, which saw the emergence in Australia of the mass movement against the Vietnam War and the early development of an effective revolutionary socialist current.
A central feature of Resistance Books' publishing activity is the Resistance Marxist Library project. Currently there are 18 titles and a further eight are planned for this year, to make available some of the classic works of Marxism in attractive modern editions with contemporary introductions, explanatory notes and glossaries.
Heavily featured in the series are works by the founders of modern socialism Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Russian Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, and James P. Cannon, a pioneer American communist and the founder and longtime leader of the US Trotskyist movement.
The Class Struggles in France: From the February Revolution to the Paris Commune brings together Marx's three main works dealing with the 19th century class conflicts in France — works which are particularly important in the development of his theory of the state.
The Fight against Fascism in the USA is a rich collection featuring articles by Cannon and others dealing with five decades of experiences of the American Trotskyist movement in the struggle against homegrown fascist and incipient fascist formations.
An edition of Engels' classic 1884 work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State will soon go to print. It includes an introduction by Pat Brewer that both defends Engels' key thesis and updates some of the argument in light of contemporary scientific evidence.
Another new title will deal with Lenin's fight against the Economist current at the beginning of the 20th century. The centrepiece of this collection is his famous work What is to be Done?
The modern world is full of books but very few of them shed any light on how this world operates — how imperialist capitalism exploits the vast working and poor majority. Even less offer any valid pointers to how this rotten system might be junked and a better one put in its place.
Resistance Books is concerned with bringing out cheaply priced books and pamphlets which deal with contemporary problems from the point of view of a fundamental critique of the whole system. It seeks to present Marxist works that can be weapons in the struggle for a better world.
[Check out <http://www.resistancebooks.com>.]
From Green Left Weekly, April 7, 2004.
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