Verso Books

Book SynopsisFrom the COVID-19 pandemic to uprisings over police brutality, we are living in the greatest social crisis of a generation. But the roots of these latest emergencies stretch back decades. At their core is a politics of death: a brutal neoliberal ideology that combines deep structural racism with a relentless assault on social welfare. Its results are the failing economic and public health systems we confront today-those that benefit the few and put the most vulnerable in harm's way.Contributors to this volume not only protest these neoliberal roots of our present catastrophe, but they insist there is only one way forward: a new kind of politics-a politics of care-that centers people's basic needs and connections to fellow citizens, the global community, and the natural world. Imagining a world that promotes the health and well-being of all, they draw on different backgrounds-from public health to philosophy, history to economics, literature to activism-as well as the example of other countries and the past, from the AIDS activist group ACT-UP to the Black radical tradition. Together they point to a future, as Simon Waxman writes, where "no one is disposable."CONTRIBUTORS Robin D. G. Kelley, Gregg Gonsalves and Amy Kapczynski, Walter Johnson, Anne L. Alstott, Melvin Rogers, Amy Hoffman, Sunaura Taylor, Vafa Ghazavi, Adele Lebano, Paul Hockenos, Paul Katz and Leandro Ferreira, Shaun Ossei-Owusu, , Colin Gordon, Jason Q. Purnell, Jamala Rogers, Dan Berger, Julie Kohler, Manoj Dias-Abey, Simon Waxman, Farah GriffinA co-publication between Boston Review and Verso Books.Trade ReviewBoston Review is so good right now. -- Naomi Klein, activist and New York Times best-selling authorBoston Review cuts out the noise, the posturing, and the hysteria and engages ideas with intelligence and humanity. In other words, it's a democratic place for a reading public. -- Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning authorLet mainstream publications give in to the perceived demand for bite-sized news; Boston Review provides the exquisite main course. -- UTNE award citation for Best Writing, 2010In our swamp of media sensationalism and group-speak, Boston Review stands out as a bold voice for reason and argument, one of the very, very few places that offer intelligence, integrity, and variety. -- Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of ChicagoBoston Review is a place where American prose feels exact and alive. It is one of the three or four American journals that makes me feel we have a culture. -- Robert Hass, Poet Laureate of the United States, 1995–97Always challenging, always provocative, Boston Review brings a fresh and insightful perspective to the literature and politics of a multicultural age. -- Henry Louis Gates, Jr., general editor of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature

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Book SynopsisA new progressive generation is on the rise in the United States, reflected in the mushrooming rolls of the Democratic Socialists of America (90,000 mostly twentysomething members), Marxist explainers in Teen Vogue, and perhaps most famously of all, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.The Rise of a New Left is the first book to look closely at this new politics. Propelled by interviews with AOC and the other key figures and organizations who have shaken up American politics, the book includes portraits of groups like the Democratic Socialists of America, the Sunrise Movement, and Justice Democrats, explaining who they are, where they come from, and what they want. Investigating the panoply of strategies employed by the new movements and their relationship to politicians from Bernie Sanders to Nancy Pelosi, the book describes how the generational focus on insurgent electoral campaigns both aims to transform the Democratic Party and threatens to be captured by it.Written with panache by a member of this rising generation, this book immerses the reader in a youth culture the likes of which hasn't been seen since the Sixties.Trade ReviewThe Rise of a New Left is an engrossing behind-the-scenes account of our decade's breakout political movement. It is also an invaluable second draft of history that readers and scholars will consult for many years to understand the opportunities and challenges of socialist organizing in the first decades of the 21st century. -- Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, author of The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global CitizenI was on the verge of getting sad about politics, again. Then I picked up The Rise of a New Left, I was reminded of all the energy on the young left, and I started feeling hope again. If you don't know this movement, you could find no better way to learn about it than this book. -- Doug Henwood, host, Behind the News, KPFAAn exceptionally well-informed report from the ranks of the most dynamic, constructive movement in contemporary American politics. Few books can be profitably read as history, journalism, and political field manual, but this one succeeds on all three fronts. -- Patricia O'Toole, author of The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He MadeAn important primer on the young activists and politicians whose mandate is nothing less than saving our country. -- Gary Shteyngart, author of Our Country Friends: A NovelAn insider's account of how young progressives are influencing American politics and culture...an inspirational introduction to young progressives and the causes they're fighting for. * Publishers Weekly *A well-reported introduction to a growing, controversial movement among the younger electorate. * Kirkus *A sobering yet inspirational record of what leftists have been up to post-Bernie....by highlighting the work of a diverse array of left organizations and their leaders, most of whom are women, Lipsitz does justice to the Left as a whole. -- James J. Jackson * Democratic Left *Lipsitz's The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics is the best book I've read on the evolution of radical politics in recent years. -- John Nichols * Cap Times *

