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"The Charles H. Kerr Company is a truly extraordinary example of living history. Here is the publisher of Gene Debs, Clarence Darrow, Mother Jones, Mary Marcy, Jack London, Carl Sandburg and hundreds of other outstanding figures-still at it, still fighting the good fight after a hundred glorious years. The American labor movement has a great heritage, and the Charles H. Kerr Company is a precious part of it. It deserves every support." -Studs Terkel

"What a remarkable history! How can it ever be estimated, the influence of the Kerr Company over all these years? Above all in this era of communication and the rising of the people all over the world, such a bond with expressions and education of the people must be truly celebrated-more than a statue of liberty: the Kerr Company is a true beacon." -Meridel LeSueur

"Charles H. Kerr has a magnificent record . . . . More importantly, it continues that tradition of courageous publishing in these difficult times. Kerr's list of titles provides us with excellent material to continue the fight for a just society." -Dennis Brutus

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 New Titles

Dreams & Everyday Life  Dreams & Everyday Life  Dreams & Everyday Life  Dreams & Everyday Life  Dreams & Everyday Life  Dreams & Everyday Life  Dreams & Everyday Life




DREAMS & EVERYDAY LIFE


By Penelope Rosemont

ANDRÉ BRETON, Surrealism, the IWW, Rebel Worker, Students for a Democratic Society and the Seven Cities of Cibola in Chicago, Paris & London ... A 1960s Notebook.

"The book is wonderful! I read nothing else till I finished it; a great and passionate evocation of those times–unapologetic and real."Diane di Prima


"Few books like this one give us the feeling of the elusive thing called "the spirit of the 60's."Michael Löwy


"Readers would be hard-pressed to find a better reminiscence of those days when, for an extended historical moment, Chicago again became the center of radical energies. Still, in all this, it is the personal that is most interesting and charming. The personalities, large and small, many of them oddball in the extreme, seemed perfectly suited to a moment in history when, as Rosemont says, life was supercharged with developments that we somehow expected would go on for decades—to know about the inner life of the sixties, this book is a good place to start." —Paul Buhle


"Thanks Penelope! Here’s to justice and remembrance of all our working class heroes!"Studs Terkel


 "A remarkable life record."Leon Despres


 "Rosemont's book is a passionate remembering. In an era when we are taught that there is no real history because nothing ever changes, that today's society is the way it has always been and will always be, amen!, remembering becomes a useful and subversive tool."Len Wallace

250 pages. $17 Paper


SURREALISM IN '68 SURREALISM IN '68 SURREALISM IN '68 SURREALISM IN '68 SURREALISM IN '68 SURREALISM IN '68 SURREALISM IN '68 SURREALISM IN '68



SURREALISM IN ‘68: Paris, Prague, Chicago
Dreams of Arson & the Arson of Dreams
Including Long Live Adventurism! From L’Archibras, June 18, 1968
Letters from François-René Simon, Marie-Dominique Massoni, Jean Benoît and Michel Zimbacca
With a Statement in Defense of the Students, June-July 1968


By Don Lacoss


THIS ESSAY
is a brief examination into surrealist activities in 1968, triangulated between Prague, Paris, and Chicago and anchored to two key surrealist texts, The Prague Platform and "Situation of Surrealism in the U.S." My intention is to show how surrealism responded to and participated in the electric events of ‘68, and to suggest how an understanding of the movement’s past can help instigate the next tremors to run through the atmosphere. To paraphrase Lautréamont, it is only a matter of having the awareness and insolence to accept them.


Historians will argue about the degree to which the global rebellions of 1968 can be linked
together or what (if any) catalysts triggered the transnational movements. But there can be no mistaking the pronounced cross-pollination of surrealist ideas and activities in ‘68.

32 pages. Paper $5.00




BENJAMIN PÉRET  BENJAMIN PÉRET  BENJAMIN PÉRET  BENJAMIN PÉRET  BENJAMIN PÉRET  BENJAMIN PÉRET  BENJAMIN PÉRET  BENJAMIN PÉRET  BENJAMIN PÉRET 



BENJAMIN PÉRET, A MENAGERIE IN REVOLT!
Selected Writings


Introduction by Franklin Rosemont. Afterword by Don LaCoss


"In Péret ‘bad conscience’ is done away with, censorship no longer exists, and ‘all is permitted'." André Breton

This collection is based on the pioneering anthology of Péret’s writings that first appeared in August 1970 in the SDS journal Radical America, introduced by Franklin Rosemont. This new, expanded and illustrated edition includes a selection of Péret’s incomparable poetry and stories, a wide range of critical essays on the practice of poetry, the struggle against capitalism, slave revolts in Brazil, Pre-Columbian art, and appreciations of the great surrealist artists Wifredo Lam, Jindrich Styrsky, and Toyen. An Afterword by Don LaCoss discusses the ecological dimension of Péret’s work.

"In this world of specialists and appointed robots, a man of truth is an archaism. Our time is one of nihilism, Péret, a man of hope, is a figure of the past. But at the same time is this not proof that he is the man and poet of the future?" Octavio Paz

"One of the most militant of the surrealist poets, Péret wrote about how poetry serves the revolution only when the revolution serves poetry. "from the Afterword by Don LaCoss

148 pages. Paper $14.00


 

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FLIVVER KING, A STORY OF FORD AMERICA

By Upton Sinclair

AMONG THE FINEST of modern American historical novels. It is history as it ought to be written---from the bottom up and the top down, with monumental sensitivity to the compromise and conflict between the two extremes. Its two stories, those of Henry Ford and Ford-worker Abner Shutt, unfold side-by-side, indeed dialectically. They are, in the end, one story: the saga of class and culture in "Ford-America."

Paperback $14.00.


BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER

HISTORY AGAINST MISERY

By David Roediger

IN THIS LAVISHLY illustrated collection of activist essays, articles and reviews from the late 70s to the present, the noted author of The Wages of Whiteness, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness and other pathbreaking critical studies of America's "white problem" focuses on the complex issue of MISERABILISM in its many and invariably oppressive forms.

"David  Roediger is renowned for his brilliant writings on whiteness, but few readers acknowledge what lay at the root of his work: his abiding hatred of all forms of oppression and exploitation. If you didn't know this before, History Against Misery ought to make it clear, for Roediger has put together a powerful collection of rants and chants against miserabilism, and a surrealist road map to liberated futures. This is one of those books we must keep close to us as we struggle to overthrow misery once and for all." -Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

"An exquisite corpus of work! Like any great history, Roediger's work is an act of rescue and restoration. The words, acts and deeds have always been out there, and here he meticulously gathers and reconstructs for us what has been willfully over-looked and disappeared. It is to the summer of our discontent that the surrealist brings us a wintry elation: humor, a poetics of resistance, purpose-ful deviance motivated by genuine compassion and a love of truth." -Blake Schwarzenbach, musician/writer

In this terrific collection of essays, the great radical historian David Roediger digs deep into his engagement with surrealism, sports, and subversion. It is unusual to read someone so good on such a range of topics, from Travis Tritt to W.E.B. Du Bois, from Andr_ Breton to Bugs Bunny. Those familiar with his other books will find here Another Side of David Roediger, but in this book he brings it all back home." -Eric Lott, author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class

This wonderful collection of essays is not only a powerful indictment of late capitalism-the system that "dulls and narrows human desire"-but also a fascinating survey of resistance voices, from the IWW to the Surrealists, from the "Chicago Idea" Anarchists to Black Liberation. David  Roediger persuasively shows that rebel poetry, free imagination, workers' direct action and Black freedom struggles are all part of the same great movement against the established order and its (miserable) ideology of  "whiteness."' -Michael Lowy, author of On Changing the World: Essays in Political Philosophy, from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin (1993)

 

184 pages. Illustrated. Paper $17.00

JACQUES VACHE JACQUES VACHE JACQUES VACHE JACQUES VACHE JACQUES VACHE JACQUES VACHE JACQUES VACHE JACQUES VACHE JACQUES VACHE JACQUES VACHE

JACQUES VACHE
AND THE ROOTS OF
SURREALISM
Including Vaché’s
War Letters
& Other Writings

By Franklin Rosemont

Vaché is magnificent! An important work. Comprehensive and impressive! - Nancy J. Peters, City Lights Books

THE DECADE that gave the world Krazy Kat, Rube Goldberg, and Buster Keaton also marked the emergence of Jacques Vaché. A bold jaywalker at the crossroads of history, and an ardent exemplar of freedom and revolt, Vaché challenged all prevailing values, from church and state to white supremacy, and was especially gifted at the fine art of ridiculing the dominant ethics and aesthetics of the emerging age of imperialism.  Conscripted into the French Army in World War One, he soon became not only the unsurpassed champion of “Desertion from Within,” but also the  master of “Disservice with Diligence.” His post-humous slim book, War Letters (1919)—included in the present volume—is a classic of surrealist  anti-militarism and subversion. Renowned as the Inventor of Umour (Humour without the H), Vaché was—along with Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont—the major inspirer of André Breton and the surrealist revolution. The first of its kind in English, this book chronicles Vaché’s boundless originality, creative nonconformity, revolutionary morality (or  umoral-ity), and his all-out turn-the-world-upside-down hilarity. Welcomed by André Breton himself into the Paris Surrealist Group in 1966, Franklin Rosemont took part in the Paris group’s activities for several months and went on to co-organize the Chicago Surrealist Group later that year.

A great job, and stirring great interest in Paris! - Guy Ducornet

This lively study of a central figure in the origins of the movement puts the accent on surrealism’s revolutionary significance today!” - David R. Roediger

Full of information, subversive surprises, and wild humor, this revelatory account of Jacques Vaché is just the book for our time. - Gale Ahrens.

396 pages. Profusely illustrated with Vaché’s own cartoons. Paper $20. Cloth $35

BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER BEN FLETCHER

BEN FLETCHER
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF
A BLACK WOBBLY
Including Fellow Worker Fletcher’s
Writings & Speeches

By Peter Cole

Ben Fletcher’s all-out revolutionary industrial unionism exemplifies Wobbly-style working class solidarity at its creative best. - Franklin Rosemont

ONE OF THE GREATEST HEROES of the American working class movement!  The great African American Wobbly organizer, Benjamin Fletcher (1890-1949), was noted for his brilliant organizing ability and imaginative on-the-job strategies, as well as for his courage, humor, and excellence as a soapbox orator. Not surprisingly, he was one of the IWW’s most admired and best loved figures. Along with a biographical sketch of Fletcher, reminiscences of him by fellow workers who knew him well, and an impressive selection of Fletcher’s  own writings and speeches, Peter Cole’s impressive introductory biographical essay also chronicles the ups and downs of the Philadelphia waterfront union in which Fletcher played such a leading role: Local 8 of the IWW’s Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union 510.

One of the leading organizers of the industrial Workers of the World. He has a vision far beyond that of almost any Negro leader we know. - A. Phillip Randolph

Courageous and dedicated to the emancipation of the working class. - Matilda Rabinowitz Robbins

In a union noted for great organizers, Fletcher was one of the greatest.  Local 8's achievements are still a model for us all. - Carlos Cortez

158 pages.  Illustrated.  Paper $18

BIG RED SONGBGOOK BIG RED SONGBGOOK BIG RED SONGBGOOK BIG RED SONGBGOOK BIG RED SONGBGOOK BIG RED SONGBGOOK  BIG RED SONGBGOOK

THE
BIG RED
SONGBOOK

Edited by Archie Green, David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, Salvatore Salerno

ARCHIE GREEN HAS JUST RECEIVED THE LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD FROM THE FOLKLORE CENTER OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS!

