Notebooks for Study and Research

The history of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, the POUM, is the history of thousands of men and women who fought to transform the world and would be at the centre of one of the most profound revolutions of the 20th century.

Founded in September 1935, of the many dissident communist groupings that emerged internationally in the 1930s, the POUM was the most important. The largest workers party in Catalonia before the Civil War, the POUM, it had in its ranks the two most outstanding Marxist theorists of the time in Spain: Joaquín Maurín and Andreu Nin.

The race for profit is widening social inequalities and destroying the planet. As the productivist catastrophe is worsening day by day, democratic and revolutionary socialism must be rethought to meet needs within ecological limits. This Manifesto adopted in February 2025 by the Fourth International raises the banner of a civilisational alternative: ecosocialism. It proposes a programme of transitional demands for different situations and a strategy for the convergence of struggles against all exploitation, oppression and dispossession.

This book is an essential primer on the Palestinian struggle from an internationalist and socialist standpoint. The new phase of genocidal violence unleashed after 7 October 2023 by the state of Israel against the Palestinian population makes it all the more necessary to strengthen solidarity with the Palestinian people and their struggle. This struggle, Daher argues, is inextricably linked to the revolutionary processes in the Middle East and North Africa.

Internationalism or Russification? was written in 1965 while there was a wave of political repression in Ukraine. In the book, Dzyuba analyses from a Marxist position the national and cultural policy of the Soviet Union in Ukraine. The book was first sent to the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine and to the head of the government. Internationalism or Russification? was then distributed as a samizdat, and was first published abroad in 1968.

Michael Pablo was a twentieth century revolutionary whose life and ideas remain relevant and inspirational in the 21st. He spent his life involved in revolutions around the globe – in Greece, France, Algeria, Chile, Palestine and Portugal, to name the most important – everywhere pursuing a genuinely democratic socialism. He was a hands-on participant and advocated and worked for what he called ‘generalised self-management or direct democracy’ – on a local, regional, national and planetary scale. For Pablo, this was utopian but realisable.

As the USSR disintegrated in 1990 and 1991, the Socialist Workers Party and the Fourth International took different views of the impending privatizations. Marxists Against Stalinism brings together powerful contributions from Ernest Mandel and Chris Harman in the long-running debate on the class nature of the USSR.  Chris Harman argued that Soviet Union and the other “socialist” countries were bureaucratic state-capitalisms.

“Our collective future demands we start listening to people who can imagine a system other than globalised capitalism. This book is a blueprint for the world we must build together.” – Tansy Hoskins, author of Stitched-up: the anti-capitalist book of fashion (2014) and Foot Work: what your shoes tell you about globalisation (2020).