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Book SynopsisA historian's personal journey into the complex questions of immigration, home and nationFrom Ireland to London in the 1950s, Derry in the Troubles to contemporary, de-industrialised Manchester, Joyce finds the ties of place, family and the past are difficult to break. Why do certain places continue to haunt us? What does it mean to be British after the suffering of Empire and of war? How do we make our home in a hypermobile world without remembering our pasts?Patrick Joyce's parents moved from Ireland in the 1930s and made their home in west London. But they never really left the homeland. And so as he grew up among the streets of Paddington and Notting Hill and when he visited his family in Ireland he felt a tension between the notions of home, nation and belonging. Going to My Father's House charts the historian's attempt to make sense of these ties and to see how they manifest in a globalised world. He explores the places - the house, the street, the walls and the graves - that formed his own identity. He ask what place the ideas of history, heritage and nostalgia have in creating a sense of our selves. He concludes with a plea for a history that holds the past to account but also allows for dynamic, inclusive change.Trade Reviewan immensely readable, thoroughly enjoyable book ... Hegel would have admired the way Joyce lets a sharply individualised life distil a whole socal history. -- Terry Eagleton, author of Why Marx was RightA haunting meditation on Ireland and England, war and migration, Derry and Manchester. I admired the originality of his observations and his tone of melancholy, calm wisdom. -- Colm Toibin * Books of the Year 2021, Guardian *Merges personal stories with large political moments. Joyce's family came to England from Mayo and Wexford. His account of his life in London, of the legacy of war and of his experiences in Ireland is written with wisdom and grace. -- Colm Toibin * Authors' and Critics' 2021 Favourites, Irish Times *This is a rare kind of writing, a form of meditation on the societies that are forming and melting around us in the present. Only a voice such as this can alert us to these historical worlds -- Seaumas DeaneI can't think of another historian around who could write something so suggestive and profound, so much on both a minor and major scale, constantly tracing the connections between the two. -- Paul Ginsbourg

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Book SynopsisThis book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions by composing a constellation of "dialectical images": Marx's "locomotives of history," Alexandra Kollontai's sexually liberated bodies, Lenin's mummified body, Auguste Blanqui's barricades and red flags, the Paris Commune's demolition of the Vendome Column, among several others. It connects theories with the existential trajectories of the thinkers who elaborated them, by sketching the diverse profiles of revolutionary intellectuals-from Marx and Bakunin to Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks, from Mao and Ho Chi Minh to José Carlos Mariátegui, C.L.R. James, and other rebellious spirits from the South-as outcasts and pariahs. And finally, it analyzes the entanglement between revolution and communism that so deeply shaped the history of the twentieth century. This book thus merges ideas and representations by devoting an equal importance to theoretical and iconographic sources, offering for our troubled present a new intellectual history of the revolutionary past.Trade ReviewOffering one of the most unsentimental yet non-reactionary meditations on revolution ever written, Traverso comes not to bury or praise the earthly drive to "take heaven by storm" but to understand it anew. Enriched by a lifelong study of historiography and politics, immense historical knowledge, theoretical polyamory, and a compelling artistic eye, this book also features splendid humility in exploring its slippery, complex and important subject. For those who long to craft a different order of things, Traverso's account is essential. For those who want to ponder what spirits revolutions or makes shipwrecks of them, this rare work roams the globe and the library, reflecting on Phnom Penh and Havana, not only Paris and Moscow, and thinking with Weber, Arendt, Fanon and Constant, not only Trotsky, Lenin and Mao. -- Wendy Brown, author of In the Ruins of NeoliberalismThis brilliant essay on the images of revolutions is a unique experiment, which has no equivalent in the vast historiographic literature on the subject. Inspired by Marx, Trotsky ,and Walter Benjamin, it is built as a montage of dialectical images, which function as lamps that illuminate the past. Enzo Traverso, probably the most gifted historian of his generation, does not hide his hostility to what he calls the "octopus of universal commodity reification"; without idealizing the past revolutions , he wants to preserve, in this fascinating and heterodox piece of research, the memory of historical experience. Quoting Benjamin: we cannot ignore the claim that the past has on us. * Michael Löwy *A perfect partnering of author and subject! Enzo Traverso is the Marxist scholar most gifted to present us with a masterfully articulated appraisal of the perplexing presence of concepts and images of revolutions in the political imagination. His astonishing scholarly expertise is on display with stunning elegance to reveal a rich tapestry of material from the 19th and 20th centuries, along with a multitude of riveting actors and thinkers. Revolution is a monumental advance in its sophisticated and supple interpretations; it is also a virtuoso performance in the art of refreshingly precise, rigorously compact exposition, complemented by a novelist's flair for narrative power and dramatic verve. -- Alan Wald, H. Chandler Davis Collegiate Professor Emeritus, University of MichiganBrilliant and beautiful. Now this book exists, it's hard to know how we did without it. -- China MiévilleVividly written, full of sparkling details and sharp theoretical insights... -- Hannah Proctor * Radical Philosophy *Something for every revolutionary. * Socialist Worker *

