Marxist books are back: International Publishers rolls out expanded catalogue, more diverse authors / by C.J. Atkins

_{^{International Publishers | PW}}

_{Reposted from Peoples World}

People’s World isn’t the only one celebrating its centennial in 2024. International Publishers, long known as one of the leading publishers of Marxist literature in the English-speaking world, is also marking its 100th year. For over a century, the company has been distributing “the literature of the revolution,” as our predecessor, Daily Worker, put it ten decades ago.

Since last year, People’s World has featured a series of articles spotlighting International’s history and revival as a force in the field of radical publishing. In the interview below, with IP President Tony Pecinovsky, we check in again to find out the latest plans that are in the works for growing the company’s profile and get a sneak peek at a few upcoming titles.

After you’ve read the interview, check out the links at the bottom of the article to see some of our other coverage of International Publishers.

People’s World: This is International’s 100th birthday year, and it seems like there’s already been a lot of celebrating going on these past few months. What’s happened so far to mark the occasion?

_{^{Some of the participants at the International Publishers 100th Anniversary Symposium, October 2023, from left: Dr. Denise Lynn, Dr. Melissa Ford, Dr. Gerald Horne, International Publishers President Tony Pecinovsky, Dr. Dennis Laumann, and Dr. Elisabeth Armstrong. | Photo and graphic design: C.J. Atkins / People’s World}}

Tony Pecinovsky: That’s right, International Publishers is celebrating its 100th Anniversary! We kicked off our 100th Anniversary last October with a day-long symposium at NYU’s Tamiment Library. The event was a huge success. Historians, activists, and leaders of the Communists Party spoke. They collectively took the day to recognize IP’s historic and continuing relevance as a premier Marxist publisher. The symposium included a wonderful exhibit and was keynoted by Dr. Gerald Horne, who I’m happy to announce has a new book now available for pre-order titled Armed Struggle? Panthers and Communists; Black Nationalists and Liberals in Southern California through the Sixties and Seventies.

Speaking of Dr. Horne, earlier this year we announced an ambitions scholarship partnership with him—the Jerry and Flora Horne Scholarship. This $1,000 scholarship, named after Dr. Horne’s parents, is an investment in ongoing Marxist research into the links between Indigenous dispossession and Slavery / Jim Crow. The scholarship will be awarded to the manuscript proposal that best reflects the tradition of Dr. Horne’s pioneering research in scope and content, as well as International Publishers’ commitment to Marxist historiography. So, this is also part of our 100th Anniversary!

IP authors have also been a part of the academic mainstream, speaking at conferences. For example, myself, Denise Lynn, and Melissa Ford recently lead a panel at the Organization of American Historians 2024 Conference titled “Fear of a Socialist America: Black Radicals Face Right-Wing Anti-Communism.”

So, as you can see, IP has been much more outwardly projecting during our centennial.

As someone who keeps up with the latest scholarship in radical and left history, I’ve heard that International has some other interesting titles on the horizon, too. Can you let our readers in on what will be coming out in the months ahead?

We have a ton of exciting new titles in the works. In addition to the book I mentioned, we have another new title by Gerald Horne that’s being prepared now. It will hopefully be out this fall and is tentatively titled African Americans & A New History of the USA.

We also have several titles by and about women available for pre-order. This is a major step for IP. When I came on board, I recognized this as a major weakness of our catalog—an absence of titles by and about women. So, I made it a special project to reach out to new authors. For example, we have Melissa Ford’s Their Example Will Inspire Us: Five Black Communist Women, a collection of five short biographies. We have Joelle Fishman and Lisa Armstrong’s Lessons From Revolutionary Organizing: On the Campaign Trail and Beyond. We have Bennett Shoop’s Half the World: A Century of Communist Women’s Writing, which includes a Foreword by Denise Lynn, who is also working on a project for IP on the CPUSA’s Women’s Commission publications Working Women and Women Today. And we have a Claudia Jones reader in the works by Cristina Mislan and Keona Ervin. So, we’re making some real strides toward correcting this imbalance.

That’s several new, women authors who have not appeared in the IP catalogue previously. Is that a sign of things to come?

It’s definitely a sign of things to come. When I’m at various conferences—the Organization of American Historians, the African American Intellectual History Society, etc.—I’m talking with people. I’m connecting. I’m trying to figure out what manuscript ideas are out there that might be right for IP. I hear from folks how excited they are that IP is still around, how influential IP has been to their own political and ideological development.

I say all of this to say that IP is actively looking for new authors and manuscripts, which gets me to some other exciting projects on the horizon. We have a collection of poems by Stewart Acuff, titled Love Is Solidarity In Action. As you may know, Acuff is probably one of the most well-known labor leaders of the late-20th / early-21st century. He was responsible for leading the effort to unionize the workers involved with the 1992 Olympics while serving as president of the Atlanta AFL-CIO.

