Political organizing is hard — political education shouldn’t have to be.  Near the end of 2018, Catalyst and Jacobin teamed up to create a new series of pamphlets, called The ABCs of Capitalism.

In the best tradition of socialist political education, we distributed tens of thousands of sets far and wide below costs. We’ve now formatted them as small PDFs that anyone can read and print out and distribute too.

All you have to do is fill out this free order form, and we’ll email you the digital ebooks for The ABCs of Capitalism.

• Pamphlet one: “Understanding Capitalism.” A forty-page text explaining clearly why capitalism isn’t just a collection of individuals, but individuals grouped in social classes with very different interests. Capitalists aren’t necessarily “greedy,” but motivated by market pressures and those pressures create enormous wealth but also great misery for the majority. Because of the nature of the system workers can only advance if they act collectively.

• Pamphlet two: “Capitalism and the State.” We are living in a new Gilded Age, in which an immense concentration of wealth has grown together with the concentration of political power. This pamphlet analyzes the sources of state bias. We need to understand why, far from counteracting the power of capital, states tend to reinforce it. We need to recognize the structural forces that bind it to capitalist interests, even though capitalists’ small numbers should be a disadvantage in a democratic system.

• Pamphlet three: “Capitalism and Class Struggle.” The reason working-class struggles are central to Left politics is that they are the enabling condition for everything else. They create the power and the political leverage that enables us to act on our morals and ideological beliefs — whereas the morals and values without the leverage remain little more than pipedreams. In this third pamphlet, we develop the classic rationale for a class-based political strategy. We examine how it works and also why, even though it deserves to be at the heart of progressive politics, it is so hard to organize and sustain.

Intended for students, organizers, and militants, we hope that they will help in the task of building a new generation of radicals in these heady times.

Get your free edition of The ABCs of Capitalism.

If you want to support the reprinting of future physical runs of the pamphlets and their dissemination, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to Jacobin Foundation.

Also, Catalyst editor and author of the first three pamphlets, Vivek Chibber, is doing a series of YouTube lectures for us this week. Tune in here.