Ball Buster? True Confessions of a Marxist Businessman

CLASS STRUGGLE IS THE NAME OF THE GAME: TRUE CONFESSIONS OF A MARXIST BUSINESSMAN is the second edition of a unique work that is
a straight forward business adventure story full of ups and downs, dangers, victories and defeats, with enough suspense to satisfy a Hitchcock movie (Warner Brothers almost made a film about the story);
an extremely humorous autobiography, painfully honest (and just plain painful), full of irony and satire, and sprinkled (lightly) with scholarly insights;
a critical view of business (and not just the game business) as seen from the inside; and
a case study in the Marxist theory of "embodiment", which holds that the role you play in society is decisive in determining the kind of person you are, no matter what kind of ideas you have in your head.
In 1978, Bertell Ollman, a professor in the Department of Politics at NYU and one of America's leading Marxist philosophers, created a board game called CLASS STRUGGLE that pits capitalists against workers in a race to ally with minor classes and win elections, general strikes and the revolution. A prototype of the game was made, but Ollman could not interest any game company to manufacture and market it. So, together with a half dozen professor friends, he started a company, Class Struggle, Inc., to bring his creation to the market.

That's when all hell breaks loose with manufacturers who break their promises, toy salesmen who are only interested in the color of the box, banks who refuse to "finance the revolution", protests and bans and one distributor who worries that Ollman may be the Anti-Christ, death threats, workers who go on strike, the New York Chamber of Commerce hearing its first socialist speech (from one of its own, no less), a record media blitz of over 300 stories on the humorous Marxist professor and his game (ranging from "The Star" warning that "Professor Plans Dangerous Monopoly Game With Our Kids" to "Express", Paris, announcing that "The Star of the Frankfurt International Book Fair This Year Was Not a Book but a Game, CLASS STRUGGLE", and Warner Brothers buying Ollman's life story to do a movie. And throughout all this, the game sells...and sells, eventually 250,000 copies in five language editions. Yet, back at the store and little known to the general public, the person Italian papers are calling the "Marxist millionaire" is caught up in his own up and down struggle not to go bankrupt, with all the fears, hopes and anxieties that accompany this typically American experience.

There are many lessons to be drawn from this roller coaster ride over the bumps and the hollows the make up the life of a small business-person in America today, and Ollman misses few of them. But this is also a journey of self-discovery, and the peculiar charm of the book lies in the deft and humorous manner in which Ollman combines the two tales and the insights and derived from them to produce a moving autobiography of our most unusual businessman that is at the same time a learned treatise on our economic system.

Why a second edition? Why now? Because the latest economic crisis has made its analysis of the world of business more relevant and more useful than ever before. Also, with the growing protests against globalization all around the world, there is an entire generation of newly politically conscious twenty-somethings eager to read a true life adventure story that contains a probing criticism of capitalism and is funny as hell.

Finally, Ollman's enhanced reputation as a scholar, teacher and political activist (see below) is likely to attract more readers to this autobiography than ever before.