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Book SynopsisFully updated from the original edition. As the retreat from Kabul shows, America goes to war not to bring democracy, or glory, but in the pursuit of profit. In The Spoils of War, leading Washington reporter, Andrew Cockburn, reveals the extent of the rot that stretches from the Pentagon and the White House, to Wall St and Silicon Valley.The American war machine can only be understood in terms of the "private passions" and "interests" of those who control it - principally a passionate interest in money. Thus, as he witheringly reports, Washington expanded NATO to satisfy an arms manufacturer's urgent financial requirements; the U.S. Navy's Pacific fleet deployments were for years dictated by a corrupt contractor who bribed high-ranking officers with cash and prostitutes; senior marine commanders agreed to a troop surge in Afghanistan in 2017 "because it will do us good at budget time."Based on years of wide-ranging research, Cockburn lays bare the ugly reality of the largest military machine in history: squalid, and at the same time terrifyingly dangerous.Trade ReviewCockburn is ... an assiduous investigator and skillful narrator. -- Foreign AffairsCorruption is the recurring theme that runs through the US journalist Andrew Cockburn's brilliant journalism collected in The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine. -- Richard Norton-Taylor * Declassified UK *An accessible yet forensic account of not only why runaway military spending is wrong, but how. -- Ed O'Loughlin * Irish Times *A devastatingly convincing account of the runaway nature of a powerful grouping of interests - the defence, intelligence and financial sectors in the US. -- Mary Kaldor * openDemocracy *This is robust, old-fashioned progressive, polemical journalism . Cockburn describes some shocking practices, and provides valuable critiques - for example, of the over-reliance on sanctions as a coercive instrument. -- Lawrence Freedman * New Statesman *He possesses a uniquely detailed knowledge of the arcane, lucrative machinations of this world, as well as a deep historical understanding of the forces that built it. And while the specifics change, the stories he tells all have the same shocking moral. "People say the Pentagon does not have a strategy," he quotes a former Air Force colonel as saying. "They are wrong. The Pentagon does have a strategy. It is: 'Don't interrupt the money flow.'" -- Jon Schwarz * The Intercept *A withering exposé reveals the insatiable and squalid profit motive that drives the US military apparatus - the largest in modern history * Morning Star *Informative and entertaining. -- Mike Phipps * Labour Hub *Nothing I have read for years has so reoriented, even revolutionized, my thinking about the corporate/political forces that underly our constructing and "modernizing" a doomsday machine, the subject of my own life's work I am urging everyone to read this book. -- Daniel Ellsberg, author of The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War PlannerCockburn presents a damning account of America's military-industrial complex, culled from his best work over a decade on the paradoxical nature of American military power...Spoils of War is a meticulously researched book that presents a critical perspective on the 'American War Machine.' -- Marc Martorell Junyent * Responsible Statecraft *

