BY GREG McCARTAN
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.
Three Pathfinder titles are being reprinted in December with substantial improvements. The Revolution Betrayed and the Communist Manifesto will feature new covers, and the Manifesto and The Politics of Chicano Liberation have new type and internal design.
These reprints come just prior to the release of Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1956-58, by Ernesto Che Guevara. Special promotional material for this new book will be featured throughout December in the Militant, in mailings to Pathfinder supporters, and in press releases and information sent to book industry magazines.
Supporters of Pathfinder can make plans to utilize these attractive reprints to increase sales from Pathfinder bookstores, to retail outlets and libraries, on literature tables, and elsewhere. They provide a good opportunity to increase membership in the Pathfinder Readers Club as well, since special offers on these books amount to a substantial savings for workers and young fighters seeking to build up their libraries of revolutionary literature.
Newly back in print is The Politics of Chicano Liberation, the preface to which is reprinted in this issue of the Militant.
Edited by Olga Rodríguez, the book features reports and resolutions of the Socialist Workers Party in the 1970s that draw together the experiences and lessons of the Chicano movement in the United States over the previous decade. Members of the SWP and Young Socialist Alliance were centrally involved in the battles for Chicano liberation and working-class struggles such as those to build the United Farm Workers union.
Many fighting to defend affirmative action, to oppose the anti-immigrant measure Proposition 187, and to build the labor movement will find the history and the lessons in the book invaluable for advancing today's struggles.
The book will be available December 21. A 25 percent discount off the $15.95 retail price is available to members of the Readers Club.
One of Pathfinder's best-selling titles, the Communist Manifesto, is now available in an attractive new format. The cover features a detail of the Pathfinder Mural in New York and was designed by Toni Gorton.
Written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in 1847 as the program of the first modern communist workers organization, the Manifesto presents in bold, scientific, and straightforward language why communism, to the degree it is a theory, is the generalization of the historical line of march of the working class, and of the political conditions for its liberation.
Thousands of Pathfinder's edition of the Manifesto are sold each year off literature tables at protest meetings and strikes, to people visiting Pathfinder bookstores, and to university bookstores for use in college classrooms. Supporters of Pathfinder can visit colleges in their area to show appropriate professors the new pamphlet and encourage them to order it for their class use.
Now 68 pages and with a more durable cover, the Manifesto sells for $3.95.
Coming off the press in early December will be The Revolution Betrayed, a classic work of Marxism by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky was a central leader of the 1917 revolution in Russia, one of the most deep-going revolutions in history, and of the Bolshevik Party and Communist International during the early years of the Soviet Republic. Following Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky was the principal leader of the international struggle to continue Lenin's communist course.
In this book Trotsky examines the social, political, and economic impact of the counterrevolution organized during the mid- to late 1920s by the privileged bureaucratic caste headed by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, and why and how that layer was able to take and hold political power. It is essential reading in gaining an insight into the crisis shaking the countries of the former Soviet Union today.
This printing features a new color cover designed by Eric Simpson.
Pathfinder also has a 25 percent-off special offer available until January 1 to members of the Readers Club on the newly reprinted Polemics in Marxist Philosophy, by George Novack. Regularly $19.95, the special offer price is $14.95.
In this book Novack defends scientific socialism as an essential tool working people have to advance the fight for a world based on cooperative labor and human solidarity. Novack takes on those in the 20th century who, parading as the true interpreters of Marx, have provided a "philosophical" veneer for the anti- working-class political course of Stalinist and social democratic misleaderships around the world.