Every month at People’s World, we receive solicitations for a variety of new books that are hot off the press and looking to score a review in a progressive publication. Publicists and authors contact us, hoping for a chance to get their work in front of the eyes of audiences who read outlets like PW. Most are intriguing and certainly deserving of a review in our pages—more than we can possibly read and review.
One title in our stack, which we frankly should have gotten around to sharing with our readers sooner, however, is Books to Change the World: International Publishers at One Hundred.
Though the title appears pretty self-explanatory, this is not just a book about the history of America’s most famous and longest-surviving Marxist publishing house. It’s also a record of how a wide range of activists, authors, and academics assess International’s significance in the labor and left movement over the decades and the role its books have played in breaking barriers for equality and justice.
Way back in 1924, when International issued its first full catalog, our predecessors on the editorial board of what was then the Daily Worker commented, “The literature of the revolution is taking its prominent place in the English-speaking world.”
In this new volume are nine essays that explore some of that literary heritage. They are based on presentations given at a symposium held in October 2023 at New York University’s Tamiment Library in advance of International Publishers’ centennial the following year. Each one is a window into just one aspect of this storied imprint’s ten decades, and introductions by current IP President Tony Pecinovsky and Tamiment Library Curator Shannon O’Neill prepare the reader for what’s in store.
Elisabeth Armstrong looks at the founding of the Women’s International Democratic Federation—a key mid-century global advocate for women’s equality—and puts the spotlight on how many of its leaders rose to prominence in the 1930s and ’40s when their work was brought to a wide audience for the first time by International.
Dennis Laumann, well-known historian of Africa and the African Diaspora, traces the captivating story of a single International Publishers title, Kwame Nkrumah, for many decades, almost the only biography of the CIA-deposed Ghanaian leader of the 1960s available in English.
“For generations,” Laumann writes in his chapter, “IP [International Publishers] has provided affordable, accessible, and critical texts on progressive leaders, movements, and ideas to working-class readers.” Specifically, he says, “it often has printed the only available works by Black Marxists like Nkrumah and W.E.B. DuBois, among others.”
Joel Wendland-Liu also focuses on a single influential IP title, one by Maurice Dobb, who’s been called “the most influential Marxist economist in the 20th century in the West” and credited with inspiring China’s modern economic reform program.
Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism, Wendland-Liu argues, showed that Marxist economics was more than just sweeping abstract systemic models devoid of precise, empirically based analysis. Dobb embraced “an interdisciplinary approach that blended the historian’s empirical method with classical economics, Marxist political economy, and dialectical materialist philosophy.”
Again, it’s a story where IP earns credit as the patron printer who brought such a critical work to the world.
A similar tale repeats in Melissa Ford’s chapter on Grace Hutchins and her pioneering studies of working mothers and the “double burden” of keeping a household while also toiling in the public sphere.
Hutchins’ Depression-era IP pamphlets Women Who Work and Children Under Capitalism were not only among the first works to raise the curtain on the special oppression of women and children; they also served as a corrective to the long neglect of these issues by the Communist Party and the wider radical movement.
Already an established writer for the Daily Worker, it was IP President Alexander Trachtenberg who brought Hutchins to International’s pool of authors in 1927.
Not all the essays focus on individual titles or authors, though.
Longtime Connecticut activist Joelle Fishman, for instance, talks about growing up a red-diaper baby and how IP books were a constant presence in her childhood home. Fishman writes that International books by authors as varied as Victor Perlo, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Henry Winston, Hosea Hudson, Gus Hall, and more “informed me, grounded me, awakened my imagination, and helped launch my journey as a Communist Party organizer.”
Gerald Horne, himself an IP alum with several titles in the company’s catalog, surveys the moment when International Publishers found itself playing a central role in the drama of the 1950s anti-communist Smith Act trials.
In those cases, government prosecutors and Communist Party defendants alike referred to IP titles as evidence in their respective cases. Quoting one of the defendants, Horne says, “The witnesses were books, books, and more books…it was a trial of books.” Books on Marxism, on the Black freedom struggle, on strategy and tactics—all of them became prime exhibits.
During the Cold War, the government and big business realized the danger represented by International Publishers and its printing press. It was dangerous because it told the truth about capitalism, exploitation, and war—and it made that truth easily accessible. “It was not unusual,” as Horne reminds the reader, “for IP to distribute paperback editions of up to 100,000” copies. Little wonder, then, as he says, that “IP found itself on trial.”
These are only a few of the intriguing essays in Books to Change the World, which are further supplemented by a selection of key documents from IP’s history. In the latter column are important articles from the Daily Worker and People’s World about the company’s development, along with commentaries on the Smith Act inquisitions as they were happening.
For a book of just over 200 pages, it packs a lot in and will surely be a welcome addition to the libraries of anyone interested in the history of the First Amendment, radical publishing, Marxist politics, the Communist Party, or the many movements covered by IP authors over the decades—from women’s equality to peace to Black liberation to international solidarity and more.
With potential McCarthy-style witch-hunts once again on the horizon, institutions that incubate free thinking, social critique, and dissent like International Publishers are all the more valuable. Over its 101 years, the company has produced countless books that have changed the world. This new volume provides just a few snapshots of how IP has pursued that mission and of how it’s still chasing the dream of a future after capitalism.
Books to Change the World: International Publishers at One Hundred
Edited with Introductions by Tony Pecinovsky and Shannon O’Neill
International Publishers, 2024, $24.99.
Order here
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