America's foremost folklorist and the founder of “laborlore...and his collaborators explore the IWW song tradition with marvelous insight. - Paul Buhle

Best collection of rebel workers’ songs and poems ever compiled: all the songs that appeared in the IWW’s celebrated “little red songbook” from 1909 through 1973—plus scores of others.  Songs of Joe Hill, T-Bone Slim, Dick Brazier, Ralph Chaplin, “Dublin Dan” Liston, Covington Hall, John Brill and other Wobbly “greats.”  For the first time anywhere, a good selection of songs by women Wobbies: Agnes Thecla Fair, Laura Payne Emerson, Sophie Fagin, Jane Street, Laura Tanne and others.  Not least, songs and poems by the colorful bunch of Wob soapboxers who frequented Chicago’s Dil Pickle Club and Bughouse Square including G. G. Florine, Lionel Moise, James Rohn, Jim Seymour, and Bert Weber.  A special section focuses on variants and parodies of IWW songs: a Depression-era version of “Hallelujah I’m a Bum,” Jack Langan’s 1960s version of “Solidarity Forever,” an Earth First! adaptation of Joe Hill’s “There is Power” by Walkin’ Jim Stoltz, and Hazel Dickens’ bold update of “The Rebel Girl.”  The essays by the editors and Judy Branfman, Richard Brazier, James Connell, Carlos Cortez, Bill Friedland, Virginia Martin, Haywire Mac, Fred Thompson and Utah Phillips not only provide historical/ biographical context, but also a wide range of perspectives on the Wobbly counterculture and its enduring legacies.

Beautifully illustrated and full of fascinating detail, a must for anyone interested in song, labor history, workers’ culture, and the struggle for a better world. - Paul Garon

538 pages. Illustrated.  Discography.  Index. Paper $24.  Cloth $36

MUHAMMAD AHMAD MUHAMMAD AHMAD MUHAMMAD AHMAD MUHAMMAD AHMAD MUHAMMAD AHMAD MUHAMMAD AHMAD MUHAMMAD AHMAD MUHAMMAD AHMAD

WE WILL RETURN

IN THE WHIRLWIND

By Muhammad Ahmad

"This book is dedicated to all freedom and liberation fighters of African descent, past, present, and future, and to all our friends and allies: the freedom-loving people of the world." - Muhammad Ahmad

About the Author: Dr. Muhammad Ahmad was national field chairman of the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) during the mid-1960s and founder of the African People’s Party in the 1970s.  He has worked closely with Malcolm X, Jesse Gray, Amiri Baraka, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), James and Grace Lee Boggs, James Forman, Robert and Mabel Williams, and Queen Mother Audley Moore, among others, in founding and carrying out various Black liberation projects and organizations.  In 1968 he helped organize the Third National Black Power Conference, and co-chaired its political workshop. He has consistently worked to build a Black united front. Now in his sixties, he is a member of N/COBRA and teaches in the department of African American Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia.

"At last we have a major assessment of some of the important Black radical organizations of the 1960s by one of the major figures involved. Muhammad Ahmad (Maxwell Stanford, Jr.) has given us a study of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party (BPP), the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) that only he could have done. Drawing upon his extensive network of personal and political contacts and his unique understanding of the connections between persons, organizations, and events (too often viewed in isolation), Ahmad has made a significant contribution toward deepening our understanding of a period whose complexities might otherwise be lost to future generations." - From the Introduction by John Bracey

350 Pages.  Paper $18.  Cloth $35

American Labor's First Strike American Labor's First Strike American Labor's First StrikeAmerican Labor's First Strike American Labor's First Strike American Labor's First Strike

AMERICAN
LABOR’S
FIRST STRIKE

Articles on Benjamin Franklin,
The 1786 Philadelphia Journeymen’s Strike,
Early Printers’ Unions in the U.S.,
& Their Legacy

By Henry P. Rosemont
Introduction by David Roediger

"In countless columns in ITU and other labor publications, Henry P. Rosemont distilled the history of his union. His interests and insights are brilliantly informed by the everyday, but never confined to the narrow."  — From the Introduction by David Roediger

June 2, 1786, journeymen printers in Philadelphia added a whole new dimension to worker’s struggles. For the first time workers went on strike demanding a specific wage, and devised methods of mutual aid to sustain their collective direct action.  This book goes on to examine other significant developments in the rise of printing trade unionism, and notably the International Typographical Union.  America’s First Strike explores the role of Benjamin Franklin in the  June 1786 strike; his lasting influence on organized labor; the early union printers’ support for the abolition of slavery; their leadership in the broader U.S. labor movement, and the struggle for an 8-hour day. Other articles focus on the problems of technological change, and on such epochal labor battles as the Haymarket Affair of 1886, the 1938-40 Newspaper Guild Strike, and the Chicago newspaper strike of 1947-49.  Rosemont profiles many brave and thoughtful individuals involved in this colorful history: the 1786 strikers, revolutionary printer-editor George Henry Evans, anarchist Albert Parsons, and others. The son and grandson of printers, Henry P. Rosemont (1904-1979) was himself a lifelong printer and labor activist. Author of much of the ITU’s agitational and educational literature over a span of fifty years, he was also recognized —not only in his own local (Chicago No. 16) but also throughout the international organization—as one of union printerdom’s foremost historians. His massive collection of union printers’ documents is housed at The Newberry Library, Chicago.

"A wondrously effective tribute, it is also a valuable contribution to the history of the American past. Enthusiastic congratulations!" - Leon M. Despres

122 pages.  Paper $15

CHANGING SOCIETY CHANGING SOCIETY CHANGING SOCIETY SOCIETY CHANGING SOCIETY SOCIETY CHANGING SOCIETY SOCIETY CHANGING SOCIETY SOCIETY CHANGING SOCIETY

CHANGING SOCIETY:
The Lives of Worker Heroes
Who Made a Difference

By Bob Breving

"Nineteen years ago when I started teaching union members at Roosevelt University, I knew very little about labor history and neither did the students. As we went on a mutual journey, I began to learn about labor history through the papers the students wrote. I read and wrote about John Peter Altgeld, Mother Jones, Walter Reuther, A. Philip Randolph and Eugene V. Debs. A. Philip Randolph, a prominent leader in the civil rights movement is almost never referred to in the telling of the civil rights struggle. I decided to tell also about Delores Huerta and Regina Polk, women important to today. These biographies focus on their contributions to improve the lives of working people." – Bob Breving, teacher at DePaul  Labor Education Center in Chicago.

88 pages. Paper $9

SURREALISME SURREALISME SURREALISME SURREALISME SURREALISME SURREALISME SURREALISME SURREALISME SURREALISME SURREALISME SURREALISME SURREALISME

SURREALISME & ATHEISME

By Guy Ducornet

SPECIAL IMPORT FROM PARIS!

This surrealist critique includes the text of the French Surrealists’ classic 1948 anti-clerical text, with translations by German, English, U.S., Spanish, Greek, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Czech and Arabic surrealist groups.

Supply Limited!

258 pages. Illustrated. Paper $25

COMMUNICATING VESSELS COMMUNICATING VESSELS COMMUNICATING VESSELS COMMUNICATING VESSELS COMMUNICATING VESSELS COMMUNICATING VESSELSj

COMMUNICATING VESSELS
An Anthology

By Anthony Leskov

A collection of essays, parables, poems and reviews from the lively periodical published in Portland.

189 pages. Illustrated. Paper $10

BLACK HOBOES BLACK HOBOES BLACK HOBOES BLACK HOBOES BLACK HOBOES BLACK HOBOES BLACK HOBOES BLACK HOBOES BLACK HOBOES BLACK HOBOES

What's the Use of Walking
if There's a Freight Train Going Your Way?

Black Hoboes & their Songs

By Paul Garon & Gene Tomko

 

In this exciting new book, Paul Garon -– celebrated author of The Devil's Son-In-Law: Peetie Wheatstraw and His Songs; Blues and the Poetic Spirit; and with Beth Garon, Woman With Guitar: Memphis Minnie's Blues -– tells the story of African American migratory workers and the songs they sang: at work, in boxcars and hobo jungles, in jail, in country roadhouses and urban nightspots. Focused on the years 1910-1940, Garon's narrative and the powerful lyrics of 100-plus songs relate in detail the Black hobo experience with racism and other injustice as well as with jobs as varied as turpentining, track-laying, circus work, lumber, agriculture and mining. Here, too, are fascinating digressions on Black Wobblies, Southern Tenant Farmers' Union organizers, and the hobohemian counterculture. This invaluable study comes with a 25-track CD.

"Paul Garon has produced yet another masterpiece of cultural history. The stories and songs he gathers together in this remarkable book disrupt common notions of what we mean by 'freedom' when it comes to black folk. Hoboes represented a significant segment of the black working class, and their constant movements were both evidence of constraints and acts of freedom. And as he so eloquently demonstrates, the men and women who took to the road and their bards have much to teach us about America's 'bottom rail.'" - Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

"The music and the poetry of black workers in motion-hoboing, hitchhiking, timbering, mining, railroading, loving, leaving, fighting back and searching for a new job, a new life and even a new world are brilliantly recorded and explained in this arresting collection."  -David Roediger, author of History Against Misery

"A fascinating book in which Paul Garon has brought together a truly remarkable collection of blues and blues songs, created by African American hoboes and ex-hoboes, which reveals a new dimension of the personal and the experiential nature of the poetic spirit in the blues. The main motivation of the black hobo travelers was to find work, and the author has meticulously researched the nature and conditions of the lumber and turpentine industries, mining, levee-building and other employment that they sought, and about which they also sang. This is not a book solely for blues enthusiasts, for whom it is indispensable, but it is strongly recommended to all who are interested in popular culture, its forms, its expression and meaning."- Paul Oliver, author of Blues Fell This Morning, The Story of the Blues, etc.

288 pages. Illustrated with 25-track CD. Paper $22

FACING REALITY FACING REALITY FACING REALITY FACING REALITY FACING REALITY FACING REALITY FACING REALITY FACING REALITY FACING REALITY FACING REALITY

Facing Reality

With a new Introduction by John H. Bracey

By C.  L. R. James & Grace C. Lee
with the collaboration of  Cornelius Castoriadis

"Springing forth from the utopian flames of self-emancipation kindled by the workers councils of the Hungarian Revolution, this pivotal book offers a socialist indictment of the miserabilism of state capitalism and calls for the ongoing rejection of both vanguardism and the bureaucratic rationalism of state power." - Ron Sakolsky, author of Creating Anarchy

In this celebrated "underground classic," also known as "C. L. R. James's most anarchist book," the author of The Black Jacobins, History of Pan-African Revolt and Beyond a Boundary examines the practical process of social revolution in the modern world. Inspired by the October 1956 Hungarian workers' revolution against Stalinist oppression, as well as the U.S. workers' "wild-cat" strikes (against Capital and the union bureaucracies), James and his co-authors looked ahead to the rise of new mass emancipatory movements by African Americans as well as anti-colonialist/anti-imperialist currents in Africa and Asia. Virtually alone among the radical texts of the time, Facing Reality also rejected modern society's mania for "conquering nature," and welcomed women's struggles "for new relations between the sexes."