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Book SynopsisThe Poverty of Ethics stands the usual moral-political dichotomy on its head. It argues that moral principles do not in fact underlie or inform political decisions. It is, rather, the conceptual primacy of political discourse that rescues ethics from its poverty. Our ethical convictions receive their substance from historical narratives, political analyses, empirical facts, literary-educational models, political activity and personal experience. Yet morality, essentially, doesn't leave room for relativity: not every ethos deserves to be titles 'moral'. Hence the book argues further, it is the left ethos, as it has evolved over years, which forms the basis for ethics: morality is left-wing! Clarifying and justifying this seemingly odd statement is the main purpose of this essay.Appealing to philosophical ideas on the essence of language, on meaning, on understanding and persuasion, this book scrutinizes the system of concepts and attitudes informing our common view of the relationship between the moral and the political. It argues that the traditional conception of morality is far too narrow to form a basis for political thought and political action. Its carefully unfolded argument concludes that none of the current philosophical accounts of morality can be translated into terms of political will, much less into direct political action. Being too general and elastic, neither abstract moral principles, ethical-aesthetic sensibilities, nor the ethical demand emanating from an Other, can fulfill these tasks. Instead, the false primacy of the ethical over the political and the infinite flexibility of vacuous moral discourse are often mobilized to launder wrongs and delegitimize radical left politics. Gratification of the moral high ground becomes an implement of de-politicization, and thus a powerful political instrument in the hands of those seeking to shore up the existing order.Trade ReviewThe Poverty of Ethics, Anat Matar's book, is a rich essay, full with insights, which manages to bridge the divide between a serious philosophical discussion and actions and values belonging to the political reality. The solidarity which Matar is interested in promoting ensues from the ability to detect historical-economical structures of injustice and to recognize their oppressed victims. Matar aims at establishing a kind of solidarity, whose model she finds in Karl Marx. But she also describes in detail the limitations of the explanatory power of the Marxist model. Matar has no presumption to prophesize that such a solidarity would indeed be established. Her optimism is the optimism of the political activist rather than the investigating philosopher. -- Dr. Rami Godovitz * Haaretz *It is not easy to explain how a philosophy book can be so relevant and biting, while it's based on close readings in philosophical texts. The Poverty of Ethics is a brave book, because it reminds us not only how important philosophy is for everyday political discussion, but also for the self-criticism of academia and its ties to the governing powers. In an exceptional manner, the book forges links between wide streams of thought and local action - and lack of action. Matar chooses to do this through a serious, non-compromising examination of the ideas and of the philosophers identified with them in the last hundred years. Unlike reference-loaded discussions in professional journals, she discusses these philosophers and their ideas in a direct and impartial manner; the intrigued reader will find here a fresh - almost respect-less - examination of "big names". If this sounds hard to digest, the book presents alongside its criticism a clear optimistic vision and a huge love - for philosophical thinking (especially that of Wittgenstein and Derrida); for Left thinking, to which the book is explicitly committed; and to the people who create, alongside Anat Matar, possibilities of solidarity. The Poverty of Ethics is not merely an intellectually brilliant book, but a political and humane spotlight, which warns us against the penetration of fascism to everyday life, including everyday academic life. This is an exciting and magnanimous book, and I hope that the future generation of researchers and thinkers will be directed by its light. -- Prof. Nitzan Lebovic, Chair of Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values, Lehigh University * Hazman Hazeh *In today's confusion, when the lowest form of political opportunism is regularly masked as the appeal to highest ethical principles, Anat Matar's book sets the record straight. It doesn't argue for the subordination of ethics to political pragmatism, quite the opposite. It demonstrates how authentic ethics are always grounded in a basic political decision. It is rare that one sees such a combination of progressive political engagement and deepest philosophical reflection as in The Poverty of Ethics. Matar's book is a guide for all those who are trying to survive with dignity in a topsy-turvy world that is our own. -- Slavoj ZizekAn unusually and attractively bold and passionate work that crosses the idioms of Analytical and European Philosophy, challenges the orthodoxies and complacencies of each tradition, while animating the subject of Ethics from within the urgencies of contemporary political debate and action -- Akeel Bilgrami, Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy, Columbia UniversityA bracing and illuminating challenge to moral philosophy in its many guises. Matar offers philosophers a stark choice: to understand morality through the history and practice of radical left struggle, or to serve as an apologist for the dominant order. -- Amia SrinivasanPhilosophy can and should be a crucial component in the toolbox enabling our political struggles, Anat Matar argues compellingly in this elegant, erudite text. Indeed, bringing all her philosophical rigour to the question of the 'poverty of ethics', no-one is better placed than Matar to teach us the relevance of committed philosophical reflection to resisting injustice and oppression, situated as she is in the heart of Israel, and a supporter of Palestinian rights. This book is essential reading for all political thinkers and activists. -- Lynne SegalA learned and engaging work.Matar's greatest achievement in this book is to refute the too-widespread assumption that a 'Levinasian' ethics can precede our life with language - with each other, at large. Rather, politics goes all the way down.A powerful antidote to depoliticisations of ethics, a powerful paean to the power of community -- Rupert Read, author of Wittgenstein’s Liberatory Philosophy

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Book SynopsisThis short book calls to account the government misrulers and corporate criminals who made suffering from the global coronavirus pandemic more acute. Modeled on a famous 1940 bestseller--a pamphlet exposing appeasers of Nazi Germany--Guilty Men shows how the crisis has been stoked by the callous and opportunistic decisions of powerful men. The rogues gallery begins with Donald Trump, who deliberately downplayed the crisis despite knowing its dangers, as well as his international political allies, above all Boris Johnson. Billionaire politicians like Georgia senator Kelly Loeffler moved stocks at the same time they were telling Americans all was well . Political charlatans like Education Secretary Betsy DeVos undermined public safety in order to advance their agenda, Trump-controlled agencies, led by the ever-crooked Federal Reserve, bailed out Wall Street while failing to provide basic relief for workers. Libertarian "think tanks" like the Ayn Rand Institute decried public expenditures but were first in line to get bailout checks. Pharmaceutical companies gamed the vaccine race, and the most rapacious global corporations like Facebook, Visa, and Pfizer have found the pandemic to be very profitable indeed, vastly enriching the already grotesquely bloated fortunes of trillionaires like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Charles Koch. Guilty Men closes with a call for a version of the Pecora Commission, initiated by newly elected Franklin Roosevelt, that took aim at what FDR called "speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, and profiteering" that stoked the Depression. The commission led to some of the most far-reaching reforms in US history, as well as sensational hearings that led to the fall of the leading bankers and financiers of that era.Trade ReviewOn The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party: Henry Wallace is a political figure-one of the giants of the mid-twentieth century-who has kind of been pushed out of the national political discussion. Nichols [tells us] that one of the reasons Wallace was not renominated in 1944 was because of his opposition to racism. The segregationists didn't want him around. -- Senator Bernie SandersOn The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party: More than a history book-this is an examination of what progressives must do to retake our democracy. Nichols points the way toward how we can build a party based on peace, liberty, and justice for all. -- Representative Ilhan OmarOn The 'S' Word: A chilling reminder of how much rich American history has been erased by shallow messaging. A crucial book. -- Naomi KleinOn The 'S' Word: The Tom Paine of our time. -- Bill MoyersSure to alarm as much as it angers and informs ... [Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiteers] will leave readers with a renewed hunger for justice regarding the pandemic. * Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review) *

