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Stumbled across an amazing database of free Marxist PDFs, the posts of which seems to be password protected but whose files are nevertheless accessible. Even if these get taken down, as seemed to happen with the Fuck V£R$0 blog a few years ago, the cat is already out of the bag. As Novara Media pointed out following the Lawrence & Wishart copyright controversy in 2014, once published these things tend to obey the logic of the so-called “Streisand effect.” They explained that “[the] attempt to ban or censor something will tend to increase its prominence and breadth of dissemination. The instantly and near-infinitely replicable quality of digital information makes this easy.”
In their view, this is just one of “Seven Reasons ‘Radical’ Publishers are Getting OWNED by the Internet.” You should really read the whole article; it’s quite good. With Lawrence & Wishart, the outcry over their exclusive claims to ownership over material that should be made available to all was nearly universal. However, publishing tycoons such as Sebastian Budgen — until recently a member of the Socialist Workers’ Party in Britain (prior to its 2013 rape scandal), commissioning editor of Historical Materialism, Verso Books, New Left Review, and now also Jacobin — take exception when similar demands are placed on books released by their own companies. Budgen of course claims that the printing presses he works for are not ordinary companies, but rather integral parts of a “counterhegemonic apparatus” that will someday challenge hegemonic capitalism.
The Association of Musical Marxists captured this hilarious sense of exceptionalism on their “Sebastian Budgen Memorial Download Page,” featuring one of his trademark outbursts against those who illegally download books:
Before the internet people had to actually go to the photocopying shop. Now they don’t even have to do that and they are outraged when they can’t download the stuff for free. Fuckers – I hate them so much…
I make a distinction between the honest downloaders who do it discreetly and will spend money when they have it and the loud-mouthed freeloading scum who have no interest in or understanding of how to build a counterhegemonic apparatus.
I’m not just interested in people being customers but in recognising, to the extent that they are leftists, that they should be involved in building a counterhegemonic apparatus. The anarchoids and lazy leftists of today don’t get that so they act like the lowest petty bourgeois individualist swine.
Usually rhetoric denouncing “lazy fuckers” and “freeloading scum” comes from neoliberal demagogues, who want to gut social welfare programs and impose austerity. Not this time, though. Apparently you’ll also hear it from counterhegemonic apparatchiks, tilting at windmills in order to protect their intellectual property. Pretty pathetic, if you ask me. Whoever uploaded these PDFs has it more right, to my mind: “Knowledge must be held in common.”
Maybe I’d feel a bit worse about linking to all these texts if Budgen weren’t such a whiny crybaby. Hard to sympathize with him, however, after he put out this ridiculous burn notice against me a couple months back, urging other leftists to erect a cordon sanitaire around me. Leftists should “shun” and “no platform” me, defriending anyone who posts or shares links to this blog. Kind of reminds me of a recent Clickhole article, “Uncompromising: This Tyrant Unfriends All Dissidents as an Example to the Rest,” which describes “[a] despotic maniac rules with an iron fist of callous indifference, unfriending anyone who dares go against something he posts.”
Childishness and grandiosity aside, though, this is a great list of books. Grab them while you can, but don’t despair if they’re removed before you get the chance. Someone will repost them eventually, probably sooner than later. Enjoy.
Historical Materialism book series
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Alan Sennett, Revolutionary Marxism in Spain, 1930-1937
Alan Shandro, Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony: Political Practice and Theory in the Class Struggle
Alasdair Macintyre, Selected Marxist Writings, 1953-1974
Alex Callinicos, Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory
Allessandro Carlucci, Gramsci and Languages: Unification, Diversity, Hegemony
Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations
Carlos Nelson Coutinho, Gramsci’s Political Thought
Charles Post, The American Road to Capitalism
China Mieville, Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law
Christoph Henning, Philosophy after Marx: 100 Years of Misreadings and the Normative Turn in Political Philosophy
Christopher Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital
Colin Barker, Marxism and Social Movements
David McNally, Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires, and Global Capitalism
Dialectics of the Ideal
Ellen Meiksins Wood, Selected Essays
Francisco Fernández Buey, Reading Gramsci
Fred Moseley, Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Logic: A Reexamination
Gary Roth, Marxism in a Lost Century: A Biography of Paul Mattick
Georg Lukács, The Culture of People’s Democracy: Hungarian Essays on Literature, Art, and Democratic Transition, 1945-1948
Gregory Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory
Guglielmo Carchedi, Behind the Crisis: Marx’s Dialectics of Value and Knowledge
Heather A. Brown, Marx on Gender and the Family: A Critical Study
Heide Gerstenberger, Impersonal Power: History and Theory of the Bourgeois State
Jack M. Bloom, Seeing Through the Eyes of the Polish Revolution: Solidarity and the Struggle Against Communism in Poland
Jacques Bidet, Exploring Marx’s Capital
Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis, Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism
Jairus Banaji, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production
Jan Rehmann, Max Weber — Modernization As Passive Revolution: A Gramscian Analysis
Jan Rehmann, Theories of Ideology: The Powers of Alienation and Subjection
Jean-Jacques Lecercle, A Marxist Philosophy of Language
Jeffrey R. Webber, Red October: Left-Indigenous Struggles in Modern Bolivia
John Eric Marot, The October Revolution in Prospect and Retrospect: Interventions in Russian and Soviet History
Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done In Context (2008)
Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women
Luca Basso, Marx and Singularity: From the Early Writings to the Grundrisse
Manuel Sacristán, Selected Writings
Marcel van der Linden and Karl Heinz Roth, Beyond Marx: Theorizing the Global Labour Relations of the Twenty-First Century
Marcel van der Linden, Western Marxism and the Soviet Union: A Survey of Critical Theories and Debates Since 1917 (2007)
Massimiliano Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities
Matthew Beaumont, Utopia Ltd
Michael A. Lebowitz, Following Marx: Method, Critique, and Crisis
