BY MAGGIE PUCCI
Pathfinder, located in New York, with distributors in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, publishes books and pamphlets by revolutionary and working-class leaders. Pathfinder bookstores are listed in the directory on page 12.
Pathfinder is becoming increasingly known as one of the main sources of essential works by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, the founders of the modern revolutionary working- class movement. Pathfinder publishes several works by Marx and Engels, including the Communist Manifesto in English and Spanish, and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, both by Engels. In addition, the New York-based publisher carries and distributes some 110 titles by these two communist leaders in English, Spanish, and French.
Pathfinder bookstores around the world can promote these titles with special offers and displays that call attention to these indispensable resources and encourage readers of Pathfinder books to build up their libraries.
Among the titles by Marx and Engels distributed by Pathfinder is the entire available set of the Collected Works, comprised of 44 volumes so far. (Six more are awaiting publication to complete the 50-volume set.) In addition, all three volumes of Capital by Marx, still to be published as part of the Collected Works, are available separately.
Several books collect together essential readings on particular topics that can help fighters gain a deeper understanding of contemporary issues and communist politics and strategy. In Ireland and the Irish Question readers are treated to the writings of these working-class leaders on what Engels describes as "England's first colony." The book consists of letters between the two, as well as to political collaborators around the world; articles for several different newspapers; and minutes and addresses of the first international mass organization of the workers movement, the International Working Men's Association, which Marx and Engels helped found and lead.
A succinct description of the history of British colonial oppression is included in the record of a speech delivered by Marx to the German Workers' Educational Association in 1867. The Irish question is "not simply a nationality question," Marx says, "but a question of land and existence. Ruin or revolution is the watchword."
These writings offer a chronicle of the first modern national liberation movement in Ireland, with a thorough account of the Fenian movement. Marx and Engels describe and condemn the brutality of the English police in Ireland against the captured Fenians when that movement was defeated.
The American Revolutionary War, the U.S. Civil War from 1861 to 1865, and the development of the working class and labor movement in the latter half of the 1800's are the subjects of Marx and Engels On the United States.
Marx and Engels provide detailed descriptions of events in the Civil War as they were unfolding. Writing on behalf of the Central Council of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln upon his re-election as president in 1864, Marx congratulates him, saying, "If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant warcry of your re- election is, Death to Slavery." Later in the same letter Marx denounces the Southern slaveholders. "An oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe...`slavery' on the banner of Armed Revolt," he wrote, "on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man [the Declaration of Independence] was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the 18th century."
One of the excerpts in this collection is Engels's 1887 preface to the American edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England (this entire book is also available from Pathfinder). Referring to the general strike of 1886 for the eight-hour workday, which began on May 1, and to the hanging in November 1887 of activists in this movement in Chicago who later became known as the Haymarket Martyrs, Engels writes: "May and November have hitherto reminded the American bourgeoisie only of the payment of coupons of US bonds; henceforth May and November will remind them, too, of the dates on which the American working class presented their coupons for payment."
"The Civil War in France," contained in the collection On the Paris Commune, is the product of Marx's painstaking political assessment of the historic importance and lessons of the Commune, which lasted from March to May 1871. The Commune was the first time the working class held political power and "stormed the heavens," as Marx wrote at the time of the uprising in Paris.
"Its true secret was this," Marx writes. "It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labor." Marx pointed to the Commune's practical experience in the period of transition from capitalism to socialism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat as the form of government in that period.
The Civil War in France was first published in 1871 in English. In that year alone, nearly 30 editions of the book were produced in 11 languages. The revolution in Paris found an echo among working people around the world. During the Commune's existence, mass meetings in support of the revolutionary movement, and, later in protest against the atrocities committed against it, were held in Britain, Germany, Belgium, the United States, and other countries. This solidarity movement was led by the First International.
Marx describes the Commune as "the bold champion of the emancipation of labor, emphatically international....The Commune admitted all foreigners to the honor of dying for an immortal cause." (A good companion to the writings of Marx and Engels on the Paris Commune is The History of the Paris Commune of 1871, by Prosper-Olivier Hippolyte Lissagaray, a barricade fighter and journalist who covered the course of the Commune's existence. This book is also available from Pathfinder.)
Other works by Marx and Engels available through Pathfinder include, On Colonialism, The First Indian War of Independence, and the first and third volumes of the Selected Works (in three volumes). Among the items in Volume One of the Selected Works are Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach" and "Wage Labor and Capital," and Engels's "Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany." Volume Three contains "Critique of the Gotha Programme" by Marx and several writings by Engels, including "The Part Played by Labor in the Transition From Ape to Man" and "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific."
Pathfinder also distributes more than 30 titles by Marx and Engels in Spanish. These include Crítica del programa de Gotha, (Critique of the Gotha Programme), Miseria de la filosofía (Poverty of Philosophy), and El origen de la familia, la propiedad privada y el estado (Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State) by Engels.
Fourteen titles are available in French including Anti- Duhring by Engels and Contribution á la critique de l'économie politique (Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) by Marx.
The Communist Manifesto is available in all three languages.
For a complete list of titles available from Pathfinder, send a self-addressed stamped envelope to 410 West Street, New York, NY 10014 or visit a Pathfinder bookstore near you.