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Book SynopsisWhen the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no 'white' people there; nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years. Historical debate about the origin of racial slavery has focused on the status of the Negro in seventeenth-century Virginia and Maryland. However, as Theodore W. Allen argues in this magisterial work, what needs to be studied is the transformation of English, Scottish, Irish and other European colonists from their various statuses as servants, tenants, planters or merchants into a single new all-inclusive status: that of whites. This is the key to the paradox of American history, of a democracy resting on race assumptions.Volume One of this two-volume work attempts to escape the 'white blind spot' which has distorted consecutive studies of the issue. It does so by looking in the mirror of Irish history for a definition of racial oppression and for an explanation of that phenomenon in terms of social control, free from the absurdities of classification by skin color. Compelling analogies are presented between the history of Anglo-Irish and British rule in Ireland and American White Supremacist oppression of Indians and African-Americans. But the relativity of race is shown in the sea change it entailed, whereby emigrating Irish haters of racial oppression were transformed into White Americans who defended it. The reasons for the differing outcomes of Catholic Emancipation and Negro Emancipation are considered and occasion is made to demonstrate Allen's distinction between racial and national oppression.Trade ReviewA meticulous study. -- AkalaSeminal -- Emma Dabiri

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Book SynopsisWhether class or race is the more important factor in modern politics is a question right at the heart of recent history's most contentious debates. Among groups who should readily find common ground, there is little agreement. To escape this deadlock, Asad Haider turns to the rich legacies of the black freedom struggle. Drawing on the words and deeds of black revolutionary theorists, he argues that identity politics is not synonymous with anti-racism, but instead amounts to the neutralization of its movements. It marks a retreat from the crucial passage of identity to solidarity, and from individual recognition to the collective struggle against an oppressive social structure. Weaving together autobiographical reflection, historical analysis, theoretical exegesis, and protest reportage, Mistaken Identity is a passionate call for a new practice of politics beyond colorblind chauvinism and "the ideology of race."Trade ReviewAsad Haider offers a clarifying and frank assessment of the left's evacuation of class from our identity debates, as well as a powerful defense of political solidarity across hierarchies of race. Drawing on the radical legacy of anti-racist movements-from the Black Panthers to the Combahee River Collective-Mistaken Identity puts forward a powerful vision of collection action, that should offer hope and inspiration to a new generation of activists. -- Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth and Feel FreeRiveting. Haider moves deftly over difficult terrain. His prose is precise and propulsive. His Marxism is not a mausoleum but a living, breathing thing. And he writes as both a militant and a theorist, one who believes that theory is integral to political struggle and that theoretical rigour has political stakes. The American left has shown signs of life recently, but it has no shortage of enemies. Defeating them will require, among other things, ideas. Haider's book contributes several. We will need more. -- Ben Tarnoff * Guardian *Essential reading for anyone interested in bringing socialist ideas into movements against racism today. * Socialist Worker *Mistaken Identity will inspire some, piss off others, and compel all of us to reconsider how we fight back. A bold, fresh, and radical critique of so-called "identity politics," this book deserves a wide reading-especially now, when liberal multiculturalism, the "renaturalization" of capitalism, and a resurgent bourgeois black nationalism draped in radical language forecloses the possibility of revolutionary solidarity. Asad Haider proclaims another universality is possible, and it's probably not what you think. -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical ImaginationAsad Haider renews the critique of identity politics for the contemporary Left. Drawing on the work of British cultural studies, black feminism, and theories of the subject (and subjection), Haider writes in an open and persuasive prose to show how identity is always partial and ambivalent, deflecting from the larger racial ideologies while reproducing its terms. This is a fresh and timely book, thoughtful and provocative. -- Judith Butler, author of Gender Trouble and Frames of WarReviving what has become a deeply unfashionable anti-racist standpoint, Asad Haider indicts the complicity of "identity politics" from the left. For him, the dissident mentalities and meticulous historical methods of open-ended, ecumenical commitment to radical social transformation are still valid. This spiky little book shows how opposition might be salvaged from an ocean of pessimism and despair. -- Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic and There Ain't No Black in the Union JackAsad Haider offers a devastating and constructive critique of what is commonly understood as "identity politics," while still maintaining the centrality race, racism and racist oppression in capitalism. -- Bill Fletcher, Jr., coauthor of Solidarity Divided and former president of TransAfrica ForumPithy, smart and readable, Mistaken Identity is a wonderful book for our time. Notwithstanding his critique of identity, there is a compelling authenticity to Haider's voice, making him someone one wants to think with about shaping a left vision today. -- Wendy Brown, author of States of Injury and Undoing the Demos[Asad Haider] constructs a comprehensive and critical dissection of identity politics in his hard-hitting debut...This book is an important contribution to discourses on American politics, race, and social movements. * Publishers Weekly *Asad Haider has written a brief and informed survey and critique of the inherent flaws in identity politics. It convinces the reader through a measured calm, not polemics, and that's a refreshing change in these troubled times. -- Christian John Stephens * PopMatters *For a slim book, Haider's argument is expansive and philosophically challenging. Although he never overwhelms the reader with unexplained jargon, the range of work he engages with is impressive, including that of Althusser, Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and more. Moving through this material with skill and acumen, Haider sets out to undercut the material and philosophical foundations of identity politics (and the idea of identity itself). -- Michael Mirer * Public Books *Mistaken Identity is a refreshing and timely answer to the rupturing status quo that flows within the popular movements of our day. Haider's critique of liberal identity politics cuts through the fog that has been raised by opportunists who seek to divide popular movements. His insurgent universality could become a potentially useful way of thinking through the identity politics that seek to divide rather than reconstitute our movements into a larger program with demands for a better world for all of us. -- Brant Roberts * Marx & Philosophy Review of Books *Short and readable, the book provides an intellectual genealogy of anti-racism and of the myriad ways in which contemporary anti-racist politics go awry. -- Aidan J. Beatty * Logos: Journal of Modern Society and Culture *Lucid, compact, and fiercely polemical, Asad Haider's book Mistaken Identity identifies a desperate need for greater political solidarities and broader coalitions at a time when left political movements are governed largely by the logic of 'staying in your lane,' which poses a significant barrier to mass organizing in the United States. -- Field Street Collective * Commune Magazine *

