"Deep inside that T-shirt where we have tried to trap him," notes the celebrated Chilean novelist Ariel Dorfman, "the eyes of Che Guevara are still burning with impatience." Olivier Besancenot and Michael Lowy deftly capture this burning impatience, revealing Guevara as a powerful political and ethical thinker still capable of speaking directly to the challenges of our time.

In this masterful new study, Besancenot and Lowy explore and situate Guevara's ethical, revolutionary, and humanist legacy. They explicate Guevara's emphasis on the import of the individual coming to understand and accept socialism at a personal level. For Guevara, Besancenot and Lowy show, the revolutionary project demands more than a transformation of the mode of production; it demands a profound transformation of the individual, the birth of what Guevara termed the "new man." Besancenot and Lowy also explore Guevara's pragmatic approach to the question of state power and unique theoretical contributions to the question of the transition to socialism.

In Guevara, Besancenot and Lowy find a life that was lived as an example of revolutionary potential. Guevara's ethical and political sensibilities, unwavering anti-imperialism, and firm commitment to revolutionary social transformation still ignite hope in all who struggle for a better world."

"Permanent revolution" calls Leon Trotsky to mind as surely as "relativity" does Albert Einstein. In their originality and scope, these two famous theories have a symmetry. Leon Trotsky was a leading Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist. He was a central leader of the Russian revolution and an influential politician in the early days of the Soviet Union. He was Commissar for Foreign Affairs, founder and commander of the Red Army and Commissar of War. He led the struggle against Stalin's bureaucratization of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union in the Great Purge. As the founder of the Fourth International, he continued in exile to encourage workers and oppressed peoples to unite against capitalism, and for socialist revolution. PRAISE FOR 'THE PERMANENT REVOLUTION' I'm very much of Trotsky's line - the permanent revolution. - Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela Trotsky's writings on the permanent revolution are the theoretical mainspring of proletarian revolutionary strategy and are an obligatory study for all who aspire to lead the working-class in the struggle for socialism, whether in the capitalist countries of the West or in the backward colonial countries. - Li Fu-jen, co-founder, Communist League of China The whole essence of Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution lies in the idea that the colonial bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie of the backward countries are incapable of carrying out the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution. - Ted Grant, editor, Militant

"Deep inside that T-shirt where we have tried to trap him," notes the celebrated Chilean novelist Ariel Dorfman, "the eyes of Che Guevara are still burning with impatience." Olivier Besancenot and Michael Lowy deftly capture this burning impatience, revealing Guevara as a powerful political and ethical thinker still capable of speaking directly to the challenges of our time.

In this masterful new study, Besancenot and Lowy explore and situate Guevara's ethical, revolutionary, and humanist legacy. They explicate Guevara's emphasis on the import of the individual coming to understand and accept socialism at a personal level. For Guevara, Besancenot and Lowy show, the revolutionary project demands more than a transformation of the mode of production; it demands a profound transformation of the individual, the birth of what Guevara termed the "new man." Besancenot and Lowy also explore Guevara's pragmatic approach to the question of state power and unique theoretical contributions to the question of the transition to socialism.

In Guevara, Besancenot and Lowy find a life that was lived as an example of revolutionary potential. Guevara's ethical and political sensibilities, unwavering anti-imperialism, and firm commitment to revolutionary social transformation still ignite hope in all who struggle for a better world."

