The purpose of this effort is to aid Pathfinder bookstores in North America and around the world in promoting the entire range of revolutionary literature Pathfinder publishes and keeps in print--in English, Spanish, French, and in some cases Swedish and Icelandic as well.

These include the works of communist leaders from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, to V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky; to speeches and writings of the pioneering leaders of the revolutionary workers movement in the United States, such as James P. Cannon and Farrell Dobbs; to titles by outstanding revolutionary and Marxist leaders of the world struggle for national liberation and socialism over the past half century, such as Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Thomas Sankara, and Maurice Bishop.

At the heart of Pathfinder's political arsenal are writings and speeches by Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters, and other current leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and communist movement--books and pamphlets such as The Changing Face of U.S. Politics, Capitalism's World Disorder, Cuba and the Coming American Revolution, Pathfinder Was Born with the October Revolution, Communist Continuity and the Fight for Women's Liberation, and many others. Together with issues of the Marxist magazine New International, these titles provide a working-class political analysis of, and strategic orientation to, the expanding opportunities and challenges of the class struggle in today's world.

Pathfinder bookstores will receive a special 60 percent commercial discount during the month on newly reprinted books such as these and other Pathfinder titles. The bookstores will feature the Books of the Month on their counters and bookshelves, and supporters of Pathfinder will take these and other titles out each week to street corners, picket lines, campuses, and political events in the workers' neighborhoods and cities where they are located and to the surrounding area.

These monthly promotional offers are a chance for workers, farmers, and youth interested in the lessons of hard-fought struggles by working people over the past century and a half to expand their libraries and equip themselves to be more effective militants and leaders. Each week the Militant will highlight one of these titles, running excerpts from it, along with an ad for the specials as a whole.  
 
Pathfinder Reprint Project
The Books of the Month are selected from titles newly digitized by the more than 150 volunteers around the world participating in the Pathfinder Reprint Project, as well as from titles they have already digitized but have sold out and been reprinted once again. Volunteers in this project are organizing to put all 350-plus Pathfinder titles into electronic form, so they can be kept in print at a smaller cost and with less labor time using the state-of-the-art computer-to-plate technology in Pathfinder's printshop.

The printshop has set the goal of a one-month turnaround of titles as they are turned in by Pathfinder to go on the presses.

At the beginning of May, the Pathfinder Reprint Project volunteers celebrated the halfway mark in this international effort, and they have set the goal of surpassing 75 percent by this time in 2002. Without this volunteer project, a growing percentage of Pathfinder's catalog of revolutionary literature would simply be unavailable for purchase, study, and use by working people and youth.

The newly digitized titles represent a substantial upgrade to these books and pamphlets: larger, more readable type; a more attractive internal presentation; higher-quality photographs and other graphics; corrections of errors in previous printings; improvements to the indexes; and in some cases newly designed covers.

For that reason, readers who have earlier, well-worn printings of these books on their shelves are often replacing them with the reprints. Some readers also point out that when they join in classes to study and discuss these books and pamphlets, it's useful for all involved--from whatever generation--to be using the same editions with the same page numbers.  
 
July special offers
Titles to be featured in July are:

• Revolutionary Continuity in the U.S.: The Early Years 1848–1917 by Farrell Dobbs. Newly redesigned and more inviting to the eye, this is the first of two volumes by a central leader of American communism. These books, in Dobbs's words, "trace three major threads through the history of the workers' movement in this country and its revolutionary continuity: (1) the fight for the economic organization of the working class into trade unions, and for organization along industrial rather than craft lines; (2) the fight for political and social consciousness and action by the workers' movement; and (3) the fight for the independent political organization of the working class, a labor party, to advance its interests and those of its allies against the interests of the ruling capitalist minority. Tying these threads together are the efforts by the Marxist wing of the workers' movement to gather the cadres of a proletarian revolutionary party needed to lead the fight to end capitalist rule, establish a workers and farmers government, and open the road to a socialist order."
• Class, Party, and State and the Eastern European Revolution. This Education for Socialists publication, also newly reset in a more attractive format, contains documents and polemics from the discussion in the Socialist Workers Party and world communist movement on the post–World War II overturns of capitalism across Eastern Europe. An understanding of the process through which these social transformations took place--from a deep-going popular revolution in Yugoslavia, to more bureaucratically organized mass mobilizations of workers and peasants in most other of these countries--sheds light both on the collapse of the Stalinist regimes at the opening of the 1990s and the obstacles imperialism still faces in its efforts to impose stable capitalist regimes and exploitative social relations on working people throughout this part of the world.
• Maurice Bishop Speaks. The only collection of speeches, interviews, and writings still in print by the central leader of the 1979–83 Grenada Revolution, explaining the anticapitalist course and internationalist foreign policy of the workers and farmers government in that Eastern Caribbean island. The collection contains an introduction by Steve Clark that reviews the achievements of the revolution and the background to its overthrow in 1983 by a Stalinist faction, paving the way for an invasion by Washington, as well as a speech by Fidel Castro and statement by the Cuban government condemning the counterrevolutionary coup and subsequent imperialist intervention.
• Che Guevara: L'économie et la politique dans la transition au socialisme (Economics and politics in the transition to socialism) by Carlos Tablada. A new French-language edition drawn from the writings of Ernesto Che Guevara, a central leader of the Cuban Revolution. When the original Spanish edition was first published in the late 1980s, Cuban president Fidel Castro commented that the author had "compiled, studied, and presented in the book the essence of Che's economic ideas...dealing with a subject so decisive in the building of socialism." The Spanish and English editions are also available through Pathfinder.
• Writings of Leon Trotsky 1939–40. These articles and letters were written at the onset of World War II by the Bolshevik leader who led the international fight to continue putting Lenin's political legacy in practice following the Stalinist political counterrevolution in the Soviet Union. They assess the aims of the contending imperialist powers in the unfolding slaughter and the tasks facing the world communist movement. This newly redesigned and reprinted book is part of the 14-volume collection of writings by Trotsky from the decade of capitalism's most devastating social and political crisis of the last century and many of the biggest class battles by workers and farmers. This series is an important component of the library of revolutionaries anywhere in the world.
• 50 años de guerra encubierta by Larry Seigle, This Spanish-language pamphlet contains a translation of the article, "Washington's 50-Year Domestic Contra Operation," which appears in issue no. 6 of New International magazine. The pamphlet, the author says, looks "at the origins and continuity of the FBI's covert war against the Socialist Workers Party" going back to the U.S. government's preparations to drag U.S. workers into World War II. In the process, the article explains why the SWP has taken the lead in unconditionally championing the rights of all those targeted by the U.S. imperialist rulers--rather than "the Social Democrats, who have substantially greater resources," or "the Communist Party, which has suffered more than the SWP from the FBI's illegal campaigns of spying, harassment, and disruption."

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