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Thursday 22 July 2010

Lenin, Lukacs and changing the world: new short books from Counterfire

Strategy and tactics: How the left can organise to transform society
By John Rees

What makes change happen? What makes some people fight to change the world while others remain passive? For those who want change, what sort of political organisation could make it happen faster?

Drawing on the experience of recent mass movements and past revolutions, this booklet suggests ways in which the Left can organise to maximise the effectiveness of all those who want to transform society.

It looks at what has worked in the past and what has gone wrong. And it concludes with a call to all those who have fought to change the world to come together in a new form of organisation, to shape the outcome of the battles that lie ahead.

Capitalism and class consciousness: The ideas of Georg Lukacs
By Chris Nineham

Georg Lukacs (pictured above) was the great theorist of revolution in the 21st century. In the process of explaining the principles of the Russian revolution he provided answers to some vital questions:

How do capitalist ideas maintain a hold on our consciousness?
In what circumstances do people become radicalised?
And how can socialists build genuinely mass revolutionary movements?



Lukacs' revolutionary ideas of the 1920s were suppressed by Stalin and have been marginalised by academics and many on the Left. They have lived a kind of underground existence re-emerging whenever fundamental change is being discussed.

The book introduces his ideas and argues they are vital to our world of crisis and war.

Each of these is £4. See Counterfire, which will soon have details of how to order.  

More on Lukacs: my 'Lukacs after Leninism' article.

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