First published in 1958 by a tiny group of James's supporters in Detroit, Facing Reality was popularized by the Chicago Rebel Worker group, Solidarity Bookshop, and other anti-authoritarians all through the 1960s. Later taken up by the SDS journal Radical America in its early IWW/surrealist-oriented period, Facing Reality became -like the works of Herbert Marcuse and E. P. Thompson -one of the most discussed and debated books of revolutionary theory in the late 20th century.

This new 21st-century edition includes a new introduction by James's longtime friend, John H. Bracey, situating the book in its 1950s/60s context, and accenting its continued relevance in our time.

"Among the most forward-looking books of the 1950s, Facing Reality is not only a merciless critique of the reactionary rationalism that then passed for Marxism, but also a passionate celebration of workingclass creativity and revolutionary internationalism at their inspired  best."-Franklin Rosemont, author of Revolution in the Service of the Marvelous (2004).  "Facing Reality was written in response to specific historical circumstances half a century ago, but recent events insist on reminding us why issues of class, race, state authority, and military aggression are as urgent now as they were in 1958. It is a keen and relevant text for readers of today who are troubled by the globalized violence of neoliberal avarice and neoconservative hubris. Facing Reality poses the kinds of questions about freedom that need to be asked openly and repeatedly during miserable times." - Don LaCoss, co-editor of Surrealism, Politics & Culture (2003)

188 pages. Paper $18.00

 

DANCIN' IN THE STREETS DANCIN' IN THE STREETS DANCIN' IN THE STREETS DANCIN' IN THE STREETS DANCIN'

 


AT LAST, A DIFFERENT BOOK ON THE SIXTIES!

DANCIN' IN THE STREETS!

Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists,
Situationists & Provos in the
1960s

Edited with Introductions by
Franklin Rosemont & Charles Radcliffe

 

"The dreamkillers won't have finished working over the 1960s until they flatten the soaring visions of that decade into petty quarrels between vanguardists and aspiring Democratic Party functionaries. They won't be done until they turn the movement into one without humor, without poetry, and indeed almost without motion. But dreamkilling just got lots harder. This brilliant collection gives us back the audacity, imagination, energy, laughs, wildness and chance that animated freedom dreams that are as alive today as they were 40 years ago." -David Roediger

MOST BOOKS on the 1960s focus on large liberal organizations and reformist politics. This one is unabashedly devoted to the far left of the far left. The Rebel Worker was a mimeo'd magazine started by young members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Chicago, 1964. Multi-racial and working class, they were inspired not only by the hobo wisdom of the Wobblies, but also by surrealism. While square critics derided them as "the left wing of the Beat Generation," The Rebel Worker and its sister journal Heatwave in London became well known for their highly original revolutionary perspective, innovative social/cultural criticism, and uninhibited class-war humor and cartoons. Rejecting traditional left dogma, and proudly affirming the influence of Bugs Bunny and the Incredible Hulk, these playful rebels against work expanded the critique of Capital into a critique of daily life and developed a truly radical theory and practice, rooted in poetry, provocation, blues, jazz and the pleasure principle. Active in strikes, free-speech fights and other tumults, they also ran the IWW's celebrated Solidarity Bookshop and introduced countless readers to writings by surrealists, situationists, IWWs, anarchists, libertarian Marxists, Provos, Japanese Zengakuren, etc.

Here for the first time in book-form are dozens of selections from both of these legendary journals, with lengthy introductions by Franklin Rosemont (editor of The Rebel Worker) and Charles Radcliffe (editor of Heatwave).

More pre-publication comments on Dancin' in the Streets

"Look here for links between the Beat Generation and the later Underground Press, but also between traditional Marxist theory and the new "critique of everyday life" developed by an increasingly defiant and countercultural young left that made Martha and the Vandellas' "Dancin' in the Streets" its international anthem."-Paul Buhl

"Thanks for Dancin'! We surely need it!"-Diane di Prima

"A remarkable collection, full of interesting material. If I were still an editor, I would be looting stuff from it." -Colin Ward (editor of the London Anarchy, 1960s)

"A very handsome book, and an important history of an era and a milieu."-Lorraine Perlman

"I really enjoyed Dancin' in the Streets. I didn't agree with it all, but what the hell! It has given me many hours of pleasure."-Ken Weller (a mainstay of the London Solidarity group from the early 1960s on)

"Here is the missing link of books on the Sixties, an essential text: It tells a lot of heretofore untold stories and fills in a lot of gaps.-Ron Sakolsky

"More than other recent collections, Dancin' has a certain surreal punch stemming from the exponential contrast between its pure youthful spirit and the current miserabilism. Anyone with any life in them will want to flip all the way back and pick up the lost thread of those days."-Joseph Jablonski

Sixties Series, 450 pages. Illustrated. Paper $17. Cloth $25

STARVING AMIDST STARVING AMIDST STARVING AMIDST S TARVING AMIDST STARVING

 

STARVING AMIDST
TOO MUCH

& Other IWW Writings on the Food Industry by
T-Bone Slim, L. S. Chumley,
Jim Seymour & Jack Sheridan

Edited & Introduced by Peter Rachleff

Foreword by Carlos Cortez

"What the Wobblies of yesteryear had to say about the all-important "food question" is still relevant in our time. These writings clearly deserve wider circulation, and should be considered and discussed by working people today." -Carlos Cortes (from the Foreword)

THIS IS A BOOK about the irrepressible conflict between the poorly paid workers who actually feed the world and the parasitical multi-billionaire corporate powers that make the rules and grab the profits. Reproduced here are rare classic documents on the "food question" by four old-time members of North America's most creative, colorful and uncompromising union: the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known as Wobblies.

Here is the greatest Wob writer of them all, the one and only T-Bone Slim, whose detailed critique of the industry-chockful of penetrating insight and knockout black humor-is reminiscent of Jonathan Swift and Benjamin P_ret. Organizer L. S. Chumley portrays the horrid living and working conditions of hotel and restaurant workers circa 1918, stressing the need for workers' direct action. Here, too, is Wobbly troubadour Jim Seymour, with his inspired saga of "The Dishwasher" and reflections on the possibilities of a radically different diet. Jack Sheridan's fascinating 1959 survey of the role of food in ancient and modern civilization, especially in economic development, is also a crash-course in the materialist conception of history at its Wobbly soapboxer best.

In the introduction, historian/activist Peter Rachleff traces the history of food-workers' self-organization, and brings the book up to date with a look at current point-of-production struggles to break the haughty power of an ecocidal agri-business and the union-busting fast-food chains.

Informative and provocative, this lively collection provides just the kind of background and inspiration needed by young workers today, who are striving to build a new revolutionary movement based on direct action and solidarity.

"The pamphlets, columns, and articles collected in this volume make available to us a rich wellspring of ideas. . . . These are far more than historical artifacts. They offer today's workers a first class breakfast, a place to begin consideration of all our places in the food chain, from farming to processing and production to the preparation and serving of meals. The metaphor reminds us of the ways that workers and consumers are bound in their work and by their most fundamental of bodily practices-eating-by broad economic and social decisions from which workers' input has been excluded. We are bound by these chains of the food industry. T-Bone Slim, L.S. Chumley, Jack Sheridan, and Jim Seymour offer us acute analyses of these industries and processes, and, even more importantly, they offer us access to the IWW vision of how to break these chains, how to change the world." -Peter Rachleff (from the Introduction)

128 pages. Illustrated. Paper $12

 

JOE HILL JOE HILL JOE HILL JOE HILL JOE HILL JOE HILL JOE JOE HILL JOE HILL JOE HILL JOE HILL JOE HILL JOE

 


NOW IN ITS SECOND PRINTING!

"In Franklin Rosemont, Joe Hill has finally found a chronicler worthy of his revolutionary spirit, sense of humor, and poetic imagination. This is no ordinary biography. It is a journey into the Wobbly culture that made Joe Hill and the capitalist culture that killed him. But as Rosemont suggests in this remarkable book, Joe Hill never really dies. He will live in the minds of young rebels as long as his songs are sung, his ideas are circulated, and his political descendants keep fighting for a better day."
-Robin D. G. Kelley, , author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002)

"This is an exceptionally important book in many ways, and Franklin Rosemont has done us all a great favor in writing it. The fine chapter on Hill's involvement in the Mexican Revolution is alone well worth the cove price, for no other study comes even close to offering so much information, so much rich detail, on that crucial moment in his life. There's no doubt about it: This is the best book ever written about Joe Hill."
-Utah Phillips

"Extraordinarily interesting ... a tremendous achievement, full of insight into Joe Hill, carefully separating his life from his post-mortem elaboration, and substantiating all of it. Hill is not quite as alive a you and I, but almost, and this book has contributed to his long life."-Leon M. Despres

JOE HILL

The IWW & the Making of a

Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture

By Franklin Rosemont

JOE HILL (1877-1915) is the best-known figure in the heroic history of the Indus trial Workers of the World (a.k.a. Wobblies). U.S. labor's most world-renowned martyr and celebrated song-writer, he is remembered above all for his songs in the Little Red Song Book: "The Preacher and the Slave" ("Pie in the Sky"), "Mr Block," "There Is Power in a Union," and many more that are still popular on picketlines today.

Franklin Rosemont's important new book presents a fresh and in-depth study of the life and work of the famous Wobbly bard, and of the revolutionary counter-culture he came to personify. Older books on Hill focused on the crime he didn't commit, his frame-up and martyrdom. This study sheds new light on those topics -particularly on the ongoing use of frame-up in the U.S."justice" system-but its overall focus is on Hill's ideas and activity: as songwriter, poet, artist, hobo, thinker, humorist, and archetypal rank-and-file Wobbly.

No other book discusses in such detail Hill's views on capitalism, white supremacy, gender issues, religion, wilderness, law, and prison, as well as on songwriting, humor, direct action, and revolutionary industrial union-ism. Several chapters explore Hill's little-known work as a cartoonist. Collected here for the first time is all his art, including his one surviving painting. The scores of other illustrations feature Hill-inspired art by IWWs from Ralph Chaplin to Carlos Cortez, and by such other labor artists as Mike Alewitz, Gary Huck, Mike Konopacki, and Lisa Lyons.

Examining Hill's status as a "near-mythic" figure in history as well as his enormous influence-on Wob artists; other radicals, songwriters, and poets; on movements as varied as the 1910s Chicago Renaissance and the 1950s Beat Generation-Rosemont also examines the many appearances by Hill and the IWW in popular culture, including mass-market mysteries, science-fiction, and rock'n'roll. In chapters on "The Hobo Contribution to Critical Theory," "Wobblies Against Whiteness," "Forerunners of Earth First! and Eco-Socialism," and "Surrealism, Wobbly Style" he argues that Hill's legacy -the profound but playful old-time Wobbly counter-culture-is still the "most important inspiration and model for a new revolutionary movement" today.

Franklin Rosemont's nearly thirty books include T-Bone Slim: Juice Is Stranger Than Friction, and From Bug-house Square to the Beat Generation: Selected Ravings of Slim Brundage, both published by Charles H. Kerr, and Penelope: A Poem (Surrealist Editions).

