Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: A Long View of History

Where did humanity come from?
How did we arrive where we are today?
Why is that even important?

Because without understanding how human society, since our remotest ancestors, has been created through social labor, working people remain prisoners of the capitalist epoch in which we live.

Without knowing how our labor transforms nature, how it’s the motor force along humanity’s ongoing road, we can’t see beyond the class exploitation that warps every aspect of our social relations, ideas, and values.

The dictatorship of capital hasn’t always existed. It’s a few hundred years old. Like slavery and serfdom before it, capitalist rule had a beginning. . . and will have an end.

Only the revolutionary conquest of state power by the working class, conscious of our class position and conditions of emancipation, can open the door to a future. One based not on dog-eat-dog capitalist exploitation, degradation of nature, subjugation of women, racism, and war.

A world built on human solidarity. A socialist world.
That’s what a long view of history helps us understand.

Also available in Spanish (ISBN: 9781604881219), French (ISBN: 9781604881295)

“As an introduction to an important but now neglected side of one of the great debates of our age, this short book genuinely deserves attention.” —Peter W. Wood, president, National Association of Scholars

Frederick Engles (1820–1895) was the founding leader, along with Karl Marx, of the modern revolutionary workers movement. Together with Marx he drafted the Communist Manifesto, the program of that movement. A founder of the Communist League (1848–52), Engels played a prominent role in the 1848–49 revolution in Germany. He was, with Marx, a founding leader of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association (1864–76), often called the First International. After the death of Marx in 1883, Engels led the revolutionary wing of the Second International, founded in 1880, until his own death in 1895.

Writings by Engels published and distributed by Pathfinder include:
Labor, Nature, and the Dawn of History (coauthor, 2021)
Communist Manifesto (coauthor, 2008)
Collected Works of Marx and Engels (1975–2004)
"The Peasant Question in France and Germany" in Marxism and the Working Farmer (1979)
Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1972)
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1972)

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was the founding leader, along with Frederick Engels, of the modern revolutionary workers movement. Together with Engels he drafted the Communist Manifesto, the program of that movement. A founder of the Communist League (1848–52), Marx played a prominent role in the 1848–49 revolution in Germany. He was the founding leader of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association (1864–76), often called the First International. The writings of Marx and Engels have provided the political foundation for the actions of proletarian revolutionists worldwide for more than a century and a half.

Pathfinder Press publishes The Communist Manifesto (1970) and distributes the Collected Works of Marx and Engels (1975–2004).

George Novak (1905–1992) joined the communist movement in the United States in 1933 and remained a member and leader of the Socialist Workers Party until his death.

As national secretary of the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, Novack helped organize the 1937 International Commission of Inquiry that investigated the charges fabricated by Stalin’s Moscow trials. In the 1940s Novack was national secretary of the Civil Rights Defense Committee, which gathered support for leaders of the SWP and the Midwest Teamsters’ strikes and organizing drive who were framed up and jailed under the witch-hunting Smith Act. He played a prominent role in numerous other civil liberties and civil rights battles over subsequent decades, including the landmark lawsuit against FBI spying and disruption won by the Socialist Workers Party in 1986. He was also active in defense of the Cuban Revolution and against the war in Vietnam.

His works include:
An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism
Genocide against the Indians
The Origins of Materialism
Existentialism versus Marxism
Empiricism and Its Evolution
The Marxist Theory of Alienation; Democracy and Revolution
Understanding History
Humanism and Socialism
Pragmatism versus Marxism
America’s Revolutionary Heritage
Polemics in Marxist Philosophy.

Mary-Alice Waters (1942– ), a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee since 1967, is president of Pathfinder Press and editor of New International magazine. She joined the Young Socialist Alliance in 1962 and Socialist Workers Party in 1964. She has helped lead the SWP’s work nationally and internationally, especially in defense of the Cuban Revolution as well as the fight for women’s liberation.

Waters was YSA national secretary, then chairperson (1967–68). She covered the 1968 student-labor uprising in France for the Militant and edited that working-class newsweekly from 1969 through the early 1970s.

She has edited more than thirty-five books on the Cuban Revolution as well as more than a dozen other titles. Waters has spoken in the United States and around the world on the Cuban Revolution and its lessons for working people and youth everywhere.

Her works include:
The Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party (2019, coeditor)
In Defense of the US Working Class (2019)
Is Socialist Revolution in the US Possible? (2016)
"It’s the Poor who Face the Savagery of the US ‘Justice’ System": The Cuban Five Talk about Their Lives within the US Working Class (2015)
Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women (1986, coauthor)
Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (1970, editor)