Socialist publisher launches online bookshop

Dave Holmes

Radical publisher Resistance Books has launched a new online bookshop — <http://www.resistancebooks.com>. Its old website at this address has been given an extreme makeover and now lists over 330 books, pamphlets and other items for sale; it also offers visitors a shopping cart and a secure credit-card payment facility.

For lefties who can't find what they want in the mainstream bookshops or who can't easily visit a Resistance centre, the new website should offer an easy means of purchasing socialist literature.

Resistance Books is a non-profit, left-wing book publisher and distributor. Although a shoestring operation, Resistance Books is Australia's main publisher of socialist literature. Currently it has almost 80 titles in print, roughly half books and the remainder pamphlets. The Resistance Marxist Library series now stands at 20 titles and more are planned for this year.

All Resistance Books titles are listed on its website.

In addition, Resistance Books also distributes a number of other items from other publishers that may be of interest to those visiting its website.

Recently, Resistance Books achieved a real milestone in left publishing when it brought out two very substantial books dealing with the building of revolutionary parties — Resistance, the first in a projected three-volume history of the Democratic Socialist Party and Resistance by DSP national secretary John Percy; and The Party, the first in a planned two-volume set of political memoirs by Barry Sheppard, a former central leader of the US Socialist Workers Party. Both these titles, dealing with left radicalism in the 1960s and '70s, are available from Resistance Books' online bookshop or from Resistance centres (see page 2 for addresses).

All this is a very considerable effort for a small left-wing publisher. Just as Green Left Weekly is a minnow compared to the Sydney Morning Herald or the Melbourne Age, so obviously is Resistance Books in relation to Penguin Books or Borders bookshops. However, it is not an essentially commercial undertaking but exists to help provide left activists and those looking for alternatives to the capitalist system with an effective path to fight for something better.

If you would like to make a donation to help support our socialist publishing project, contact us at <info@resistancebooks.com>.

From Green Left Weekly, June 29, 2005.

Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.

From GLW issue 631