"Red Diapers" is the first anthology of autobiographical writings by the children of American communists. These memoirs, short stories, and poems reflect the joys and perils of growing up in a subculture defined by its opposition to society's most deeply held values. 15 photos.

“Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class.” So begins Vivian Gornick’s exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin’s crimes became public. From the immigrant Jewish enclaves of the Bronx and Brooklyn and the docks of Puget Sound to the mining towns of Kentucky and the suburbs of Cleveland, over a million Americans found a sense of belonging and an expanded sense of self through collective struggle. They also found social isolation, blacklisting, imprisonment, and shattered hopes. This is their story--an indisputably American story.

Women’s music legend Alix Dobkin for the first time chronicles her rise to fame as the first artist to record an openly lesbian album in 1973. Her story, however, opens much earlier in postwar New York City, where, growing up in a Communist family, she watches Jackie Robinson steal home, rubs elbows with radical Left celebrities like Paul Robeson, and comes of age under the watchful eye of the FBI. Dobkin herself joins the party at the height of the McCarthy witch hunts and offers readers a firsthand glimpse of daily life as a young person living under government surveillance. During this time she also matures as a devotee of folk music, having fallen under the spell of renowned performers such as Lead Belly and Pete Seeger. Yet it’s after she arrives on the burgeoning folk music scene of Greenwich Village, where she meets the up-and-coming Bob Dylan, Bill Cosby, John Sebastian, Buffy Ste. Marie, and Flip Wilson, among many other rising luminaries, that she achieves her first acclaim as a singer-songwriter. Her music takes on overt feminist dimensions when she joins a women’s consciousness-raising group and comes out as a lesbian. Rich in period detail, storytelling, and outspoken politics,My Red Bloodis essential reading for lovers of music and history. Singer-songwriter and producer of the groundbreaking 1973Lavender Jane Loves Women,Alix Dobkinhas six additional highly praised albums and a songbook to her credit. She lives in Woodstock, New York.

'When people ask me what it was like growing up in Hungary in the 1970s and 80s, most people expect to hear tales of secret police, bread queues and other nasty manifestations of life in a one-party state. They are invariably disappointed when I tell them that the reality was quite different and that communist Hungary, far from being hell on earth, was in fact rather a good place to live'. From my 'Goulash and Solidarity' article, The Guardian, 2nd November 2002. My book presents a detailed, nuanced account of what everyday life was really like behind the 'Iron Curtain', written from a working-class perspective. How we lived, worked, loved, played and laughed (and at times suffered too). After my original Guardian article, (which was featured on the front cover of The Week magazine as one of the 'Best British Articles') was published I received a large number of emails and letters from readers from all over the world who had given up hope that such an honest, balanced account would ever be published. The dominant view we have of countries behind the 'Iron Curtain' is a very negative one, because the accounts tend to be written by those fiercely hostile to communism. But there is another side to the story, at least in relation to my country, Hungary. Thirty years on from the seismic political changes of the autumn of 1989, which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism in eastern Europe, my book, based on first-hand experience, provides a refreshing, alternative view to the one we have read or heard so many times before. My aim in writing 'Goulash and Solidarity' is to inform you, to entertain you, and I hope, surprise you.

A short zine collecting an introduction to the concept by Matt Colquhoun that appeared in 'krisis journal for contemporary philosophy Issue 2, 2018: Marx from the Margins' and the unfinished introduction to the unfinished book on Acid Communism that Mark Fisher was working on before his death in 2017. "In this way ‘Acid’ is desire, as corrosive and denaturalising multiplicity, flowing through the multiplicities of communism itself to create alinguistic feedback loops; an ideological accelerator through which the new and previously unknown might be found in the politics we mistakenly think we already know, reinstantiating a politics to come." —Matt Colquhoun

Paylie Roberts spent the first eight years of her life living under communist rule in Poland. From age eight on she grew up in the US and became so Americanized that she refused to acknowledge her native Polish heritage, including her birth name. Only after researching the history of why her family was exiled from Poland by the communist government did she realize the tremendously important and unique lessons that the Polish Solidarity movement offers about overcoming tyranny, oppression, and corruption, and how these lessons are imminently relevant and applicable to America today. Paylie combines her personal story with historical facts and sheds light on the many unnerving similarities between growing up in communist Poland in the early 1980s and life in the US now, in a way that is engaging, insightful and inspiring. She recounts her memories of living under the Soviet Union's rule over Poland, as her family struggled along with most other Poles just to survive. This book also includes memories that are only told by Poles as they were never recorded in "official" history due to media censorship during those years. Paylie wrote this book not only to honor the brave Polish people (including her parents) for defeating tyranny using largely non-violent means, but also with the hope of spreading knowledge that could help prevent her worst fears from manifesting regarding what the future in "free" America may hold.