Common Cause

by Francis Combes, Alan Dent (Translator)

'Communism,' wrote Brecht, 'is the simple idea so hard to achieve.' Common Cause tells the hard story of this simple idea, from the Garden of Eden to the French Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is a brave and original history of utopia, revolution, and hope. It is a study in verse of the Communist movement in the twentieth-century, the men and women who led it, like Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Gramsci, as well as some of the artists who marched in their ranks, like Mayakovsky, Picasso and Brecht. Common Cause is a 'history of the defeated', a book about enthusiasm and illusion, heroes and martyrs, saints and sinners. It is an epic, a tragedy and a manifesto for the utopian imagination.

314 pages, Paperback

Published September 15, 2014