Mehring Books

06/21/2026

Two hundred and fifty years after the Continental Congress proclaimed the Declaration of Independence, American democracy confronts its gravest crisis since the Civil War. The democratic principles proclaimed in Philadelphia in July 1776—that all men are created equal, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that the people retain the right to abolish any government that becomes destructive of these ends—are being trampled by a government controlled by a financial-corporate oligarchy. At the same time, political and social resistance to the assault on democracy is being undermined by the claim that there is nothing in the historical legacy of the American Revolution worth defending.

While rejecting simplistic nationalist myth-making, the standpoint of this webinar is that the American Revolution was a world-historic event. Despite its historically determined limitations, contradictions, and compromises, the American Revolution set into motion a global wave of democratic revolutions. It led inexorably to the destruction of slavery in the United States and the emergence of a new epoch of struggle for the emancipation of the working class.

The webinar will feature a distinguished panel of historians who have written extensively on the complex legacy of the American Revolution: James Oakes, Richard Carwardine, Sean Wilentz, Adam Hochschild, and Thomas Mackaman. The webinar will be moderated by David North, International Editor of the World Socialist Web Site.

Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, American democracy confronts its gravest crisis since the Civil War.

06/21/2026

Donate today to strengthen the WSWS—the indispensable voice and organizing center of the international working class—so we can expand our coverage, deepen our interventions, and build a movement of the working class for socialism.

06/21/2026

Mehring Books has published “Oligarchy: Trump and the Breakdown of American Democracy.” Posted below is the Foreword, written by the book’s editor David North. The book can be ordered here.

Spanning 2015 to 2026, this volume traces Trump’s rise to power, his coup of January 6 and his second term to their source in the corporate-financial oligarchy, and advances the socialist strategy required to stop the threat of fascism.

Spanning 2015 to 2026, this volume traces Trump’s rise to power, his coup of January 6 and his second term to their source in the corporate-financial oligarchy, and advances the socialist strategy required to stop the threat of fascism.

06/21/2026

Nearly one century after its publication in late 1929, My Life remains a work of undiminished significance. A great memoir must, of course, be very well written. It must also convey—through its recollection of social, political or psychological experiences—a sense of what it was to be alive at a particular time.

All these challenges were met by Trotsky. First, to describe My Life as merely “well written” is an understatement akin to referring to Tolstoy’s War and Peace as an exciting depiction of military conflict. The reference to Tolstoy is not out of place. For all the differences in the circumstances of their early lives and the conditions they described, Trotsky’s account of his youth in backward Yanovka bears comparison, as a work of art, to Count Tolstoy’s recreation of life on the vast ancestral estate of Yasnaya Polyana. Indeed, Trotsky as a writer was profoundly influenced by the narrative sweep and intellectual depth of 19th-century Russian literature.

His reading, as Trotsky recounts in My Life, began as a seven-year-old. Trotsky was enthralled by works of Pushkin, Nekrasov and Tolstoy. He recalled the impact of his early reading on his emerging consciousness: “Every new book brought with it new obstacles, such as unfamiliar words, unintelligible human relationships and the vagueness and instability which separate fancy from reality.”

Mehring Verlag, the publishing house of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party) in Germany, will soon release a new German-language edition of Leon Trotsky’s My Life. Written from exile in 1929, the autobiography is at once a literary masterpiece and an essential d...

06/21/2026

For the first time, newly discovered photos of the N**i massacre at Kaisariani give a face to the 200 Greek resistance fighters, including twelve Trotskyists, and reveal their courageous defiance.

02/24/2026

In January 1929, Leon Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union by the bureaucratic regime led by Stalin. During the previous five years he had led the struggle of the Left Opposition, founded in October 1923, against the bureaucratic degeneration of the workers state created by the 1917 October Revolution. Notwithstanding the lies of the Stalinist regime, it is a historical fact that Trotsky’s role in the Bolshevik Party’s conquest of power and the survival of the Soviet regime in the struggle against imperialist intervention between 1918 and 1921 was comparable to that played by Lenin.

This assessment of Trotsky’s role is based on the following:

The perspective that culminated in the Bolshevik seizure of power was based on Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, which he had developed in the aftermath of the revolution of 1905. Trotsky foresaw that the bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia would assume the form of a socialist revolution, in which the working class would overthrow the capitalist class and take power in its own hands. Moreover, the workers revolution in Russia would be not only a national event; its fate would be inextricably linked to the development of the world socialist revolution.

David North delivered lectures online at the invitation of Social Democracy clubs at Bilkent University and Middle East Technical University, both located in Ankara, Turkey. The lectures were delivered on February 17 and 19.

02/24/2026

A quote from David North's lecture on February 19, "World Socialist Revolution is the answer to imperialist war and fascism." Read or watch it online at WSWS dot org.

01/14/2026

Congo President Kabila assassinated; Strikes rock Spanish monarchy; French inflict heavy defeat on Viet Minh forces; Premiere of Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin

01/14/2026

01/14/2026