We also have a biography of George Meyers, titled No Power Greater: The Life & Times of George Meyers, by Tim Wheeler. Meyers was the President of the Maryland CIO, redbaited during the McCarthy era. And we have a new collection of essays titled Philip S. Foner – Marxist Historian, edited by Paul Mishler and myself.

If we can keep this pace, IP is on track to have one hell of a centennial!

Seeing some of the covers of these new titles, it also looks like International is getting a real upgrade in the graphics and design department, too.

Thank you for noticing! For a long time, IP was mostly focused on the content, on the substance of its books, which—don’t get me wrong—is vitally important. However, we live in a modern world. We must compete for people’s attention in the modern marketplace of ideas, in a marketplace of instant gratification. And many of our covers were honestly doing us a disservice.

A few years ago, I attended an Independent Book Publishers Association Conference. One of the workshops was on book covers. And they noted that in a modern marketplace, we have roughly five seconds to catch a reader’s attention. If we don’t, they are moving on to something else. So, we could have the best content in the world, and we might. But readers would never know because they weren’t picking up our books—at least, not as much as they should.

**_{^{100th anniversary totes and other merchandise available at intpubnyc.com}}**

So, that became another major project. We decided all new manuscripts would be colorful and vibrant. They would feature photos as much as possible of the relevant personalities, so as to humanize the often-demonized characters involved (again, we’re often talking about Communists).

From seminars and conferences to several new titles and authors, this centennial year has been a big one. Is there anything else in the works for IP fans to look forward to?

A couple of things come to mind. We’ll be at the CPUSA National Convention in Chicago in June where several of our authors will read excerpts from their forthcoming books, and we’ll have books on hand for folks to take back with them. Plus, we have these really cool 100th Anniversary totes now available. They’ve been selling like hot cakes!

And by fall, the companion book publishing from the NYU 100th Anniversary Symposium will be in print. So, keep your eye out for that!

It’s going to be a busy 100th Anniversary!

READ other People’s World articles on International Publishers:

_{> International Publishers – 100 years producing ‘the literature of the revolution’}

^{> International Publishers begins its second century of printing ‘books to change the world’}

^{> We Charge Genocide: Ceasefire movement learning from the Black freedom struggle}

^{> Gerald Horne endows International Publishers research prize on Indigenous dispossession and Black oppression}

_{C.J. Atkins is the managing editor at People’s World. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from York University in Toronto and has a research and teaching background in political economy and the politics and ideas of the American left. In addition to his work at People’s World, C.J. currently serves as the Deputy Executive Director of ProudPolitics.}

International Publishers – 100 years producing ‘the literature of the revolution’ / by C. J. Atkins

NEW YORK—“The literature of the revolution is taking its prominent place in the English-speaking world.” That was how this newspaper reported on the growth of International Publishers back in the 1920s when the company debuted its first full catalog of books, covering everything from classical works of Marxism to developments in the U.S. labor movement to the latest happenings in “the new Russia”—the Soviet Union.

International arrived on the scene in 1924, a time when almost no one was making the works of scientific socialism available to an American audience. It hasn’t stopped since. As International’s vice president, Tony Pecinovsky, told People’s World, “International Publishers was not only one of the first Marxist publishers in the U.S., it is also one of the longest continually publishing Marxist publishers in the U.S.”

Over the past century, the radical imprint has put out thousands of titles in copies numbering in the tens of millions. The achievements of those 100 years of publishing will be the subject of an upcoming day-long seminar hosted at New York University’s Tamiment Library on Oct. 26.

“This is an especially important time to celebrate and recognize International’s history,” Pecinovsky said. “With a new generation exploring socialism, we’re celebrating IP’s past, but we’re also gearing up for our future.”

**_{^{Titles from International Publishers displayed in the window of the}}**
**_{^{Workers Book Shop on 13th Street in New York City in 1942. | Library of Congress}}**

While it’s perhaps best known for its extensive selections of affordable paperback classics like The Communist Manifesto and What is to be Done?, or the 50-volume Marx-Engels Collected Works, International’s reach has gone far beyond works of philosophy and political strategy.

For the better part of the 20th century, it was the premier publisher of radical literature in North America—covering the struggle for socialism, the strategy and tactics of organizing and mobilizing the working class, the fights for African American equality and Black Liberation, women’s liberation, peace, and international solidarity.

“Long before mainstream publishing houses, academic publishers, trade publishers, etc., recognized the importance of publishing books on Black Liberation, IP was there,” Pecinovsky said.

Backing up the claim—and more—Pecinovsky continued:

“We published Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts when most of academia still argued that slaves benefited from slavery; we published W.E.B. Du Bois’ autobiography when most of the publishing world had turned their backs on him claiming he was a “foreign agent”; we published Betty Millard’s Woman Against Myth, a ground-breaking study that helped lay the foundation for the 1960s and ’70s wave of feminism; and we are the publisher of Philip S. Foner’s monumental 11-volume History of the Labor Movement in the United States.”