A Few Words About Franklin Rosemont's JOE HILL

"A remarkable book, and badly needed."-Paul Avrich

"This full-length study . . . discusses for the first time the Wobbly bard's contributions to labor cartooning, wilder-ness radicalism, women's liberation, and the struggle against white supremacy. Far more than a biography, this book is a fundamental re-examination of the IWW, its rich and manysided culture, and its relation to such currents as romanticism, Futurism, the Chicago Renaissance, the Beat Generation, and surrealism, emphasizing throughout the significance of the Wobblies' multiple legacies for revolutionary struggle in our own time."
-
Ron Sakolsky, in Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings and Images by the Surrealist Movement in the U.S. (2002)

"It's the right man by the right biographer at the right time. ... This magnificent, practical, irreverent, and (as one might say) magisterial book has sixteen chapters and more than 600 pages, profusely illustrated ... It is written in a direct, passionate, sometimes funny, deeply searching style. It is a labor of love. Rosemont's book, like E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class, has a job to do-making the class which brings to birth a new world from the ashes of the old. ...The Wobbly vocabulary of mutual aid that Thompson called for is not going to be found in theory, or in instinct, but it might be found in song. Here we need Rosemont and Joe Hill."
-Peter Linebaugh, Counterpunch

"It has been a long time since so much new material on Joe Hill and the Wobblies has been collected in one volume. All students of the IWW, labor cartoons and songs, radical humor, and the history of blue-collar countercultures in the U.S., will find this book indispensable."
-Salvatore Salerno, author of Red November, Black November (1989)

"Extraordinarily interesting . . . a tremendous achievement." -Leon Despres

"Exceptionally important . . . The fine chapter on Hill's involve-ment in the Mexican Revolution is alone well worth the cover price. . . . No doubt about it: This is the best book ever written about Joe Hill."-Utah Phillips

"Blends the best of labor history with popular culture [and] debunks the many myths surrounding Hill. . . Rosemont's passion for IWW history and lore is compelling". - Julie Herrada, Fifth Estate

"Informative, fascinating, fun to read-a little like The New Yorker, with great cartoons every other page". -Tom Geoghegan

"In these 600-plus pages there is not one bit of tedious reading. This is an important book." - Industrial Worker

656 pages. Illustrated. Paper $19.00. Cloth $35.00

LUCY PARSONS LUCY PARSONS LUCY PARSONS LUCY PARSONS LUCY PARSONS LUCY PARSONS LUCY PARSONS LUCY

LUCY PARSONS

FREEDOM, EQUALITY & SOLIDARITY

Writings & Speeches 1878-1937

Edited & Introduced by Gale Ahrens

With an Afterword by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

"The most prominent black woman radical of the late nineteenth century, Lucy Parsons [was also] one of the brightest lights in the history of revolutionary socialism."-Robin D. G. Kelley, in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.

"Lucy Parsons's writings are among the best and strongest in the history of U.S. anarchism. Although written long ago, these texts tackle the major problems of our time. Her long and often traumatic experience of the capitalist injustice system-from KKK terror in her youth, through Haymarket and the judicial murder of her husband, to the U.S. government's war on the Wobblies -made her not "just another victim" but an extraordinarily articulate witness to, and vehement crusader against, all injustice. That kind of direct experience gave her a credibility and an actuality that those who lack such experience just don't have. Lucy Parsons's life and writings reflect her true-to-the-bone heroism. Her language sparkles with the love of freedom and the passion of revolt."
- Gale Ahrens
, Introduction

"More dangerous than 1000 rioters!" That's what the Chicago police called Lucy Parsons- America's most defiant and persistent anarchist agitator, whose cross-country speaking tours inspired hundreds of thousands of working people. Her friends and admirers included William Morris, Peter Kropot-kin, "Big Bill" Haywood, Ben Reitman, Sam Dolgoff-and the groups in which she was active were just as varied: the Knights of Labor, IWW, Dil Pickle Club, International Labor Defense, & others. Here for the first time is a hefty selection of her powerful writings & speeches-on anarchism, women, race matters, class war, the IWW, and the U.S. injustice system.

"Lucy Parsons's personae and historical role provide material for the makings of a truly exemplary figure ... Think of it: a lifelong anarchist, labor organizer, writer, editor, publisher, and dynamic speaker, a woman of color of mixed black, Mexican, and Native American heritage, founder of the 1880s Chicago Working Woman's Union that organized garment workers, called for equal pay for equal work, and even invited housewives to join with the demand of wages for housework; and later (1905) co-founder the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), which made the organizing of women and people of color a priority. . .For a better understanding of the concept of direct action and its implications, no other historical figure can match the lessons provided by Lucy Parsons."
- Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz
, Afterword

 

192 Pages. Illustrated. Paper $17.00

 

A few copies are available of

Lucy Parsons:
American Revolutionary

by Carolyn Ashbaugh.

Published by Charles H. Kerr in 1976. This is the only biography available.

 

288 pages. Paper $24.00

 

LESSON LESSON LESSON LESSON LESSON LESSON LESSON LESSON LESSON LESSON LESSON LESSON LESSON LESSON

"Six important speeches by Wendell Phillips, one of the great figures in American history, mark this volume as an indispensable source that should be read by all serious students of the national past and present."
-Sterling Stuckey, University of California at Riverside, author of Slave Culture and Going Through the Storm

THE LESSON
OF THE HOUR

Wendell Phillips on Abolition & Strategy

Edited & Introduced by Noel Ignatiev

DURING the winter of 1860-61, as southern states announced their intention to secede from the Union, the great Abolitionist Wendell Phillips walked the streets of Boston under threat of attack from mobs that blamed him for the breakup. Barely one year later, when Phillips traveled to Washington, the Vice President of the United States welcomed him to the Senate chamber, the Speaker of the House invited him to dinner, and President Lincoln received him as a guest at the White House.

The Abolitionists were revolutionaries, willing to tear up the Southern economy and society by the roots, wreck Northern commerce, and disrupt the Union irretrievably. They renounced all traditional politics. They openly hoped for the defeat of their own country in the Mexican War. They preached and practiced racial equality. They fought for the equality of women. They understood the need to break up the Union in order to reconstitute it without slavery.

Have ever revolutionaries been more thoroughly vindicated by events?

Although William Lloyd Garrison was the founder of the movement and remains the most widely known of the Abolitionists, Wendell Phillips was the real leader. This volume is the only collection of his work generally available. It includes six speeches charting a revolutionary course for abolition, with an introduction establishing their historical context.

160 pages. Paper $12.00. Cloth $28.00

"This collection of Wendell Phillips's speeches brings back to light one of the magnificent rhetoricians of the abolition movement. Noel Ignatiev's introduction makes a compelling case for treating Phillips as the "real leader" of nineteenth century American radicalism, and the orator's words as a guide to an alternative society."
-David W. Blight
, Amherst College, author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

Noel Ignatiev is the author of How the Irish Became White and the coeditor of Race Traitor: journal of the new abolitionism. He teaches in the Department of Critical Studies at Massachusetts College of Art.

PUNCHING OUT PUNCHING OUT PUNCHING OUT PUNCHING OUT PUNCHING OUT PUNCHING OUT PUNCHING OUT

"Autoworker, historian, humorist, sociologist, poet, and baseball coach, Marty Glaberman had as close a knowledge of working people as any intellectual of his generation. He also had, as these wonderful collected writings show, the most firm confidence in their revolutionary potential." -David Roediger

PUNCHING OUT:

Selected Writings of Martin Glaberman

Edited & introduced by Staughton Lynd

GLABERMAN is the most important writer on labor matters in the United States during the second half of the Twentieth century. He developed distinctive concepts concerning the nature of trade unionism; the unfolding of working-class consciousness; and the forms of revolutionary organization appropriate to modern industrial society ...

Glaberman received a bachelor's degree from City College of New York. He was working on a master's degree in Economics at Columbia University when he dropped out to become a radical doing full-time industrial work. There followed twenty years laboring for wages in plants in and around Detroit as an assembly line worker and machinist. On the eve of World War II, Glaberman associated himself with the West Indian Marxist intellectual, C.L.R. James [and] became a member of the Johnson-Forest Tendency within American Trotskyism. This small but enormously productive and influential group made the first trans-lation into English of what came to be called the "early economic-philosophical manuscripts" of Karl Marx.
-From the Introduction by Staughton Lynd

 

246 pages. Paper $15.00. Cloth $35

RAMBLING KID RAMBLING KID RAMBLING KID RAMBLING KID RAMBLING KID RAMBLING KID RAMBLING KID

THE RAMBLING KID

ByCharles Ashleigh

CHARLES ASHLEIGH'S novel, The Rambling Kid, is one of the best and most informative books concerning the IWW. It is also one of the rarest and hardest to find. First published in London, 1930, it has never been reissued and is practically impossible to locate, even in libraries.

Soapboxer, writer, poet, agitator, and publicist, the British-born Ashleigh was active in the IWW from 1912 until his deportation in nine years later. As a first-hand account of the Wobbly way of life in the 1910s, The Rambling Kid has few equals.

ON THE ROAD WITH THE WOBBLIES

"Charles Ashleigh's semi-autobiographical novel fills a void in the record of the events that led to the federal government's brutal attempts to suppress the "One Big Union" during World War I. Ashleigh's characters ride alongside IWW job delegates, bindle-stiffs, and gandy dancers as they crisscross the country hopping freights en route to jobs and strikes and everything in between. In the tradition of The Milk and Honey Route by Dean Stiff (Nels Anderson), The Main Stem by William Edge, and Home to Harlem by Claude McKay, The Rambling Kid offers an intimate glimpse into pre-World-War-1 workers' culture on the eve of the Russian Revolution. Steve Kellerman's superb introduction provides the critical and biographical context for understanding the importance of Ashleigh's work and the historical forces that produced The Rambling Kid." - Salvatore Salerno, Red November, Black November)

302 pages. Paper $17.00

REVOLUTION MARVELOUS REVOLUTION MARVELOUS REVOLUTION MARVELOUS REVOLUTION MARVELOUS

REVOLUTION IN THE SERVICE OF THE MARVELOUS

Surrealist Contributions to the Critique of Miserabilism

By Franklin Rosemont

"It is somehow comforting to see how much our lines of thought converge."
-Herbert Marcuse, letter to Franklin Rosemont

S U R R E A L I S M   A G A I N S T   M I S E R A B I L I S M !

THE Chicago Surrealist Group burst on the scene in 1966 and has remained one of the most active and innovative surrealist groups in the world. Well known for their impressive achievements in poetry, the arts, and direct action, the Chicago surrealists are also noted for their highly original contributions to revolutionary theory and criticism. As Ron Sakolsky points out in his anthology, Surrealist Subversions (2002), the group has attracted the sympathetic interest of writers, thinkers and creators as varied as Herbert Marcuse, Nelson Algren, Octavio Paz, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robin D. G. Kelley, Leonora Carrington, Maurice Nadeau, Luis Bu–uel, Cecil Taylor, Diane di Prima, Noel Ignatiev, and George Rawick.

Revolution in the Service of the Marvelous contains twenty essays by one of contemporary surrealism's major poets and theorists, Chicago Surrealist Group co-founder Franklin Rosemont. These essays focus on the ways in which surrealist perspectives have continued to evolve and expand since the movement's worldwide resurgence in the 1960s. This wide-ranging and well-illustrated collection includes prefaces to international surrealist exhibitions and texts concerning wilderness, the politics of humor, the black radical tradition, and the critique of whiteness-documenting key developments in surreal-ism's collective evolution. Other essays explore the work of individual poets, painters, musicians and dancers whose creative activity exemplifies the movement's ongoing transformative project.

