
Left of Karl Marx
The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
$0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Buy for $21.49
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
L. Malaika Cooper
About this listen
In Left of Karl Marx, Carole Boyce Davies assesses the activism, writing, and legacy of Claudia Jones (1915-1964), a pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist, and feminist. Jones is buried in London's Highgate Cemetery, to the left of Karl Marx - a location that Boyce Davies finds fitting given how Jones expanded Marxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race in her political critique and activism.
Claudia Cumberbatch Jones was born in Trinidad. In 1924, she moved to New York, where she lived for the next 30 years. She was active in the Communist Party from her early 20s onward. A talented writer and speaker, she traveled throughout the United States lecturing and organizing. In the early 1950s, she wrote a well-known column, "Half the World", for the Daily Worker. As the US government intensified its efforts to prosecute communists, Jones was arrested several times. She served nearly a year in a US prison before being deported and given asylum by Great Britain in 1955.
Looking at the contents of the FBI file on Jones, Boyce Davies contrasts Jones' own narration of her life with the federal government's. Left of Karl Marx establishes Jones as a significant figure within Caribbean intellectual traditions, Black US feminism, and the history of communism.
©2008 Duke University Press (P)2021 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
-
Black Marxism
- The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Third Edition
- By: Cedric J. Robinson, Robin D.G. Kelley - foreword, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard - preface, and others
- Narrated by: David Sadzin
- Length: 20 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this ambitious work, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand Black people's history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of Black people and Black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism, Robinson argues, must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of Blacks on Western continents, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this.
-
-
"Racial Capitalism"
- By Don Morris on 09-02-22
By: Cedric J. Robinson, and others
-
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
- By: Walter Rodney, Angela Y. Davis - foreword
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the West and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the repercussions of European colonialism in Africa remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.
-
-
A Superb must read for everyone
- By Joy on 04-16-19
By: Walter Rodney, and others
-
Decolonial Marxism
- Essays from the Pan-African Revolution
- By: Walter Rodney
- Narrated by: Terrence Kidd
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Early in life, Walter Rodney became a major revolutionary figure in a dizzying range of locales that traversed the breadth of the Black diaspora. He was not only a witness of a Pan-African and socialist internationalism, but a prime actor in mass organization, catalyzing rebellious ferment, and theorizing an anti-colonial path to self-emancipation. This volume demonstrates the unbending consistency that unites his life and work: the ongoing reinvention of living conception of Marxism, and a respect for the still untapped potential of mass self-rule.
-
-
Another Rodney Classic
- By Amazon Customer on 03-26-24
By: Walter Rodney
-
Assata
- By: Assata Shakur, Angela Davis - foreword
- Narrated by: Sirena Riley
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 2013 Assata Shakur, founding member of the Black Liberation Army, former Black Panther and godmother of Tupac Shakur, became the first ever woman to make the FBI's most wanted list. Assata Shakur's trial and conviction for the murder of a white State Trooper in the spring of 1973 divided America. Her case quickly became emblematic of race relations and police brutality in the USA. While Assata's detractors continue to label her a ruthless killer, her defenders cite her as the victim of a systematic, racist campaign.
-
-
Knowledge is power
- By Ashleigh Terry on 08-20-17
By: Assata Shakur, and others
-
The Black Jacobins
- Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
- By: C.L.R. James
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 14 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of master toward slave was commonplace and ingeniously refined. And it is the story of a barely literate slave named Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces and, in the process, helped form the first independent nation in the Caribbean.
-
-
So you want a revolution?
- By Amazon Customer on 05-17-20
By: C.L.R. James
-
Hammer and Hoe
- Alabama Communists During the Great Depression
- By: Robin D. G. Kelley
- Narrated by: David Sadzin
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate Black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of Whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture.
-
-
I should like this book more
- By bkpiper on 11-17-21
-
Black Marxism
- The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Third Edition
- By: Cedric J. Robinson, Robin D.G. Kelley - foreword, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard - preface, and others
- Narrated by: David Sadzin
- Length: 20 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this ambitious work, Cedric Robinson demonstrates that efforts to understand Black people's history of resistance solely through the prism of Marxist theory are incomplete and inaccurate. Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of Black people and Black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism, Robinson argues, must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of Blacks on Western continents, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this.