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Book SynopsisNarrating some lesser known episodes from the deep history of digital machines, Alexander R. Galloway explains the technology that drives the world today, and the fascinating people who brought these machines to life. With an eye to both the computable and the uncomputable, Galloway shows how computation emerges or fails to emerge, how the digital thrives but also atrophies, how networks interconnect while also fray and fall apart. By re-building obsolete technology using today's software, the past comes to light in new ways, from intricate algebraic patterns woven on a hand loom, to striking artificial-life simulations, to war games and back boxes. A description of the past, this book is also an assessment of all that remains uncomputable as we continue to live in the aftermath of the long digital age.Trade ReviewGalloway's work is conceptually sharp, visually compelling and completely attuned to the political moment. * New York Times *An engaging methodological hybrid of the Frankfurt School and UNIX for Dummies. Galloway brings the uncool question of morality back into critical thinking. * Village Voice *Praise for Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture:This is contemporary media theory at its best. -- Lev Manovich, Professor of Computer Science, CUNY Graduate CenterThe Interface Effect builds on the work of Marxist critical theorists such as Fredric Jameson, new media scholars such as Wendy Chun, and Galloway's own work in earlier books such as Protocol. An interface, for him, becomes a technique for thought: an 'allegorical device' that makes the social world accessible in an age of information. The Interface Effect raises many critical questions about the ways that contemporary human beings mediate a historical present that invariably eludes us. * Los Angeles Review of Books *Employing a sustained, powerful methodology, The Interface Effect sparkles with original insights. Galloway is interested not only in the effects that interfaces have, but also in them as themselves the results of cultural, technological, economic, and political forces. This double movement provides a way to connect the historical with the political, and the technological with both. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in new media studies, contemporary theory, and digital technologies. -- N. Katherine Hayles, Professor of Literature, Duke UniversityGalloway's theorisation of the computer as a mode of mediation offers rich possibilities for the critical analysis of the digital. * Radical Philosophy *The Interface Effect fuses sophisticated contemporary theory with a detailed knowledge of the technics and techniques of digital media. Galloway is an important voice, and the book is sure to have a wide uptake among those interested in new media theory and contemporary aesthetics. -- Jodi Dean, Professor of Political Science, Hobart and William Smith CollegesPraise for The Exploit:Essential reading for all theorists, artists, activists, techheads, and hackers of the Net. -- McKenzie Wark, Professor of Culture and Media, The New SchoolAlexander Galloway's Uncomputable is a brilliant counter-history of some of the technological worlds we are all currently inhabiting. In this enthralling genealogy of computation, we encounter a refreshingly unfamiliar constellation of marginalized or overlooked practices, theories, artifacts and individual innovators. -- Jonathan CraryHow to translate political struggle into algorithm? How to transpose material entanglement into executable operations? What is the relation between passion, heartbreak and mathematics and what are the losses incurred by moving in-between them? Alexander Galloway's intelligent and delicate treatise draws out the tensions between matter and thought, the invisible and the sharp impact of historical manifestation, the palpable and the operational and these other, unspeakable things and situations, that keep evading through the cracks, shining. -- Hito SteyerlThrough a series of wonderfully surprising hidden histories of computation, Galloway provides a radically different perspective on the digital age and computational media, illuminating its limitations and its possibilities. -- Michael HardtAt a historical moment characterized by totalizing forms of data-capture, rabid machine learning algorithms, and the colonization of everyday life by the logics of computation and capital, Galloway asks a pointed question: "What if things were otherwise?" Using case studies from across the arts, humanities, and sciences, Uncomputable shows the alternate pathways of history, and provides a glimpse towards a theory, practice, and politics of radical refusal whose timeliness could not be more relevant. -- Trevor Paglen