Rosemont remarks in his Introduction: "As a book about surrealism, this is also inevitably a book about freedom, desire, surprise, love, play, humor, black music, painting, collage, dance, film, ecology, subversion, revolt and revolution. Above all it is concerned with the practice of poetry: poetry as audacity and insubor-dination, a source and method of knowledge, a model for a better society, an adventure and experience that makes all the difference in the world."

160 pages. Illustrated. $14.00

Welcomed by Andr_ Breton into the Surrealist Movement in Paris, 1966, Franklin Rosemont later edited Breton's What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings (1978). His other surrealist works include Surrealism & Its Popular Accomplices (1980), The Forecast Is Hot! Tracts & Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the U.S. (with Penelope Rosemont and Paul Garon, 1997); An Open Entrance to the Shut Palace of Wrong Numbers (2003); and three books of poetry. He has also written widely on U. S. radical history, most recently Joe Hill: The IWW & the Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture (Charles H. Kerr, 2003).

DIL PICKLE DIL PICKLE DIL PICKLE DIL PICKLE DIL PICKLE DIL PICKLE DIL PICKLE DIL PICKLE DIL PICKLE

Most people found the Dil Pickle exhilarating, liberating, illuminating, educational, and above all fun. Some found it shocking, subversive, irreverent, "un-American," and decadent. But nobody called it boring!

"An amazing job of bringing the Dil Pickle to life. I am lost in admiration over the material_a sensational collection!"-Leon M. Despres

THE DIL PICKLE E X P E R I E N C E !

(Yes-DIL with one L!)

The Rise & Fall of the
DIL PICKLE

Jazz-Age Chicago's Wildest & Most Outrageously Creative Hobohemian Nightspot


Introduction by Franklin Rosemont

WHAT do Lucy Parsons, Clarence Darrow, Carl Sandburg, Mary MacLane, Lawrence Lipton, Elizabeth Davis (Queen of the Hoboes), Jun Fujita, Sherwood Anderson, Ralph Chaplin, Kather-ine Dunham, Djuna Barnes, Kenneth Rexroth, and Slim Brundage have in common? They were all Dil Picklers!

And what was the Dil Pickle? Founded in 1914 by former Wobbly Jack Jones, Irish revolutionist Jim Larkin, and a group of fantastic IWW-oriented Bughouse Square hobos and soapboxers, the Dil Pickle in just a few years was widely recognized as the wildest, most playful, most creative, and most radical nightspot in the known universe-especially after Dr Ben Reitman (Emma Goldman's former lover and press agent) joined the club in 1917.

In this book-the first ever devoted to one of this country's most colorful and best-loved counter-institutions-Franklin Rosemont has collected forty-one reminiscences of the Dil Pickle by poets, artists, journalists, novelists, hobos, scholars, anarchists, wobblies, and other assorted radicals and oddballs. Among them are accounts by the club's founders, habitu_s, visitors, and even a few hardhearted critics. Few of these texts have ever been reprinted since their original publication in old, hard-to-find books and periodicals. Three appear here for the first time.

Included are lively portrayals of the Dil Pickle as "A Most Important Part of the Mythology of Chicago" (Kenneth Rexroth), "A Temple of the Disinherited" (Emanuel Carnevali), "A Hobo Jungle of Ideas" (Alexander Ebin), "The Flaming Crater of Chicago's Revolution in the Arts" (Vincent Starrett), and "Bohemia in All its Glory" (John Drury)-and much more.

Franklin Rosemont's introduction provides the fullest account so far of the Dil Pickle's chaotic history-its background in "Chicago Idea" anarchism and earlier free-speech forums, as well as its close association with the IWW and the Charles H. Kerr Company-and goes on to explore the role of the Picklers in the arts and the "Chicago Renaissance," along with its meaning(s) for our own troubled times.

190 pages. Illustrated. Paper $14.00

POSADA POSADA POSADA POSADA POSADA POSADA POSADA POSADA POSADA POSADA POSADA POSADA POSADA

"Posada, as great and prolific as Goya and Callot, was inexhaustibly inventive-a wellspring of creativity. He was the interpreter of the joys and sorrows, the anguish and aspirations of the Mexican people, a precursor of Zapata and Flores Magon." -Diego Rivera

VIVA POSADA!

A Salute to the Great Printmaker of the Mexican Revolution

Edited & Introduced by Carlos Cortez

MEXICO enjoys a continuity of artistic expression of more than six millennia, and despite the fact that the Spanish conquerors tried to enforce European styles on the Mexicans, that continuity persists into our own modern times. When modern technology such as the printing press was introduced into Mexico, artisans readily adapted their talents to the new medium while retaining their millennia-old values. . . .

Because of the high quality and the quantity of his art, Jos_ Guadalupe Posada is the one Mexican printmaker who has acquired posthumous and inter-national fame. Posada was at his peak at the turn of the twentieth century, during the closing years of the Diaz dictatorship. He has long been recognized as one of the personifications of the ensuing Mexican Revolution, which he did not live to see completed. He illustrated many broadsides of revolutionary ballads, printed on cheap paper and sold for centavos in the streets.

Posada remains an important part of the great living tradition of radical popular art that continues to flourish in Mexico and throughout the world today.

-From the Introduction by Carlos Cortez

Published on the 150th anniversary of Posada's birth (1852-2002), this book features 121 of the finest works by the great popular engraver and relief-etcher who inspired not only the Mexican muralists but also the international Surrealist movement as well as poster artists and radical cartoonists from all over the world. Also included here are excerpts from classic texts on the artist by Jean Charlot, Jos_ Clemente Orozco, Frida Kahlo, Andr_ Breton and others, as well as statements by poets and artists of our own time-Dennis Brutus, Rikki Ducornet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Franklin Rosemont, Joseph Jablonski, Ted Joans, Casandra Stark Mele, and many more-all published here for the first time.

96 pages. Profusely Illustrated. Paper $10.00. Cloth $ 27.00

PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE PEETIE

THE DEVIL'S SON-IN-LAW

The Story of Peetie Wheatstraw & His Songs

(with 24-track CD)

by Paul Garon

BLUES-SINGER, songwriter, piano- and guitar-player, William Bunch (1902-1941) was well-known as Peetie Wheatstraw, the Devil's Son-in-Law and the High Sheriff from Hell. Long recognized by con-noisseurs as one of the most influential blues people of all time, his life and work are little known to the broad public. Blues scholar Paul Garon's important and abun-dantly illustrated study-drawing on his own extensive interviews with Wheatstraw's relatives, and fellow musicians-brings the exciting Wheatstraw saga to life at last.

With insight and imagination, Garon explores Peetie Wheatstraw's crucial role not only in blues history, but also in African American urban mythology (he was, for example, a pivotal character in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man), and-via a penetrating analysis of song lyrics-his appreciable contributions to blues poetry and to vernacular surrealism.

Originally published in England in 1971, this substantially revised and expanded edition includes a mass of new information and images as well as an updated bibliography, discography, and index.

Also included with the book is a 24-track CD portraying Peetie at his best, with a bonus track by "Peetie Wheatstraw's Buddy" Harmon Ray-the previously unissued XMAS BLUES!

156 pages. Paper $15.00. Cloth $21.00

What the Critics Say About Paul Garon and the Blues

The Devil's Son-in-Law

"A brilliant reconstruction of one particular blues singer and the life he must have led . . . a fascinating picture of an era long-departed . . . a very fine book.

-Derrick Stewart-Baxter, Jazz Journal

"A model for any future books of this kind. No blues lover should fail to read this illuminating account."

-Bob Groom, Blues World

Woman with Guitar: Memphis Minnie's Blues (with Beth Garon)

"The authors have added a new dimension to blues scholarship"-Paul Oliver

"The first full-length study devoted to [an] outstanding artist noted for her merciless imagination and dark humor. While too many books on blues are afflicted with descriptive sociology or naive sentimentality, Garon's emphasis, in keeping with his surrealist priorities, is always on blues as poetry, magic, humor, eroticism, revolt, and the quest for freedom and the Marvelous."

-Ron Sakolsky, Surrealist Subversions (2002)

152 pages. Illustrated. Paper $18.00. Cloth $28.00

Blues and the Poetic Spirit

"A new and important approach to the analysis of the blues as a psychopoetic phenomenon . . . An important starting place for researchers who intend to investigate the essence of the blues." -Samuel Floyd

"Combines Marxism, surrealism and psychoanalysis in an innovative and engaging analysis of the poetry and power of black secular music. Garon is especially impressive in his command of a vast body of blues lyrics and his ability to isolate and to digest the meaning of the most striking images in these lyrics." -David Roediger

"The special merit of Blues and the Poetic Spirit lies in its illumination of the poetic beauty and subversive power of blues through the sights of a radical perspective. No other author, in my opinion, covers the thematic universe of blues with such imagination and breadth as Garon does. [His] vision of blues . . . captures what is best in [the] fusion of Western and Afro-American poetry and music."

-Carl Boggs, Socialist Review

Should be required reading for all college graduates and especially those few editors (whites) who earn a living from Black music, even those thousands that continue to imitate Black musicians.... Blues and the Poetic Spirit is the best to be published to this date concerning the blues."

-Ted Joans, Coda

"One of the most important surrealist texts to come out of the United States."

-Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002)

HOBOHEMIA HOBOHEMIA HOBOHEMIA HOBOHEMIA HOBOHEMIA HOBOHEMIA HOBOHEMIA HOBOHEMIA HOBOHE

"I loved the book. I plan to get copies for all my friends!" -Polly Connelly

HOBOHEMIA

Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Ben Reitman & Other Agitators & Outsiders in 1920s Chicago

by Frank O. Beck

FROM the 1910s through the Depression 30s, when Chicago was the undisputed hobo capital of the United States, a small north side neighborhood known as Towertown was the vital center of an extraordinary cultural/political ferment. It was home to Bughouse Square (the nation's most renowned outdoor free-speech center), Ben Reitman's Hobo College, and the fabulous Dil Pickle Club, a highly unorthodox institution of higher learning that doubled as the craziest nightclub in the world.

In such places, and in scores of other nearby open forums, tea-rooms, little theaters, bookshops, art galleries, taverns, and cafes, Wobblies, anarchists, and other agitators mingled and debated with a wide range of jazz-age artists, writers, musicians, and eccentrics. It was something like New York's Greenwich Village, but-thanks to the prominence of the Chicago-based IWW-much more workingclass, and more openly revolutionary.

Frank O. Beck's Hobohemia contains a long-time Towertowner's vivid reminiscences of this colorful, dynamic, creative and radical community that flourished for a generation despite constant onslaughts from the Red Squad, the Vice Squad, bourgeois journalists, funda-mentalists and other bigots.

Some of the characters he writes about are well known-Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Ben Reitman, Jane Addams-but Beck's personal recollections of them will be new to most readers. Even more exciting are his memories of such less-well-known personalities as "Red" Martha Biegler, widely regarded as the greatest woman orator at the Square; softspoken labor organizer Anna Martindale; Nina van Zandt Spies, widow of Haymarket martyr August Spies; and irascible Jack Jones, the former Wobbly who from 1916 till his death in 1940 served as the Dil Pickle's ringleader and referee.

Originally published in 1956, Hobohemia has long been out of print and hard to find. This new edition is long overdue, for the book is still one of the best first-hand accounts of a unique place and time.