-
-
"Racial Capitalism"
- By Don Morris on 09-02-22
By: Cedric J. Robinson, and others
-
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
- By: Walter Rodney, Angela Y. Davis - foreword
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the West and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the repercussions of European colonialism in Africa remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.
-
-
A Superb must read for everyone
- By Joy on 04-16-19
By: Walter Rodney, and others
-
Decolonial Marxism
- Essays from the Pan-African Revolution
- By: Walter Rodney
- Narrated by: Terrence Kidd
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Early in life, Walter Rodney became a major revolutionary figure in a dizzying range of locales that traversed the breadth of the Black diaspora. He was not only a witness of a Pan-African and socialist internationalism, but a prime actor in mass organization, catalyzing rebellious ferment, and theorizing an anti-colonial path to self-emancipation. This volume demonstrates the unbending consistency that unites his life and work: the ongoing reinvention of living conception of Marxism, and a respect for the still untapped potential of mass self-rule.
-
-
Another Rodney Classic
- By Amazon Customer on 03-26-24
By: Walter Rodney
-
Assata
- By: Assata Shakur, Angela Davis - foreword
- Narrated by: Sirena Riley
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 2013 Assata Shakur, founding member of the Black Liberation Army, former Black Panther and godmother of Tupac Shakur, became the first ever woman to make the FBI's most wanted list. Assata Shakur's trial and conviction for the murder of a white State Trooper in the spring of 1973 divided America. Her case quickly became emblematic of race relations and police brutality in the USA. While Assata's detractors continue to label her a ruthless killer, her defenders cite her as the victim of a systematic, racist campaign.
-
-
Knowledge is power
- By Ashleigh Terry on 08-20-17
By: Assata Shakur, and others
-
The Black Jacobins
- Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
- By: C.L.R. James
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 14 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of master toward slave was commonplace and ingeniously refined. And it is the story of a barely literate slave named Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces and, in the process, helped form the first independent nation in the Caribbean.
-
-
So you want a revolution?
- By Amazon Customer on 05-17-20
By: C.L.R. James
-
Hammer and Hoe
- Alabama Communists During the Great Depression
- By: Robin D. G. Kelley
- Narrated by: David Sadzin
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate Black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of Whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture.
-
-
I should like this book more
- By bkpiper on 11-17-21
-
Open Veins of Latin America
- Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
- By: Eduardo Galeano, Isabel Allende - Foreward
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 14 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx. Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation.
-
-
Please up-date the addition
- By fishrock on 02-20-10
By: Eduardo Galeano, and others
-
Black Reconstruction in America
- By: W. E. B. Du Bois, David Levering Lewis
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 37 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This pioneering work was the first full-length study of the role black Americans played in the crucial period after the Civil War, when the slaves had been freed and the attempt was made to reconstruct American society. Hailed at the time, Black Reconstruction in America has justly been called a classic.
-
-
The textbook you should have had in high school.
- By Saleh on 05-06-18
By: W. E. B. Du Bois, and others
-
Blackshirts and Reds
- Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
- By: Michael Parenti
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Blackshirts and Reds explores some of the big issues of our time: fascism, capitalism, communism, revolution, democracy, and ecology. These terms are often bandied about but seldom explored in the original and exciting way that has become Michael Parenti's trademark. Parenti shows how "rational fascism" renders service to capitalism, how corporate power undermines democracy, and how revolutions are a mass empowerment against the forces of exploitative privilege.
-
-
couldn't believe this was on audible
- By Amazon Customer on 02-24-22
By: Michael Parenti
-
The Will to Change
- Men, Masculinity, and Love
- By: bell hooks, Ross Gay
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Everyone needs to love and be loved - even men. But to know love, men must be able to look at the ways that patriarchal culture keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving. In The Will to Change, bell hooks gets to the heart of the matter and shows men how to express the emotions that are a fundamental part of who they are - whatever their age, marital status, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.
