'For students approaching the issues for the first time, there is no better text to introduce them to the heart of the problem as perceived by socialists, as well as illustrating how a good debate can be organised and presented.' - Book Notes, Europe-Asia Studies

"How can anyone claim to really understand our Constitution without knowing what these critical traditions had to say?" -Michael Wallace, Professor of History, John Jay College. "A real contribution to the subject of democracy and liberalism." -John Ehrenberg. "Does a marvelous job of returning the Constitution to its proper sphere, the product of the rough and tumble of politics." - Malcom M. Feely, author of Judicial Policy Making and the Modern State. "The United States Constitution is a provocative book, much needed for overdue rethinking on the Constitution proper and its amendments. By making available "the underside of criticism and protest that has accompanied the Constitution from its inception" the book cuts through a mountainous mass of conventional bombast, one-sided versions and outright fabrications regarding the Constitution. In clarifying what makes the Constitution's clock tick, the book lives up to its subtitle. -Ira Gollobin, National Emergency Civil Rights Committee NEVER BEFORE ASSEMBLED IN A SINGLE VOLUME-the major writings on the Constitution from six critical traditions. Here is THE OTHER SIDE in most of the key disputes over the Constitution from 1789 to the present, the side that was barely heard during the recent Bicentennial celebrations. Yet, it was often the popular side, raising many troublesome questions about the nature of American democracy that still remain to be answered. Now that the applause has subsided, every fair- minded person will want to know what these critics of the Constitution have to say about who did, and is still doing, what to whom, and why. Section 1 outlines the main events and problems that led up to and contributed to the calling of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Section 2 concentrates on what actually happened at the convention. Section 3 deals with the two-hundred-year history of interpretations and amendments that followed. Section 4 offers a number of ideas that should prove helpful in constructing the adequate theory of the Constitution that still eludes us. Skillfully woven into one volume the forty contributors include voices as varied as those of Gore Vidal, I.F. Stone, Ralph Nader, E.P. Thompson, Howard Zinn, Sheldon S. Wolin, Joan Hoff, Karl Marx, Jackson Turner Main, Charles A. Beard, and W.E.B. Du Bois joined--perhaps surprisingly--by Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Thurgood Marshall. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jonathan Birnbaum is the editor of Racial Profiling (forthcoming) and the co-editor of Civil Rights Since 1787: A Reader on the Black Struggle (also available from NYU Press). His work has appeared in the Guardian, New Politics, Socialism and Democracy, New Political Science, and other publications. Bertell Ollman, one of America's most prominent Marxist scholars, is a Professor of Politics at New York University. He is the author of Alienation, Dialectical Investigations, and How to Take an Exam . . . And Remake the World.

Authored by a famous professor who reveals the inner secrets of his trade, How to Take an Exam... interplays two totally disparate subjects, then brings them together in a revealing indictment of "higher" education and the world it produces. A delightful tour de force that entertains while it educates.

Bertell Ollman has been hailed as "this country's leading authority on dialectics and Marx's method" by Paul Sweezy, the editor of Monthly Review and dean of America's Marx scholars. In this book Ollman offers a thorough analysis of Marx's use of dialectical method. Marx made extremely creative use of dialectical method to analyze the origins, operation, and direction of capitalism. Unfortunately, his promised book on method was never written, so that readers wishing to understand and evaluate Marx's theories, or to revise or use them, have had to proceed without a clear grasp of the dialectic in which the theories are framed. The result has been more disagreement over "what Marx really meant" than over the writings of any other major thinker. In putting Marx's philosophy of internal relations and his use of the process of abstraction--two little-studied aspects of dialectics--at the center of this account, Ollman provides a version of Marx's method that is at once systematic, scholarly, clear, and eminently useful. Ollman not only sheds important new light on what Marx really meant in his varied theoretical pronouncements, but in carefully laying out the steps in Marx's method he makes it possible for a reader to put the dialectic to work in his or her own research. He also convincingly argues the case for why social scientists and humanists as well as philosophers should want to do so.

In "BallBuster? True Confessions of a Marxist Businessman, Bertell Ollman recounts the challenges of finding American distribution for his revolutionary board game, Class Struggle (more than 250,000 copies sold). His misadventures explode the myth of capitalism, showing the struggles small-business owners face. This revised edition updates readers on what has happened in Ollman's life and work since 1983. Ollman finds himself questioning his role as a Marxist professor in a capitalist society. He ponders whether he is winning or losing, and if he will make it out of the jungle of capitalist business with his socialist principles still intact.

Marx's approach to analyzing society and especially his critique of capitalist society, continues to influence the work of a large number of scholars world-wide. Unfortunately, there are relatively few clear accounts of what this approach is and how to put it to use. And, despite the many attempts to use Marx's method to study a variety of subjects, there are relatively few that can serve as useful models. In the present volume, the internationally renowned Marxist scholar, Bertell Ollman, and the social theorist Kevin B. Anderson, have brought together a sampling of the best writings of the past hundred years that illustrate and critique Marx's method as well as explain what it is and how to put it to work. Anyone wishing to understand better Marx's dialectical method (along, of course, with the theories created with its help), or to revise this method or to criticize it, or to use it in their own work will find this collection invaluable.

This volume contains the first complete translations of Wilhelm Reich's writings from his Marxist period. Reich, who died in 1957, had a career with a single goal: to find ways of relieving human suffering. And the same curiosity and courage that led him from medical school to join the early pioneers of Freudian psychoanalysis, and then to some of the most controversial work of this century-his development of the theory of the orgone-led him also, at one period of his life, to become a radical socialist. The renewed interest in Reich's Marxist writings, and particularly in his notions about sexual and political liberation, follows the radical critiques of Herbert Marcuse, Frantz Fanon and Paul Goodman, the political protest movements toward personal liberation in the present decade.

With today's conservative mood on university and college campuses, academics and students will find The Left Academy a useful reference to the current state of Marxist thought. This book explores Marxism in the social sciences and applied sociology fields such as social work and health. "The Left Academy" features essays that analyze the state of Marxism in various academic disciplines by a well-known scholar in that discipline. In addition to the essays, this third volume includes a summary of Marxism--where it stands today and where it may go in the future. Students, academics, and general readers will find the book thought-provoking.

With today's conservative mood on university and college campuses, academics and students will find "The Left Academy" a useful reference to the current state of Marxist thought. This book explores Marxism in the social sciences and applied sociology fields such as social work and health. "The Left Academy" features essays that analyze the state of Marxism in various academic disciplines by a well-known scholar in that discipline. In addition to the essays, this third volume includes a summary of Marxism--where it stands today and where it may go in the future. Students, academics, and general readers will find the book thought-provoking.

Revised throughout with an entirely new chapter, "In Defense of Internal Relations," and with replies to critical comments on the 1st edition, which the N.Y. Review of Books called "a remarkable book...brilliant and illuminating."