Franklin Rosemont's introduction provides a historical overview of Chicago's workingclass counter-culture and a biographical sketch of Beck. It also relates the book to earlier and later literature on the subject and fills in some gaps in the narrative. Helpful notes in the text correct a few errors.

Also new in this edition are the illustrations, and a useful index.

"Chicago was once richly ornamented with numerous open forums, crowned always by Bughouse Square (Washington Square Park, at Clark and Walton, across the street from The Newberry Library.

"Until radio and television intruded, the free forums entertained the populace and provided training grounds for labor organizers, political orators, and religious eccentrics. There were women_s forums, African-American forums, anarchist forums, and even a plain, large, successful forum in the South Side_s Washington Park just called the Bug Club. In cold winter weeks. the forums often found security indoors in the Dil Pickle Club, the College of Complexes, and elsewhere.

"These choice books from the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company bring many of Chicago_s erstwhile public forums back to vivid life." - Leon M. Depres

Bughouse Square Series

128 pages. Paper $12.00. Cloth $30.00

CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME C

"There should be no jails. They do not accomplish what they pretend to accomplish. They are a blot upon civilization, and a jail is an evidence of the lack of charity of the people on the outside who make the jails and fill them with the victims of their greed. -Clarence Darrow

CLARENCE DARROW

CRIME & CRIMINALS

Address to the
Prisoners in the Cook County
Jail & Other Writings on Crime & Punishment

CLARENCE DARROW'S Crime and Criminals, originally published by Charles H. Kerr in 1902, is not only one of the greatest works by the greatest attorney in U.S. history, it is also a little masterpiece in the literature of social criticism and the struggle for freedom.

In a few pages radiant with the forceful eloquence and dry humor for which he was so justly renowned, Darrow offers the man in the street-or more precisely in this case, in jail-a crash course in the theory and practice of law and criminology. He discusses what crime is, what causes it, why more people go to jail in winter than in summer, why the real criminals almost never go to prison, why punishment doesn't work, and-in the end-why the U.S. criminal justice system is in fact a system of injustice, a colossal and barbaric failure.

Today, when the "Prison-Industrial Complex" and its accomplices in local, state and federal government are trampling underfoot what little remains of the Bill of Rights, and locking up millions of the working poor, Darrow's radical and liberating message is not only timely, but urgent.

This new edition includes important supplemental material, most notably the remarkable essay, "Darrow's Crime and Criminals a Century Later," by Leon M. Despres, who is himself a courageous attorney in the Darrow tradition. Opening with valuable biographical and historical background regarding Darrow's views on crime and criminals, Despres also discusses the results of a survey made in 1996, in which a number of prisoners at Cook County Jail were invited to comment on Darrow's 1902 talk. Their agreements and disagreements with Darrow make fascinating reading!

This edition also features excerpts from several other writings by Darrow on law, crime and punishment. An important Afterword by Carol Heise, an attorney and an activist involved with prisoners on Cook County Jail's Death Row, focuses on Darrow's views on capital punishment.

Penelope Rosemont notes in her Foreword that "Darrow's association with the Charles H. Kerr Company was long and intimate." Of his many Kerr titles, Crime and Criminals has proved to be the most popular. Here, as Charles H. Kerr said, Darrow "tells the real reason for 'crime,' and points out the only cure."

60 pages. Paper $7.50. Cloth $25.00

WALLS & BARS WALLS & BARS WALLS & BARS WALLS & BARS WALLS & BARS WALLS & BARS WALLS & BARS WALLS & BA

"Capitalism must have prisons to protect itself from the criminals it has created." -Eugene V. Debs

EUGENE V. DEBS

WALLS & BARS

Prisons & Prison Life in the "Land of the Free"
with a New Introduction

by David Dellinger

EUGENE DEBS (1855-1926), the best-loved socialist agitator of his time, is to this day one of the best remembered radicals in U.S. history. More than anyone, he brought the emancipatory zeal of the Abolitionists into the workers' movement. His liberating message reached a larger portion of the U.S. population than any revolutionist ever reached, before or since. Debs's passion for freedom and his unshakable confidence in the ability of working people to create a better world inspired millions.

Few are aware that this popular and influential radical wrote one of the most insightful books on prisons. Debs's only full-length book, Walls and Bars (first published in 1927) is a lively memoir as well as a stirring critique, drawing on his own prison experiences. He served time for his leading role in the Pullman Strike in 1894, and was sent to the penitentiary again in 1919 for opposing World War I. In 1920, as Convict No.9653, he ran for President on the Socialist ticket and received a million votes.

Debs explains in this book why prisons don't (and can't) reform or deter anyone, and how prisons in fact create criminals. He discusses prison labor and the links between prison and militarism. Above all he exposes the class bias of the entire U.S. criminal justice system, showing that "the prison problem is directly co-related with poverty." His conclusion: "Capitalism and crime have become almost synonymous terms."

Arguing that prison "should not merely be reformed but abolished," Debs called for a socialism of solidarity, freedom and love, firmly rooted in industrial democracy, without which political democracy is a sham. Only with the advent of such a social revolution, in Debs' 5 view, can society succeed in "taking the jail out of man as well taking man out of jail."

This new edition of Walls and Bars includes an important introduction by David Dellinger-himself a life long revolutionist who, because of his opposition to imperialist war and his devotion to the cause of civil rights, has spent a good deal of time behind bars, as chronicled in Revolutionary Nonviolence (1970), his autobiography, From Yale to Jail (1991), and other books. Dellinger discusses various changes that have taken place in the prison system since Debs's time, and emphasizes that this decades-old book is very much a book for today.

Revolutionary Classics

256 pages. Paper $15.00. Cloth $35

Haymarket Scrapbook Haymarket Scrapbook Haymarket Scrapbook Haymarket Scrapbook Haymarket Scrapbook Haymarket Scrapbook Haymarket Scrapbook Haymarket Scrapbook

HAYMARKET SCRAPBOOK

Edited by Dave Roediger and Franklin Rosemont

THIS profusely illustrated anthology by many of today's finest labor and radical historians focuses on the most world-reverberating event in American labor history: the Haymarket Affair of 1886-87, and on the vast, incredibly varied and enduring influence it has exerted in the United States and across the globe.

Haymarket Scrapbook contributors include William J. Adelman, Carlotta Anderson, Carolyn Ashbaugh, Paul Avrich, Alan Dawley, Heiner Becker, Sam Dolgoff, Richard Drinnon, George Esenwein, Philip Foner, Paul and Elizabeth Garon, Joseph Jablonski, Stuart Kaufman, Sidney Lens, Blaine McKinley, Bruce Nelson, Penelope Rosemont, Beryl Ruehl, Sal Salerno, Stephen Sapolsky, Morris U. Schappes, Diane Scherer, Richard Schneirov, Fred Thompson, Fred Whitehead and many more!

Haymarket Scrapbook also features reprints of hard-to-find writings, speeches and poems by Jane Addams, Oscar Ameringer, Kate Austin, Edward Bellamy, John Brown, Jr., Ralph Chaplin, Voitairine de Cleyre, Eugene Debs, Floyd Dell, David Edelshtat, Emma Goldman, Sam Gompers, Lizzie Holmes, Mother Jones, Harry Kelly, Peter Kropotkin, Jo Labadie, Lucy Parsons, Kenneth Rexroth, Carl Sandburg, Nina van Zandt and many more!

Haymarket Scrapbook also includes more than three hundred cartoons and other illustrations by Flavio Costantini, Walter Crane, Robert Green, George Herriman, Mike Konopacki, Man Ray, Robert Minor, Thomas Nast, Ernest Riebe, Mitchell Siporin, "Dust" Wallin, Art Young-and many more!

256 pages. Paper $19.00. Cloth $35.00

"A magnificent work of research, memory and love." -Meridel LeSueur

"A masterpiece of American radicalism-exactly the book that the radical movement needs today." -George Rawick

"A major contribution to labor history. . . . One of the most visually exciting collections to be published in recent years. . . . It should be on the shelves of every high school and college library. Unions and social action community groups should purchase bulkorders." -Joyce L. Kornb1uh

"A marvelous, massive, very important book." -Studs Terkel

"A remarkable compilation. A genuine scrapbook, with literally hundreds of items and an abundance of visual material."

-George Woodcock, Freedom

"For the best insight into relations between old anarchist and socialist movements, and a hundred varieties of opinion swirling about them over the last century, get the Haymarket Scrapbook. . . a wonderful, big, fat compendium."

-Pete Seeger, Sing Out

"A large-scale, innovatively designed collection. A remarkable intellectual accomplishment. . . . The editors have gathered much of the best and most recent historical work on Haymarket and anarchism. Introduces us to many obscure but important anarchist figures." -Steve Rosswurm, Chicago History

VOICES VOICES VOICES VOICES VOICES VOICES VOICES VOICES VOICES VOICES VOICES VOICES VOICES VOICES VOI

REBEL VOICES

An IWW Anthology

Edited by Joyce L Kornbluh

with a New Introduction by Fred Thompson,

& "A Short Treatise on Wobbly Cartoons"

by Franklin Rosemont

NO group in American labor history has exerted so profound, widespread and enduring an influence as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known as the Wobblies, founded in Chicago in 1905.

Welcoming women, Blacks and immigrants long before most other unions, the Wobblies from the start were labor's outstanding pioneers and innovators, unionizing hundreds of thousands of workers previously regarded as "unorganizable." Wobblies organized the first sitdown strike (at General Electric, Schenectady, 1906), the first major auto strike (6,000 Studebaker workers, Detroit, 1911), the first strike to shut down all three coalfields in Colorado (1927) and the first "no-fare" transit-workers' job-action (Cleveland, 1944). With their imaginative, colorful and world-famous strikes and free-speech fights, the IWW wrote many of the brightest pages in the annals of workingclass emancipation.

Wobblies also made immense and invaluable contributions to workers' culture. All but a few of America's most popular labor songs are Wobbly songs. IWW cartoons have long been recognized as labor's finest and funniest.

The impact of the IWW has reverberated far I beyond the ranks of organized labor. An important influence on the 1960s New Left, the Wobbly theory and practice of direct action, solidarity and "class-war" humor have inspired several generations of civil rights and antiwar activists, and are a major source of ideas and inspiration for today's radical environmentalists. Indeed, virtually every movement seeking to "make this planet a good place to live" (to quote an old Wobbly slogan), has drawn on the IWW's incomparable experience.

Originally published in 1964 and long out of print, Joyce Kornbluh's Rebel Voices remains by far the biggest and best source on IWW history, fiction, songs, art and lore. Besides the full text and illustrations of the original, this new and expanded edition includes thirty-two pages of additional material: a new introduction and updated bibliography by oldtime Wobbly organizer and scholar Fred Thompson; an informative essay on Wobbly cartoons and cartoonists by Franklin Rosemont; more than three dozen additional cartoons and drawings; and a useful index.