-
-
A unique call to an ethic of creative love
- By Forrest Aldridge on 09-26-20
By: bell hooks, and others
-
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
- Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement
- By: Angela Y. Davis
- Narrated by: Angela Davis, Coleen Marlo
- Length: 5 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. Reflecting on the importance of Black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles - from the Black freedom movement to the South African antiapartheid movement.
-
-
Injustice anywhere is Injustice everywhere
- By Jarucia Jaycox on 05-05-17
By: Angela Y. Davis
-
Washington Bullets
- A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
- By: Vijay Prashad
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Washington Bullets is written in the best traditions of Marxist journalism and history-writing. It is a book of fluent stories, full of detail about US imperialism, but never letting the minutiae obscure the larger political point. It is a book that could easily have been a song of despair - a lament of lost causes; it is, after all, a roll call of butchers and assassins; of plots against people's movements and governments; of the assassinations of socialists, Marxists, communists all over the Third World by the country where liberty is a statue.
-
-
The US empire needs to fall
- By Savannah Boyd on 04-28-24
By: Vijay Prashad
-
Elite Capture
- How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else)
- By: Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
- Narrated by: Jaime Lincoln Smth
- Length: 3 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom. But the “identity politics” so compulsively referenced bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, “identity politics” is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests.
-
-
An Essential Read
- By TheFrozenBiscuit on 04-22-23
-
American Marxism
- By: Mark R. Levin
- Narrated by: Jeremy Lowell, Mark R. Levin
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 2009, Mark R. Levin galvanized conservatives with his unforgettable manifesto Liberty and Tyranny, by providing a philosophical, historical, and practical framework for halting the liberal assault on Constitution-based values. That book was about standing at the precipice of progressivism’s threat to our freedom, and now, over a decade later, we’re fully over that precipice and paying the price. In American Marxism, Levin explains how the core elements of Marxist ideology are now pervasive in American society and culture.
-
-
An articulate and point by point analysis of current affairs
- By Ricky_Savage on 07-13-21
By: Mark R. Levin
-
Abolition. Feminism. Now.
- The Abolitionist Papers
- By: Gina Dent, Angela Y. Davis, Beth Richie, and others
- Narrated by: Gina Dent
- Length: 5 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As a politic and a practice, abolition increasingly shapes our political moment - halting the construction of new jails and propelling movements to divest from policing. Yet erased from this landscape are not only the central histories of feminist - usually queer, anti-capitalist, grassroots, and women of color - organizing that continue to cultivate abolition but a recognition of a stark reality: Abolition is our best response to endemic forms of state and interpersonal gender and sexual violence.
-
-
Direct
- By P. Donaldson on 12-30-24
By: Gina Dent, and others
-
Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 50th Anniversary Edition
- By: Paulo Freire, Myra Bergman Ramos - translator, Donaldo Macedo - foreword, and others
- Narrated by: Dennis Kleinman
- Length: 7 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
First published in Portuguese in 1968, Pedagogy of the Oppressed was translated and published in English in 1970. Paulo Freire's work has helped to empower countless people throughout the world and has taken on special urgency in the United States and Western Europe, where the creation of a permanent underclass among the underprivileged and minorities in cities and urban centers is ongoing. This 50th anniversary edition includes an updated introduction by Donaldo Macedo, a new afterword by Ira Shor, and many inspirational interviews.
-
-
Not easy listening
- By Berel Dov Lerner on 02-20-19
By: Paulo Freire, and others
-
The Jakarta Method
- Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World
- By: Vincent Bevins
- Narrated by: Tim Paige
- Length: 9 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1965, the US government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the 20th century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret interventions were so successful.
-
-
Great book, but the narration has serious flaws
- By Prof. Neil Larsen on 08-03-20
By: Vincent Bevins
-
The Counter-Revolution of 1776
- Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America
- By: Gerald Horne
- Narrated by: Larry Herron
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then living in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with the British. In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne shows that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt.
-
-
A revelation, a paradigm shift and a new view
- By Diana Black Kennedy on 03-28-18
By: Gerald Horne