Among the other authors whose writings have flowed out to the world from International’s printing press are luminaries like Antonio Gramsci, Angela Davis, Claude Lightfoot, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, William Z. Foster, and countless more.

**_{^{Courtesy of @TheDailyWorker on Instagram}}**

Shannon O’Neill, the curator of the Tamiment-Wagner Collections at NYU Library, which is hosting the Oct. 26th seminar, says that International Publishers is “central to the larger story of radical publishing in the United States in multiple senses.”

First, she told People’s World, “in terms of the circulation of words and ideas that challenge capitalist, racist, sexist, imperialist systems; and second…in terms of reaching the masses through affordable, well-edited, easily accessible texts, IP has always been at the forefront.”

O’Neill believes it’s also important to underscore the fact that despite numerous attempts by the U.S. government to destroy International over the years, it has not only persisted, but continued to have an impact on history. “It is often IP’s texts that have circulated picket lines, union halls, and curricula inside and outside academia,” she said.

That’s a point Pecinovsky made as well. “We published books during the height of the McCarthy era that were deemed subversive and anti-American,” he said, “and our founder, Alexander Trachtenberg, was put on trial and thrown in jail.” He recalled that International “showed solidarity with world socialism and the national liberation movements then freeing themselves from colonialism and imperialism—something no other U.S.-based publishing house can lay claim to.”

All of that will be celebrated at the big birthday bash being planned at NYU, but it’s not just International’s past glories that are the centerpiece of the seminar—it will also be a glimpse toward the future that Pecinovsky believes is still ahead for the company. “This seminar is really a jumping-off point for a new, reinvigorated International Publishers,” he said.

O’Neill agrees. “The symposium isn’t only thinking about IP retrospectively, but also addressing the current and future impact IP has on political discourse and action.” She said that the aim of the event is to situate International’s role “within our present political context, in which we are collectively witnessing a rise (again) in the suppression of radical thought and words.”

Pecinovsky pitched the seminar as an opportunity to present “an outwardly-projecting IP that is actively reaching out to authors and trying to recapture its legacy as a premier publisher of Marxist titles.”

**_{Courtesy of International Publishers}**

That’s apparent from the diverse collection of scholars and historians slated to address the conference. Giving the keynote will be Dr. Gerald Horne, the Moores Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston.

Horne is the author of several historical monographs published by International, including studies of Jim Crow and the roots of U.S. fascism, Communists in the Civil Rights movement, the struggle against white supremacy on the African continent, and more.

Expressing the unity of theory and practice—appropriate for a Marxist publisher—International and Tamiment have assembled panels that span the bounds of academia and current labor and political struggles.

Smith College Prof. Elisabeth Armstrong will speak on women in the anti-imperialist peace movement. Historian Paul Buhle will take a look at the life of Alexander Trachtenberg and the founding of International Publishers. Denise Lynn plans to examine the works of two prominent Communist women, Betty Millard and Claudia Jones, and their writings for the party’s Women’s Commission publications.

Melisa Ford will talk about the biographies she’s preparing on Black women Communists from the Midwest. Labor activist Justine Medina will examine how William Z. Foster’s classic works on union organizing have influenced today’s fight inside Amazon’s warehouses. Some books in International’s back-catalog that are getting new releases, like Yuri Smertin’s biography of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, will also be in the spotlight.

Those are just a few of the more than a dozen presentations scheduled for the day. Communist Party USA leaders like Jarvis Tyner, Joelle Fishman, Denice Miles, and Joe Sims will also be in attendance, talking about the long relationship between the CPUSA and International, as well as giving previews of upcoming books that some of them have in the works.

The event won’t be all talk, though. A pop-up exhibit co-curated by Pecinovsky and O’Neill will showcase a collection of unique artifacts and documents from across International’s hundred years of publishing.

_{^{The impact of IP books on today’s labor and political struggles will be a feature of the seminar at NYU, along with a look at the company’s hundred-year history. | Courtesy of International Publishers}}

Pecinovsky said it was tempting to “wander down the rabbit hole and get distracted” by all the things Tamiment has from the International Publishers archives, but one of the items he found most captivating was what is believed to be the company’s first catalog, from 1926.

“We can see how IP’s offerings changed and grew over time, how it’s focus shifted,” he said. “It constantly kept pace with developing ideological questions in the world socialist movement, the struggle for peace, African American equality, Black Liberation, feminism, and workers’ rights.”

O’Neill said she’s most looking forward to a display focused on the extensive correspondence between W.E.B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and International Publishers in the 1950s and ’60s. “The letters reveal a lot about IP’s commitments as a radical publisher and ultimately demonstrates the role that IP has played in global political discourse,” she said.

Registration details for the conference are below, but if you can’t attend in person, you don’t have to miss out. All the presentations and papers from the seminar will—of course—be compiled and released as a new book by International Publishers in spring 2024.

_{REGISTER HERE for the International Publishers 100th anniversary seminar at NYU.}

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