Historical Materialism series

Has anyone read any of the books in this series?

I personally own Paul Levi's selected works and the Witnesses to Permanent Revolution books from the series, but haven't had time to read them yet. Sometime this month they are supposed to be putting out the Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Comintern, entitled Towards a United Front.

Some of the other books that looked of interest were Discovering Imperialism which is supposedly about the early theories of imperialism that were developed within the Second International, and The German Revolution. I wish I could afford the hardcover versions, but the paperback versions are expensive enough as it is. The German Revolution seems to be a subject that is woefully under-represented in historiography.

How expensive are the paperbacks? Do you mean the ones put out by Haymarket? In that case I have Lenin Rediscovered: "What Is to Be Done?" In Context, but likewise haven't fully read it yet... Some day. First I want to finish studying Capital.

The paperbacks aren't terribly expensive(though for paperbacks they are). Usually the cheaper ones will be around $30 and the more expensive ones at $55. I don't mind paying that much for a book if it's big and well done, not so much if it's paperback though. If a book is longer than 500 pages, which many of the thicker HM books are, then it's better to have it hardcover. Unfortunately the hardcover HM books tend to run over $200.. I too planned on getting Lenin Rediscovered. I've seen the hardcover going as low as $50, a real bargain!

And yes, I am talking about the ones by Haymarket. I'm not sure if Haymarket prints the hardcover versions of the HM books though. It might be a different outfit that does that.

Ben Lewis of the CPGB was supposed to be working on two volumes for the series about Kautsky, but there hasn't been word of those for a long time. It would be a real shame if they fell under. It's really quite tragic how little material from "The Pope of Marxism" is readily available today.

Well I've got Western Marxism and the Soviet Union in PDF too. I could email that to you. It's small enough to fit. It's actually an extremely good book. It should be required reading for all Marxists in my opinion. It covers everything from Bordiga's analysis(which is that the Soviet Union was just an ordinary bourgeois republic with nothing special about it, the dumbest view in my opinion) to Miasnikov and even Hilel Ticktin. It's done in a pretty objective way; the reader is left to determine the overall merit of each analysis, but it's oftentimes pretty obvious that many are.. lacking, such as the "bureaucratic collectivist" view.

We could start a small collective, buying 1 copy of the whole HM series and then digitalize it. That is, preferably, make it into text PDF (so, not scanned pictures, but OCR'ed pictures) and even republish them as epub's (this should be regarded as the format of the future, fuck pdf).

Purchasing the hardcover HM books (published by Brill) as a collective should be easily doable. What we need is knowledge on the OCR'ing and someone with an abundance of time.

Well, I've been trying the OCR thing with ABBY FineReader. The problem is that, in order to get perfect recognition, you have to examine each page carefully one at a time to see if there are any mistakes. Then if there are, you often need to rescan the page. Perhaps there is a better program?

You can't edit results? But yeah, that sucks.

I'm buying that. I don't restrict my reading on account of political ideology, so long as its ostensibly revolutionary. I'm a hell of a lot more interested in the upcoming selected works of Kautsky and Preobrazhensky though.