464 pages.  Paper $24.00. Cloth $60.00

DEEP SOUTH DEEP SOUTH DEEP SOUTH DEEP SOUTH DEEP SOUTH DEEP SOUTH DEEP SOUTH DEEP SOUTH DEEP

LABOR STRUGGLES IN THE DEEP SOUTH

& Other Writings

by Covington Hall

Edited & Introduced by David R. Roediger

"HERE is a unique account of the hidden class and race conflicts that punctuated that region's history during the first wave of industrialization. H is also the engaging autobiography of a remarkable radical named Covington Hall, who broke with Deep South traditions and who captured in moving words and poetic images the hard lives of black and white workers and the bloody fights they waged against an oppressive social order." -James R. Green

In the half-century since it was written, Covington Hall's Labor Struggles in the Deep South, published here for the first time, as become an underground Classic among activist historians writing on the South and on working people. Hall-a journalist, organizer, rebel, professor and above all poet-brings to life the dramatic early twentieth-century struggles of the waterfront workers of New Orleans and the militant timber workers or Louisiana and East Texas.

Writing about events in which he played a central role and bout the broader history of Southern labor, Hall describes many f the finest hours of integrated industrial unionism in the U.S. and the role of the Industrial Workers of the World in creating agile unity across racial lines.

The always lively narrative is heightened by dozens of rare WW cartoons and other period illustrations. Also included is a sampling of Hall's articles on labor history and education as well 5 his editorial opinions, poems, and "factful fables," revealing their aspects of Hall's remarkable creativity, humor, imagination, and lifelong dedication to libertarian socialism.

David Roediger's introduction expands our knowledge of Hall and his influence, and assesses his legacy in the light of current-day struggles against white supremacy and wage slavery.

David Roediger teaches history at the University of Illinois: Champaign. His books include The Wages of Whiteness, Black on White, and Dreams and Dynamite: Selected Poems of Covington Hall.

Paper $14.00

PAN-AFRICAN PAN-AFRICAN PAN-AFRICAN PAN-AFRICAN PAN-AFRICAN PAN-AFRICAN PAN-AFRICAN PAN-AFRICAN

A HISTORY OF
PAN-AFRICAN REVOLT

by C L. R. JAMES

with a New Introduction by Robin D. G. Kelley

A History of Pan-African Revolt is one of those rare books that continues to strike a chord of urgency, even half a century after it was first published. Time and time again, its lessons have proven to be valuable and relevant for understanding liberation movements in Africa and the diaspora. Each generation that has had the opportunity to read this small book finds new insights, new lessons, new visions for their own age.

No piece of literature can substitute for a crystal ball, and only religious fundamentalists believe that a book can provide comprehensive answers to all questions. But if nothing else, A History of Pan-African Revolt leaves us with two incontrovertible facts. First, as long as Black people are denied freedom, humanity, and a decent standard of living, they will continue to revolt. Second, unless these revolts involve the ordinary masses and take place on their own terms, they have no hope of succeeding.

Paper $14

BUGHOUSE BUGHOUSE BUGHOUSE BUGHOUSE BUGHOUSE BUGHOUSE BUGHOUSE BUGHOUSE BUGHOUSE BUG

SLIM BRUNDAGE

FROM BUGHOUSE SQUARE TO THE
BEAT GENERATION

"If you wish to see the so-called 'beat generation' in action, drop in at the College of Complexes. "

- Dorothy Kilgallen (1960), The Playground for People Who Think

"Slim Brundage was Chicago_s last guerrilla fighter for free speech. We celebrate him today as an extinct volcano on the Chicago landscape. We loved his turbulence, his passionate fire, and his continuing unpredictability. His eruptions kept us alert. Hail, Slim Brundage!"-Leon M. Despres

THAT'S WHAT THEY CALLED Chicago's College of Complexes in its heyday (1951-1961). A unique combination of tavern, university and nonstop wild party, the College was for many years the city's outstanding outsider outpost-a rare living link between the old IWW/Bughouse Square/Dil (yes-one l!) Pickle Club counterculture of the 1920s and the Beat Generation/New Left counterculture of the 1960s.

The writings collected here by the College's Founder and Janitor, Slim Brundage (1903-1990), chronicle the colorful history of what may well be the oldest continuous dissident workingclass intellectual community in the U.S.

Hobo, Wobbly, Soapboxer, veteran of Bughouse Square and the Dil Pickle, "little theater" playwright/actor, president emeritus of the Hobo College in the 1930s, housepainter, humorist and chief architect of the scandalous Beatnik Party during the 1960 electionss, Brundage was very much a maker of of the history he writes about.

Here are exciting first-person accounts of tramping, open forums, the fabulous Pickle, the hobo colleges, the Radical Bookshop, and a guided tour of North Clark Street in its most deliriously disreputable days. And here too is the hilarious story of the College of Complexes as it evolved from the last of the old-time free-speech forums into Chicago's Number One "beatnik bistro."

Also included are several of the Janitor's "Ravings" from the College's "official neurosis," The Curriculum, articulating his free-wheeling, let's-see-what-happens radical philosophy.

Franklin Rosemont's introduction discusses the IWW/hobohemian roots of the College, outlines the Janitor's radical (and Dadaist) critique of education, and relates Brundage's life, the College and Chicago's hobo/beat scenes to the broader struggles for a better, freer, truly eqalitarian and non-exploitative society.

Minors Admitted If Accompanied by Their Grandchildren

Paper $14.00

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Catalog

JOE HILL LESSON PUNCHING OUT POSADA PEETIE HOBOHEMIA CRIME WALLS & BARS HAYMARKET VOICES DEEP S

Attention: Bookstores!! ISBN Prefix: 0-88286-

No. of
Copies

 

AMERICAN LABOR’S FIRST STRIKE by Henry Rosemont

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Paper $15.00

 

APPARITIONS OF THINGS TO COME Edward Bellamy's Tales of Mystery and Imagination

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Paper (#165-4) $12.00

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Cloth (#164-6) $25.00

 

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MOTHER JONES

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Paper (#166-2) $12.00

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Cloth (#167-0) $25.00

 

BEN FLETCHER: Black Wobbly. Intro by Peter Cole

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Paper $18.00

 

BENJAMIN PERET, A Menagerie in Revolt! Intro by Franklin Rosemont.  Afterwards by Don LaCoss

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Paper $14.00

 

BEWARE ANARCHIST Life of Augustin Souchy

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Paper (# 214-6) $10.00

 

BIG RED SONG BOOK. Edited by Archie Green et al

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Paper $24.00

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Cloth $36.00

 

BLACK HOBOES AND THEIR SONGS (See WHAT'S THE USE OF WALKING)

 

CHANGING SOCIETY: Lives of Worker Heroes by Bob Breving

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Paper $9.00

 

CIVIL WAR IN FRANCE and Writings on the Paris Commune by Karl Marx

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Paper (#236-7) $10.00

 

COLD CHICAGO A Haymarket Fable. A Play by Warren Leming. Woodcut illustrations by Carlos Cortez

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Paper (#256-1) $15.00

 

COMMUNICATING VESSELS by Anthony Leskov

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Paper $10.00

 

COMMUNIST MANIFESTO by Karl Marx & Frederick Engels. Introduction by Robin D.G. Kelley

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Paper (#235-9) $5.00

 

CRIME & CRIMINALS by Clarence Darrow

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Paper (#250-2) $8.00

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Cloth (#253-7) $18.00

 

CRIME: ITS CAUSES & CONSEQUENCES by John Keracher.

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Paper $4.00

 

CRYSTAL GAZING the Amber Fluid by Carlos Cortez

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Paper (#206-5) $9.00

 

DANCIN' IN THE STREETS edited and introduced by Franklin Rosemont and Charles Radcliffe

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Paper (-301-0) $17.00

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Cloth (#302-9) $25.00

 

DAY WILL COME Stories of the Haymarket Martyrs and Others Buried Alongside the Monument

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Paper $5.00

 

DEVIL'S SON-IN-LAW The Story of Peetie Wheatstraw & His Songs by Paul Garon. with CD

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Paper (#266-9) $15.00

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Cloth $21.00

 

DIL PICKLE Rise & Fall Edited & Introduced by Franklin Rosemont

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Paper (#274-8) $14.00

 

DIRECT ACTION AND SABOTAGE, Three IWW Pamphlets from the 1910s by Flynn, Smith, & Trautman. Introduction by Salvatore Salerno

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Paper (#185-9) $15.00

 

DREAMS & EVERYDAY LIFE by Penelope Rosemont

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Paper  $17.00

 

EAGLE FORGOTTEN Life of John P. Altgeld. by Harry Barnard

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Cloth (# 100-x) $10.00

 

EUGENE V DEBS by Bernard Brommel

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Cloth $17.00

 

FACING REALITY by C.L.R. James, et al

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Paper (#308-8) $16.00

 

FELLOW WORKER The Life of Fred Thompson (IWW). Edited &Introduced by Dave Roediger

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Paper (#220-0) $10.00

 

FLIVVER KING A Story of Ford-America by Upton Sinclair

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Paper (054-0) $12.00

 

FREDERICK ENGELS by John Keracher

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Paper $4.00

 

FROM BUGHOUSE SQUARE TO THE BEAT GENERATION Ravings of Slim Brundage. Edited by Franklin Rosemont

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Paper (#232-4) $14.00

 

GOLDEN BOOK OF SPRINGFIELD by Vachel Lindsay. Introduction by Ron Sakolsky

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Paper (#242-1) $22.00

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Cloth (#243-x) $38.00

 

HARLEM GLORY A Story of Aframerican Life by Claude McKay

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Paper (#163-8) $12.00

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HAYMARKET ANARCHISTS, Reasons for Pardoning by John Peter Altgeld. Introduction by Leon Despres.

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HAYMARKET HERITAGE Memoir by Irving S. Abrams. Edited by Dave Roediger & Phyllis Boanes

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Paper (#197-2) $10.00

 

HAYMARKET SCRAPBOOK. Edited by Dave Roediger & Franklin Rosemont

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Paper (#122-0) $19.00

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HEAD-FIXING INDUSTRY by John Keracher.

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HISTORY AGAINST MISERY by David Roediger

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HISTORY OF PAN-AFRICAN REVOLT by C.L.R. James. Introduction by Robin D. G. Kelley

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Paper (225-1) $12.00

 

HOBOHEMIA by Frank O. Beck. Introduction by Franklin Rosemont

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Paper (#251-0) $12.00

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ISADORA SPEAKS Writings & Speeches of Isadora Duncan

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Paper (#227-8) $12.00

 

IWW SONGS 1923 Edition

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Paper (#189-1) $5.00

 

JACQUES VACH... and the Roots of Surrealism by Franklin Rosemont

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JOE HILL The IWW & Making of a Revolutionary Working Class Counterculture by Franklin Rosemont

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Paper (#264-2) $19.00

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JUICE IS STRANGER THAN FRICTION Selected Writings of T-Bone Slim

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LABOR LAW FOR THE RANK-AND-FILER or Building Solidarity While Staying Clear of the Law by S. Lynd. (1980) Only a few left!

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LABOR STRUGGLES IN THE DEEP SOUTH and Other Writings by Covington Hall. Introduced by David R. Roediger

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LESSON OF THE HOUR by Wendell Phillips. Introduced by Noel Ignatiev

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LUCY PARSONS American Revolutionary by Carolyn Ashbaugh. (1971)

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LUCY PARSONS Freedom, Equality & Solidarity,Writings & Speeches. Introduction by Gale Ahrens. Afterword by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

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MEMOIRS OF A WOBBLY by McGuckin

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Paper (#157-3) $7.00

 

MR BLOCK Twenty-Four IWW Cartoons. by Ernest Riebe. Introduction by F. Rosemont

_____

Paper (#062-3) $12.00 Limited Supply!