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Book SynopsisIn Xinjiang, the large northwest region of China, the government has imprisoned more than a million Uyghurs in re-education camps. One of the incarcerated--whose sentence, unlike most others, has no end date--is Ilham Tohti, an intellectual and economist, a prolific writer, and formerly the host of a website, Uyghur Online. In 2014, Tohti was arrested; accused of advocating separatism, violence, and the overthrow of the Chinese government; subjected to a two-day trial; and sentenced to life. Nothing has been heard from him since.Here are Tohti's own words, a collection of his plain-spoken calls for justice, scholarly explanations of the history of Xinjiang, and poignant personal reflections. While his courage and outspokenness about the plight of China's Muslim minorities is extraordinary, these essays sound a measured insistence on peace and just treatment for the Uyghurs.Winner of the PEN/Goldsmith Freedom to Write Award and the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought while imprisoned, this book is nonetheless the only way to hear from a man who has been called "a Uyghur Mandela".Trade ReviewAs Tohti wrote before his sentencing, the reason his people's arduous history must be known and proliferated is because of the hope it and his life's work evinces. -- Kevin Lozano * Vulture *Through his writings, Tohti tries to give the Uyghurs a voice. It is a tragic story that speaks volumes about the UK's current retreat from international law. -- Helena Kennedy * Guardian *An indispensable firsthand description of the Uyghurs' desperate plight. -- Jeremy Ray Jewell * Arts Fuse *We Uyghurs Have No Say provides a comprehensive analysis of how Uyghurs came to be a subjugated group within China, as well as strategies for remedying the situation through interethnic dialogue and policy reform ... At times, [Tohti's] writing reads more like one friend's sober advice to another, possessing a 'for your own good' quality while still bearing the mark of lived experience. * New York Magazine *[The] demand for autonomy and dignity within the Chinese state - stubbornly expressed and quietly eloquent - is voiced often in We Uyghurs Have No Say, a slim volume of Mr. Tohti's essays, speeches, open letters and interviews. * The Wall Street Journal *[We Uyghurs Have No Say] expands on [Tohti's] work unpacking China's treatment of Uyghurs and how the consequences of the country's promotion of Han ethno-nationalism. * TIME magazine *In 2014, [Tohti] was arrested and given a life sentence on the charge of 'separatism.' This selection of his writings shows what this separatism consisted of: bracingly honest analyses of the racism, discrimination, marginalization, and coercive policies that shape Beijing's treatment of the country's 55 recognized 'national minorities'; nuanced analyses of the social tensions between Uyghurs and Han Chinese; and thoughtful recommendations for how to realize the promises of equal citizenship and minority cultural self-rule laid out in the Chinese constitution and the Regional Ethnic Autonomy Law. -- Andrew J. Nathan * Foreign Affairs *

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Book SynopsisAs the call for a new understanding of our national history gets louder, this book turns the received imperial story of Britain on its head. Britain's Empire recounts the long overlooked narrative of the resisters, revolutionaries and revolters who stood up to the might of the Empire. Richard Gott recounts the Britain's misdeeds from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the Indian Mutiny, spanning the globe from Ireland to Australia, telling a story of almost continuous colonialist violence. Recounting events from the perspective of the colonized, Gott unearths the all-but-forgotten stories excluded from mainstream British histories.Trade ReviewVivid and startling ... Gott's achievement is to show, as no historian has done before, that violence was a central, constant and ubiquitous part of the making and keeping of the British Empire * Guardian *His message is stark but Gott is never shrill. He writes as a scholar, not an accuser. * Red Pepper *A tour de force. * History Today *A welcome, even necessary, corrective. * the Independent *Stimulating, inspirational and much needed. * Morning Star *Pungent and provocative ... a rich compendium of revolt * Scotland on Sunday *