Karl Kautsky is probably the first Marxist to interest himself both in the movement and the enigmatic personality of the crucified prophet. His 1908 book The Foundations of Christianity is a rather impressive attempt at a Marxist analysis. The book is rather original, innovative and has been rranslated into nine languages. Kaustky made his Foundations of Christianity into one of the most popular Marxist theoretical works. Its popular success is probably due to the interest of socialist militants to see a vision of the origins of Christianity which permits the modern workers' movement to appropriate to itself the figure of Jesus as a prophet and martyr for the proletarian cause. Kautsky wanted to interpret early Christianity as a precursor of the contemporary working class socialist movement. His friend, and later his opponent, Rosa Luxemburg, in an article of 1905 called "The Church and Socialism insisted that the first Christian apostles were Communists who denounced injustice and the cult of the Golden Calf," He counterposed a materialist account of the new religion against the Christian mythology and showed the capacity of the Marxist method to give an account of a complex historical process, interpreting a religious phenomenon in terms of the class struggle. The book is divided into four sections: 1) Society at the time of the Roman Empire: the slave economy, the absolutist forms of the state, the different manifestations of cultural and religious crisis. 2) Judaism: the class conflicts of Israelite society and the various political-religious currents (Sadducees, Pharisees, Zealots and Essene. 3) The beginnings of Christianity: the early Christian communities, the idea of themessianic Christ and Christian communism. 4) The fourth section is dedicated to the "personality of Jesus," According to Kautsky, what distinguishes Jesus' messianism from the other rebellious Jewish prophets of the era - all of whom had a strictly national character - is its social character, its calling as an international redeemer. "Only the social Messiah, not the national, could transcend the limits of Judaism," survive the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and, above all, find a hearing among the poor of all nations. By associating the hostility of the oppressed classes to the rich with proletarian solidarity, the messianism of the Christian communities promised the redemption of the poor, and so it could gain followers beyond the Jewish world. In the last analysis, Jesus, "the crucified proletarian Messiah" managed to defeat Rome and conquer the world, but in the course of this process the Christian movement suffered an "inverse dialectic": it lost its proletarian and communist character and was transformed into a state religion, under the control of a vast dominating and exploiting apparatus - the Church.

Lowy's book is the first attempt to analyze, in a systematic way, how the theories of uneven and combined development, and of the permanent revolution &mdash inseparably linked &mdash emerged in the writings of thinkers such as Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky. Such radical reflections permit us to understand modern economic development across continents as a process of ferocious change, in which "advanced" and "backward" elements fuse, come into tension, and collide &mdash and how the resulting ruptures make it possible for the oppressed and exploited to change the world.

"This book is brilliant, incisive, honest and deserves to be read with attention. It is an important event in the Marxist theoretical production." --"Politique Hebdo"

"A remarkable essay, whose merit is not only theoretical, but also historical, because it examines unknown aspects of the evolution of young Marx's thinking."--"Politis"

In the 1840s, the young German journalist Karl Marx developed ideas about modern society that remain as relevant today as when they were first developed. Here Lowy shows the lasting force of Marx's early writings on alienation and emancipation.

Michael Lowy is research director in sociology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris. He is the author of many books, including "Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity."

Ecosocialism or Barbarism explains that the twenty-first century has opened on a catastrophic note, with an unprecedented degree of ecological breakdown and a chaotic world order beset with terror and warfare. In this book, socialists Jane Kelly and Sheila Malone have gathered together articles from some of the world's leading ecologists and Marxists to discuss how the profoundly interrelated crises of ecology and social breakdown should be seen as different manifestations of the same structural forces. The expanded second edition includes 'Savage Capitalism', a detailed examination of the strategies and methods that ecosocialists can use. It was adopted as a resolution to guide the work of 'Socialist Resistance', the ecosocialist current in Britain. Jack Kovel and Michel Lowy's ecosocialist manifesto sets the framework for a discussion which is unfolding around the world. They argue that capitalism cannot regulate, much less overcome, the crises it has set going. It cannot solve the ecological crisis because to do so requires setting limits upon accumulation-an unacceptable option for a system predicated upon the rule: Grow or Die And it cannot solve the crisis posed by terror and other forms of violent rebellion because this would mean abandoning the logic of empire, imposing unacceptable limits on growth and the "way of life" sustained by empire. In this unique volume, ecologists and socialists discuss how far the capitalist world system is historically bankrupt. Their common conclusion is that it has become an empire unable to adapt, whose very gigantism exposes its underlying weakness. It is profoundly unsustainable and must be replaced. The stark choice posed by Rosa Luxemburg returns: Socialism or Barbarism

Ecosocialists believe that the prevention of an unprecedented ecological catastrophe and the preservation of a natural environment favourable to human life are incompatible with the expansive and destructive logic of the capitalist system. In Ecosocialism, Michael Lowy, Research Director at Paris' National Centre for Scientific Research, explores some of the main ecosocialist proposals and concrete experiences of struggle, particularly in Latin America.