 

MYSTERIES OF ST LOUIS. A radical gothic novel from 1851 by Henry Boernstein. Edited by Steven Rowan and Elizabeth Sims

_____

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NEW RADICALS in the Multiversity and Student Syndicalism by Carl Davidson

_____

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NOTES OF SIXTY YEARS The Autobiography of Florence Kelley. Introduced by Kathryn Kish Sklar

_____

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On the Duty of CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE by Henry David Thoreau. Introduction by George Woodcock

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Paper (#130-1) $5.00

 

PORT HURON STATEMENT by Tom Hayden et al

_____

Paper (#172-7) $8.00

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POSTCARDS: Radical History

_____

15 for $7.00

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30 for $12.00

 

PROGRESS WITHOUT PEOPLE In Defense of Luddism by David F. Noble

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Paper (#218-9) $15.00

 

PROUDHON AND HIS "BANK OF THE PEOPLE" by Charles A. Dana. Preface by Benjamin Tucker. Introduction by Paul Avrich

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PUNCHING OUT Writings of Martin Glaberman. Edited & Introduced by Staughton Lynd

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RAMBLING KID by Charles Ashleigh. Introduction by Steve Kellerman

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Paper (#272-3) $17.00

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REASONS FOR PARDONING (See Haymarket Anarchists)

  

REBEL VOICES An IWW Anthology. Edited by Joyce L. Kornbluh

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Paper (#237-5) $24.00

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Cloth (#145-x) $60.00

  

REVOLUTION IN THE SERVICE OF THE MARVELOUS by Franklin Rosemont.

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Paper (#350-9) $14.00

  

RIGHT TO BE LAZY by Paul Lafargue. Introduction by Joseph Jablonski

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Paper (#182-4) $12.00

  

RISE & REPRESSION OF RADICAL LABOR 1877-1918 by D.R. Fusfeld

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ROLL THE UNION ON A Pictorial History of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union by H.L. Mitchell

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SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF THOMAS SKIDMORE by Amos Gilbert

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SOCIALIST & LABOR SONGS of the 1930s with Music by Elizabeth Morgan. Preface by Utah Phillips

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SOLIDARITY UNIONISM Rebuilding Labor from Below by Staughton Lynd. Cartoons by Mike Konopacki

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Paper (#208-1) $15.00

 

STARVING AMIDST TOO MUCH & Other IWW Writings on the Food Industry by T-Bone Slim, L. S. Chumley, Jim Seymour and Jack Sheridan. Edited and introduced by Peter Rachleff. Foreword by Carlos Cortez

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Paper (#303-7) $12.00

  

STATE CAPITALISM by C.L.R. James with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee. Introduction by Paul Buhle

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STORY OF MARY MACLANE & Other Writings. Introduced by P. Rosemont

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SURR...ALISME & ATHEISM... by Guy Ducornet

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SURREALISM IN '68 Paris Prague Chicago by Don LaCoss

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SYNDICALISM by Earl C. Ford & William Z. Foster. Introduction by James R. Barrett

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Paper (#187-5) $9.00

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VIVA POSADA! Introduced by Carlos Cortez

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WALLS & BARS by Eugene V. Debs

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WE WILL RETURN IN THE WHIRLWIND by Muhammad Ahmad

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WHAT'S THE USE OF WALING _ BLACK HOBOES AND THEIR SONGS by Paul Garon

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WHERE ARE THE VOICES? & Other Wobbly Poems by Carlos Cortez

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Paper (#238-3) $10.00

  

WRITTEN IN RED Poems of Voltairine de Cleyre

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Paper (#146-8) $5.00

  

YEAR IN THE LIFE OF A FACTORY by M. Seider

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YOU HAVE NO COUNTRY! Workers' Struggle Against War by Mary Marcy

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Paper (#058-5) $7.00 
  





 

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Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company
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Chicago, IL 60626

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Kerr Company History

KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR KERR

When Crain's Chicago Business, of all publications, recently profiled the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, it quoted the historian Paul Avrich, who enthused, "A few people at Kerr do a lot of very hard, very fine work, which meets a real need for radical, socialist and labor history."

The company's story begins improbably enough with the birth of Charles Hope Kerr to abolitionist parents living in LaGrange, Georgia just before the start of the Civil War. According to some accounts, the Kerrs used the Underground Railroad, designed to transport fugitive slaves, to beat a hasty retreat from the South. By 1881, Charles Hope Kerr had graduated from the University of Wisconsin, where his father chaired the Department of Classics. The younger Kerr's undergraduate training in Romance Languages would later serve him well as he was to translate into English such works as Antonio Labriola's Essays on the Materialist Conception of History and Paul Lafargue's brilliant The Right to Be Lazy.

When the Haymarket bomb exploded at a Chicago labor demonstration in 1886, Charles Hope Kerr was a resident of that city, an experienced editor of Unitarian periodicals and the founder of his own Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company. He later recalled learning much from the left Unitarians, though he noted that the radicalism of many of them dimmed quickly when the property question came to the fore.

In the wake of Haymarket and of the 1894 Pullman strike, the property question was to become an increasingly sharp concern for Kerr and for his wife, the feminist temperance advocate, May Walden. After first embracing the monetary reform ideas of the Populist movement, the couple accepted socialism at the century's turn. A 1900 Kerr Company catalog suggests the expansive range of interests which the publishing house brought with it in joining forces with the organized left, promising books "on socialism, free thought, economics, history, hygiene, American fiction, etc."

A year later music would join the list, with the publication of Socialist Songs With Music, the first such collection printed in the U.S. Kerr edited Socialist Songs himself and provided a translation of the "Internationale," one destined to become the standard English text. In subsequent years, socialist playing cards, post cards and even board games found places in Kerr catalogs alongside works of theory.

In the early twentieth century, the Kerr Company became the world's leading English-language radical publisher. It issued, between 1906 and 1909, Ernest Untermann's translation of the three volumes of Marx's Capital, the first full such text, and published the initial popular edition of the anthropological classic Ancient Society, by Lewis Henry Morgan. The works of Clarence Darrow, Peter Kropotkin, Carl Sandburg and Jack London also graced Kerr's lists.

The International Socialist Review (ISR), published by Kerr and affiliated with the Second International, began in 1900 as a rather staid and academic journal edited by the socialist intellectual A. M. Simons. But, after 1908, under Kerr's and later Mary Marcy's editorship, it became a lively mass circulation magazine featuring radical theory, culture (including exclusive publications of London's short stories) and reportage. Contributors included virtually every well-known figure in the radical labor movement, here and abroad.

During the critical World War One years, the Kerr Company represented not only a publishing house, but also a current in the American socialist movement. Openly and uncompromisingly revolutionary, sympathetic to the proletarian socialism of the Industrial Workers of the World and intractably opposed to militarism, the Kerr Company vigorously opposed the war, both before and after U.S. entry. The U.S. government as vigorously opposed the Kerr Company, seeing to it that ISR was banned from the mails under the infamous Espionage Act. Repression, splits in the Socialist Party and the decimation of the IWW all took their toll and, by 1928, an exhausted Charles H. Kerr retired from the company which he had directed for 42 years.

Kerr left the company which bore his name a rich heritage, especially as the American publisher of works representing the viewpoints of the libertarian far left and of revolutionary industrial unionism. Out of the IWW experiences came Kerr's publication of Austin Lewis' The Militant Proletariat, one of the most important theoretical works written in the U.S. Especially during the war, ISR opened its pages to the best of the European far left, including Rosa Luxemburg, Otto Ruble, Hermann Gorter and S. J. Rutgers. Not only did Anton Pannekoek's articles appear, but his Marxism and Darwinism, translated into English, became a Kerr pamphlet. Perhaps most remarkably, in 1913, shortly after being investigated by the Socialist Party leadership for its heterodoxy, the Kerr Company published a translation of Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte done by the SP's sternest left critic, Daniel DeLeon. Kerr himself, though still an SP member, also included DeLeon's 1897 introduction and to top off a noteworthy adventure in nonsectarianism, added a "Publisher's Note" stressing that the "events of sixteen years have in many ways confirmed [the introduction's] forecast" on political matters.

Prior to leaving, Charles H. Kerr took steps to ensure that the company would continue. Well before he departed, he turned over much of the operation to John Keracher and other members of the Proletarian Party. The PP, which originally adhered to the Communist International, dissented from any analyses which hinted that the time of triumph of American Bolshevism was at hand. It proved to be a small party, but an apt caretaker for the Kerr Company. The Proletarians' roots in the Michigan Socialist Party imparted a deep respect for Kerr's past. Perhaps for that reason, the PP never sought to transform Kerr into a narrow party press. The PP also enjoyed a substantial following among self-educated skilled workers. It often conducted workers' schools and, at times, seemed as interested in spreading knowledge of the natural sciences as in propagating Marxism. This love of knowledge, along with the long-range perspectives of the PP, fit Keracher and his associates well for radical publishing work.

Through 1971, the Proletarians ran Kerr, a company much diminished in size from its early twentieth century heyday, but one still able to keep Marxist classics in print and even to add an occasional new title, such as Keracher's own witty and biting critique of advertising and media, The Head-Fixing Industry.

In 1971, with the PP passing out of existence, its leaders gave control of the Kerr Company to a new Board of Directors, including longtime IWW leader Fred Thompson, labor defense activist and radical economist Joseph Giganti, socialist historian and expert on American Indians Virgil Vogel, and Burt Rosen, a Korean War draft resistance activist and veteran socialist. Cooperating with the Illinois Labor History Society, the revived Kerr Company far exceeded the original expectations of its new Board of Directors, which, as Thompson recalls, at first hoped to give a "decent burial" to a historic institution by distributing its existing stock. Instead, and largely through the hard work of Burt Rosen, the company rebounded and published new biographies of Eugene Debs and of Lucy Parsons, as well as Daniel Fusfeld's masterful short history, Rise and Repression of Radical Labor. Old Kerr titles by Engels, Marx and Lafargue were reprinted, along with The Autobiography of Mother Jones, a labor classic first published in the twenties, reissued in time to sell thousands of copies in mining towns during the coal strikes of the seventies.

The past couple of decades have seen further growth of the Kerr Company. Organized as a worker-owned co-operative not-for-profit educational association, its rapidly expanding list features beautifully printed but reasonably priced books which bring back into print some of the best of C.L.R. James, Mary Marcy, Edward Bellamy, Eugene V. Debs, Clarence Darrow, Isadora Duncan, Vachel Lindsay, Mary MacLane, C. H. George, and Voltairine de Cleyre, as well as heretofore unpublished writings by T-Bone Slim, Claude McKay, Slim Brundage, and Covington Hall, and new books by H. L. Mitchell, Staughton Lynd,, Warren Leming, and Carlos Cortez. Several books on Haymarket, a "Sixties Series" (inaugurated by the first textually accurate edition ever published of the celebrated 1962 Port Huron Statement), a "Lost Utopias Series," a "Bughouse Square Series" and a large and steadily growing number of books on the IWW: These are just a few of the important books brought out by Charles H. Kerr in recent years.

Now (in 2003) in its 118th year, the Kerr Company is not only a living link with the most vital radical traditions of the past, but also an organic part of today's struggles for peace and justice in an ecologically balanced world.

Dave Roediger & Franklin Rosemont

(Originally published in the journal Workers' Democracy in 1986 the above article appears here slightly abridged and updated.)

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