Product Review

Writing in collaboration with Cornelius Castoriadis and Grace Lee, James 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 wildcat strikes of U.S. workers (against Capital and the union bureaucracies), James and his co-authors looked ahead to the rise of new mass emancipatory movements by African Americans and anti-colonialist/anti-imperialist currents in Africa and Asia. Virtually alone among the radical texts of the time, Facing Reality, first published in 1958 by Marty Glaberman, rejected modern society’s mania for “conquering nature,” and welcomed women’s struggles “for new relations between the sexes.” A true masterpiece, and still one of the finest expositions of workers’ self-emancipation around. 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 accentuating its continued relevance in our time. “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]