Michael Andrew Žmolek, Rethinking the Industrial Revolution: Five Centuries of Transition from Agrarian to Industrial Capitalism in England
Michael Löwy, The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx
Mikko Lahtinen, Politics and Philosophy: Niccolò Machiavelli and Louis Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism
Paul Burkett, Marxism and Ecological Economics: Toward a Red and Green Political Economy
Paul Levi, In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg
Peter D. Thomas, The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony, and Marxism
Peter Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism
Pierre Broué, The German Revolution, 1917-1923
Prophets Unarmed: Chinese Trotskyists in Revolution, War, Jail, and the Return from Historical Limbo
Ralf Hoffrogge, Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards, and the Origins of the Council Movement
Ray Kiely, The Clash of Globalisations: Neoliberalism, the Third Way, and Anti-Globalization
Ricardo Antunes, The Meanings of Work: Essay on the Affirmation and Negation of Work
Richard Day, Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record
Robert Heynen, Degeneration and Revolution: Radical Cultural Politics and the Body in Weimar Germany
Roland Boer, Criticism of Earth: On Marxism and Theology, IV (2012)
Roland Boer, Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology, I (2007)
Roland Boer, Criticism of Religion: On Marxism and Theology, II (2009)
Roland Boer, Criticism of Theology: On Marxism and Theology, III (2011)
Roland Boer, In the Vale of Tears: On Marxism and Theology, V (2014)
Stavros Tombazos, Time in Marx: The Categories of Time in Marx’s Capital
Stefan Gandler, Critical Marxism in Mexico
Stephen Hastings-King, Looking for the Proletariat: Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Problem of Worker Writing
Tobias Ten Brink, Global Political Economy and the Modern State System
Tony Smith, Globalization: A Systematic Marxian Account
Vittorio Morfino, Plural Temporality: Transindividuality and the Aleatory Between Spinoza and Althusser
Jacobin magazine
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Jacobin, Class Action: An Activist Teacher’s Handbook
Jacobin, Issue 1: Introducing…
Jacobin, Issue 2: And Yet It Moves
Jacobin, Issue 3-4: Liberalism is Dead
Jacobin, Issue 5: Phase 2
Jacobin, Issue 6: Praxis
Jacobin, Issue 7-8: Emancipation
Jacobin, Issue 9: Modify Your Dissent
Jacobin, Issue 10: Assembly Required
Jacobin, Issue 11-12: Misery Index
Jacobin, Issue 13: Alive In The Sunshine
Jacobin, Issue 14: A World to Win
Jacobin, Issue 15-16: Paint the Town Red
Jacobin, Issue 17: Our to Master
Verso books
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Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism
Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present
Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of the Spirit
Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory
Alain Badiou, Metapolitics
Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon
Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis
Alain Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner (2010)
Alain Supiot, Homo Juridicus: On the Anthropological Foundation of Law
Antonio Negri, Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy
Barbara J. Fields and Karen Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations
Boris Groys, Introduction to Antiphilosophy
Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript
Daniel Bensaïd, Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique
David Harvey, Rebel Cities
Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (2006)
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capital: A Longer View
Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s)
Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics
Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity
Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx (1993)
Franco Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide
Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature
Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions
Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study of the Unity of His Thought (1924)
Georg Lukács, Tactics and Ethics: Political Essays, 1919-1929
Göran Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism
Hal Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex (2012)
Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life, Volume 2
Jacques Rancière, Staging the People, Volume 2: The Intellectual and His People
Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator
Jauces Rancière, Aesthesis
Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1
Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon
Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings (1966-1967)
Louis Althusser, The Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings (1978-1987)
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism
Malcolm Bull, Anti-Nietzsche
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums
Moshe Lewin, The Soviet Century (2005)
Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis
Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain
Owen Hatherley, A New Kind of Bleak
Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
Paul Virilio, Strategy of Deception
Richard Seymour, Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens
Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn
Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding: An Ethics of Resistance
Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do
Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes
Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously
Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left
Tariq Ali, The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad
The Case for Sanctions Against Israel
Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013)
Reimut Reiche, Sexuality and Class Struggle (1967)
Alain Grosrichard, Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East (1979)
Alain Lipietz, Mirages and Miracles: Crisis in Global Fordism
Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan
André Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason
Antonio Negri, Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy
Ernesto Laclau, The Making of Political Identities
Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century
Göran Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism
Guglielmo Carchedi, Frontiers of Political Economy (1991)
Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious
Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde
Pierre Macherey, In a Materialist Way: Selected Essays
Hamid Dabashi, Close-Up: Iranian Cinema Past, Present, and Future
Jean-Paul Sartre, War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War, 1939-1940
Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 2
Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity
Ulrich Krause, Money and Abstract Labor: On the Analytical Foundations of Political Economy (1982)
Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism (1985)
Maurice Godelier, The Enigma of the Gift
Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses – Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany
Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures
Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
Alain Badiou, Metapolitics
Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy
Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings
Alain Badiou, Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy
Andre Schiffrin, Words and Money
Antonio Negri, Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy
Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
Bruno Bosteels, The Actuality of Communism
Chantal Mouffe, Dimensions of Radical Democracy – Pluralism, Citizenship, Community
Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship
Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: Race, Power, and the Blues in the Mississippi Delta
Colin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy: Reflections on Genocide
Costas Lapavitsas, Crisis in the Eurozone
Dan Hind, The Return of the Public
David Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital
David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
Doug Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom
E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker (editors), The Althusserian Legacy
Ellen Meiksins Wood, Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages
Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital
Ellen Meiksins Wood, Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Renaissance to Enlightenment
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class: A New “True” Socialism
Erik Olin Wright, Classes
Erik Olin Wright, Deepening Democracy
Ernest Mandel, Long Waves of Capitalist Development: A Marxist Interpretation
Ernest Mandel, The Meaning of the Second World War
Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason
Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation
Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800-1900
Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History
Frederic Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital
Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology
Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century
Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Time
Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins, Immanuel Wallerstein, Antisystemic Movements
Grant Evans, The Yellow Rainmakers: Are Chemical Weapons Being Used in Southeast Asia
Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord, Panegyric, Volumes 1 & 2
Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism
Jacques Lacan, My Teaching
Jacques Rancière, The Intellectual and His People, Volume 2: Staging the People
James Dunkerley, Rebellion in the Veins: Political Struggle in Bolivia, 1952-1982
Jean Baudrillard, America
Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, New Revised Edition
Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon
John Baker, Arguing for Equality
John F. Haldon, The State and the Tributary Mode of Production
John Le Carré, Richard Dawkins, Brian Eno, Michel Faber, Harold Pinter, Not One More Death
John Sturrock, The Word from Paris: Essays on Modern French Thinkers and Writers
José Saramago, The Notebook
Joseph McCarney, Social Theory and the Crisis of Marxism
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence
Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?
Kees van der Pijl, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class
Kevin Olson (editor), Adding Insult to Injury: Nancy Fraser Debates Her Critics
Kim Moody, Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy
Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire
Lucio Magri, The Tailor of Ulm: A History of Communism
Marc Perelman, Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague
Martijn Konings (editor), The Great Credit Crash
Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che
Melissa Gira Grant, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work
Michael Löwy, The War of Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America
Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh, The Anti-Social Family
Mike Davis, City of Quartz
Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
Mike Haynes, Jim Wolfreys, Daniel Bensaïd, Geoff Eley, Marc Ferro, History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism
Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From Women’s Liberation to Identity Politics to Anti-Capitalism
Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism
Nicos Poulantzas, The Poulantzas Reader: Marxism, Law, and the State
Osama bin Laden, Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden
Paige Arthur, Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre
Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge
Perry Anderson, The New Old World
Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity
Peter Dews, The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy
Philippe Van Parijs, Arguing for Basic Income: Ethical Foundations for a Radical Reform
Pierre Bourdieu, Political Interventions: Social Science and Political Action
Raymond Williams, Culture and Materialism
Regis Debray, Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms
Richard Dienst, The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good
Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression, and Revolt
Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Democracy Realized: The Progressive Alternative
Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Left Alternative
Roberto Mangabeira Unger, What Should Legal Analysis Become?
Roberto Mangabeira Unger, What Should the Left Propose?
Robin Blackburn, Age Shock: How Finance Is Failing Us
Robin Blackburn, An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln
Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800
Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848
Ross Perlin, Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy
Sheila Rowbotham, Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century
Shlomo Sand, Yael Lotan, The Invention of the Jewish People
Simon Clarke, Peter Fairbrother, Michael Burawoy, What About the Workers?
Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?
Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies
Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously
Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism
Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on Damaged Life (1944-1947)
Timothy Bewes, Reification, or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism
Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil
Vinayak Chaturvedi (editor), Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial
Walden Bello, The Food Wars
Wang Hui, The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity
