Why am I passionate about this?

All of the books I recommend offer both a very deep reading of our socio-economic situation in all its oppressiveness and alienation, and the possibility of an alternative. Only with such philosophical digging and reappropriation of dialectical thinkers of the past, beginning with Hegel and Marx, can we construct a humanist future. These books speak to my own life as a 1960s activist in the USA who has yearned ever since for a real, humanist social transformation in the face of so many setbacks for our cause, some of them self-inflicted.


I wrote

Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study

By Kevin B. Anderson,

Book cover of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study

What is my book about?

Still, the only full-length study of the achievements and limitations of Lenin's extensive writings on Hegel, Hegel, Lenin, and Western…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution

Kevin B. Anderson Why did I love this book?

Dunayevskaya’s Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution. This book contained the first-ever analysis of Luxemburg as feminist, the first widely disseminated analysis of gender in Marx’s late Ethnological Notebooks, and a hard-hitting discussion of feminism, race, and revolution that pulled no punches in terms of critiquing dominant forms of feminism, especially in the U.S. The treatment of the late Marx featured a searing critique of Engels’s economistic reductionism on women’s liberation, and this was followed up by unstinting critiques of Lenin and Trotsky as well as Luxemburg herself on the failures of what Dunayevskaya termed “post-Marx Marxism” to fulfill the profound legacies left to them by Marx.  

By Raya Dunayevskaya,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?


In this important and wide-ranging critique of Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) Raya Dunayevskaya examines the life, political thought, and action of one of the most critical revolutionary figures of our time. Dunayevskaya sheds new light on the questions of socialist democracy after the revolution, disclosing both the unprobed feminist dimension of Rosa Luxemburg and the previously unrecognized new moments in Marx's last decade concerning the role of women and the peasantry. As the founder of Marxist-Humanism in the United States, Dunayevskaya (1910-87) was an internationally respected writer, philosopher, and revolutionary. This new and expanded edition includes two previously unpublished articles by…


Book cover of Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism

Kevin B. Anderson Why did I love this book?

This is the first study ever of Marx on communism/socialism, a topic that is often considered something he refrained from writing about. Hudis ingeniously marshals a huge body of writings – on Proudhon, Lassalle, and others – where Marx elaborates his own concept of socialism/communism in the course of critiquing what he sees as vastly inadequate concepts. In so doing, Hudis connects these issues to dialectics and to economics, and above all to the critique of both capital and the state, here not even sparing Lenin’s classic work, State and Revolution.

By Peter Hudis,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In contrast to the traditional view that Marx's work is restricted to a critique of capitalism - and that he consciously avoided any detailed conception of its alternative - this work shows that Marx was committed to a specific concept of a post-capitalist society which informed the whole of his approach to political economy.


Book cover of Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory

Kevin B. Anderson Why did I love this book?

Reason and Revolution holds the important distinction of being the first Hegelian Marxist book to appear in English. In addition, it was the first systematic published analysis of Hegel’s major works from a Marxist standpoint in any language, preceding those by Georg Lukács’s The Young Hegel and Ernst Bloch’s Subjekt-Objekt by several years. To this day Reason and Revolution stands as one of the major Marxist treatments of Hegel. It views Marx’s work as grounded in Hegel’s concept of dialectic. Theoretically, Marx’s work is presented as a critique not only of capitalism, but also, at least implicitly, as the foundation for a critique of Stalinist Communism.

Not only does Marcuse’s book contain a critical analysis of Hegel’s major works such as the Phenomenology of Mind, the Science of Logic, the Philosophy of History, and the Philosophy of Right, but it also includes the first serious treatment in English of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. This Hegelian-Marxian heritage is counterposed to what Marcuse considered to be the essentially conservative world-view of positivism, which teaches people “to view and study the phenomena of their world as neutral objects governed by universally valid laws.”

By Herbert Marcuse,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Reason and Revolution as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"Brilliant and penetrating ... the most important work which has opened up an understanding of Marx's humanism." -- Erich Fromm

Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory is the philosopher Herbert Marcuse's first major work in English - a masterful interpretation of Hegel's philosophy and the influence it has had on European political thought from the French Revolution to the present day.

Reason & Revolution, written in 1941, was the first Hegelian Marxist text to appear in English, the first systematic study of Hegel by a Marxist, and the first work in English to discuss the young…


Book cover of The Wretched of the Earth

Kevin B. Anderson Why did I love this book?

This book develops the revolutionary African socialist humanism of Frantz Fanon, who was influenced by Hegel, Sartre, the Negritude School, and above all, Marx. Published in 1961, the year so many new nations were being born in Africa, Fanon’s book did not dismiss tout court the European humanist tradition. He said that the Europeans had not practiced it – whether under Nazism or in the colonies – but predicted that the emerging Third World would be able to do so: “This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others.” This was, to be sure, a humanism drawing from European revolutionary and democratic traditions, but at the same time it was a “new humanism.” As a theoretician of the newly forming Third World, Fanon also distanced himself from the Soviet bloc and its authoritarian and dehumanizing form of industrial “development,” not only mentioning the Hungarian revolution of 1956, but also writing of the new Africa: “The pretext of catching up must not be used to push man around, to tear him away from himself or his privacy, to break and kill him.” This was nothing short of a socialist humanist third way, an alternative to both Western style capitalism and Eastern statist communism.

By Frantz Fanon, Richard Philcox (translator),

Why should I read it?

7 authors picked The Wretched of the Earth as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

First published in 1961, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is a masterful and timeless interrogation of race, colonialism, psychological trauma, and revolutionary struggle. In 2020, it found a new readership in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests and the centering of narratives interrogating race by Black writers. Bearing singular insight into the rage and frustration of colonized peoples, and the role of violence in spurring historical change, the book incisively attacks the twin perils of post-independence colonial politics: the disenfranchisement of the masses by the elites on the one hand, and intertribal and interfaith animosities on…


Book cover of Clear Bright Future: A Radical Defence of the Human Being

Kevin B. Anderson Why did I love this book?

Paul Mason’s Clear Bright Future (the title is drawn from a declaration by Leon Trotsky), stands out as a manifesto of socialist humanism that takes on neoliberal ideology and the cyberworld of contemporary capitalism. The book also delivers a withering critique not only of their basic anti-humanism but also the anti-humanism of the academic left, still too much in the shadow of postmodernism, which Mason charges with helping to open the road toward the present state of affairs.

By Paul Mason,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Clear Bright Future as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Thrilling, brilliant, radical ... an admirable defence of humans against machines' Guardian

A passionate defence of humanity and a work of radical optimism from the international bestselling author of Postcapitalism

How do we preserve what makes us human in an age of uncertainty? Are we now just consumers shaped by market forces? A sequence of DNA? A collection of base instincts? Or will we soon be supplanted by algorithms and A.I. anyway?

In Clear Bright Future, Paul Mason calls for a radical, impassioned defence of the human being, our universal rights and freedoms and our power to change the world…


Explore my book 😀

Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study

By Kevin B. Anderson,

Book cover of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study

What is my book about?

Still, the only full-length study of the achievements and limitations of Lenin's extensive writings on Hegel, Hegel, Lenin, and Western Marxism has become a minor classic. In a full critical account, Anderson's book connects Lenin's 'dialectics' to his renowned writings on imperialism, anti-colonial movements, and the state. It takes up as well the debate over Lenin's writings on Hegel among Marxists such as Georg Lukács, Henri Lefebvre, C.L.R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, Lucio Colletti, and Louis Althusser. With a comprehensive new introduction by the author.

Book cover of Rosa Luxemburg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution
Book cover of Marx's Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism
Book cover of Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory

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A Long Way from Iowa: From the Heartland to the Heart of France

By Janet Hulstrand,

Book cover of A Long Way from Iowa: From the Heartland to the Heart of France

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Why am I passionate about this?

Author Reader Editor Francophile Minnesotan Once and forever Brooklynite

Janet's 3 favorite reads in 2024

What is my book about?

This memoir chronicles the lives of three generations of women with a passion for reading, writing, and travel. The story begins in 1992 in an unfinished attic in Brooklyn as the author reads a notebook written by her grandmother nearly 100 years earlier. This sets her on a 30-year search to find her grandmother’s journals and uncover the hidden interior lives of her mother and grandmother.

Her adventures take her to a variety of locations, from a small town in Iowa to New York, Washington, London, and Paris—and finally to a little village in France, where she is finally able…

A Long Way from Iowa: From the Heartland to the Heart of France

By Janet Hulstrand,

What is this book about?

This story, about three generations of women with a passion for reading, writing, and travel, begins in 1992, in an unfinished attic in Brooklyn, as a young writer reads journals written by her grandmother as a schoolgirl nearly 100 years earlier. This sets her on a 30-year quest to uncover the hidden lives and unfulfilled dreams of her mother and grandmother. In this coming-of-middle-age memoir, the author comes to realize that the passion for travel and for literature that has fueled her life's journey is a gift that was passed down to her by the very role models she was…


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