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Book SynopsisOriginally published in French in 1974, radical feminist Francoise d'Eaubonne surveyed women's status around the globe and argued that the stakes of feminist struggle was not about equality but about life and death-for humans and the planet. In this wide-ranging manifesto, d'Eaubonne first proposed a politics of ecofeminism, the idea that the patriarchal system's claim over women's bodies and the natural world destroys both, and that feminism and environmentalism must bring about a new 'mutation'-an overthrow of not just male power but the system of power itself. As d'Eaubonne prophesied, "the planet placed in the feminine will flourish for all."Never before published in English, and translated here by French feminist scholar Ruth Hottell, this edition includes an introduction from scholars of ecology and feminism situating d'Eaubonne's work within current feminist theory, environmental justice organizing, and anticolonial feminism.Trade ReviewStudents of feminism will savor this cogent presentation of a landmark text. * Publishers Weekly *An iconic text, one of the first to discuss ecofeminism and the inherent connections between women and nature ... with its urgent discussions of climate change and human rights, Feminism or Death is a perennial feminist text... potent and timeless. * Foreword Reviews *Table of ContentsPreface, by Carolyn MerchantIntroduction, by Myriam Bahaffou and Julie Gorecki (translated by Emma Ramadan) INTRODUCTION FEMINITUDE, OR RADICAL SUBJECTIVITY The Tragedy of Being a Woman Majority or Minority?Work and Prostitution Rape FROM REVOLUTION TO MUTATIONThe Stress of the Rat Regarding AbortionFor a Planetary Feminist Manifesto For a Planetary Feminist Manifesto (continued) For a Feminist Planetary Manifesto (end) Departure for a Long March THE TIME FOR ECOFEMINISM New Perspectives Ecology and Feminism Appendices A. How women do not control their destinyB. The New Feminine Mystique (Liberation) C. A Rose for Valerie D. A Tract for a "Feminist Front" E. To See Clearly (Combat for Man) Bibliography

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Book SynopsisThe European Union is a political order of peculiar stamp and continental scope, its polity of 446 million the third largest on the planet, though with famously little purchase on the conduct of its representatives. Sixty years after the founding treaty, what sort of structure has crystallised, and does the promise of ever closer union still obtain?Against the self-image of the bloc, Perry Anderson poses the historical record of its assembly. He traces the wider arc of European history, from First World War to Eurozone crisis, the hegemony of Versailles to that of Maastricht, and casts the work of the EU's leading contemporary analysts - both independent critics and court philosophers - in older traditions of political thought. Are there likenesses to the age of Metternich, lessons in statecraft from that of Machiavelli? An excursus on the UK's jarring departure from the Union considers the responses it has met with inside the country's intelligentsia, from the contrite to the incandescent. How do Brussels and Westminster compare as constitutional forms? Differently put, which could be said to be worse?Trade ReviewPerry Anderson's Ever Closer Union? provides an elegantly savage critique of the European Union. Many of the arguments and themes may be familiar - years of rowing over Brexit will do that to an audience - but few deliver the lines with the poise of Anderson. What ultimately emerges from the pages of Ever Closer Union? is the EU not as its defenders imagine it to be, but as it really is: an oligarchic institution, built over and against the peoples of Europe. -- Tim Black * Spiked *Anderson's latest book draws on his characteristic method of meticulous and staggering range of reference...His style, with its combative strain, can never be accused of being 'dull, technical, infested with jargon' - faults he ascribes to much literature on the European Union. -- Gordon Parsons * Morning Star *Picking up where his previous study of the European Union, The New Old World (2009), ended, Ever Closer Union? is one of the most serious and intelligent challenges to the EU available. -- Hugo Drochon * Times Literary Supplement *Perry Anderson's critical analysis of the European Union is a devastating indictment of liberal complacency. -- David Jamieson * Jacobin *An incisive and challenging critique of the European integration process. The book could be read for one eye-opening section alone. Witty, aphoristic and cogent * European Political Science *

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Book SynopsisFor sixty years, Noel Ignatiev provided an unflinching account of "whiteness" - a social fiction and an unmitigated disaster for all working-class people. This new essay collection from the late firebrand covers the breadth of his life and insights as an autodidact steel worker, a groundbreaking theoretician, and a bitter enemy of racists everywhere.In these essays, Ignatiev confronts the Weather Underground and recounts which strategies proved most effective to winning white workers in Gary, Indiana, to black liberation. He discovers the prescient political insights of the nineteenth-century abolition movement, surveys the wreckage of the revolutionary twentieth century with C.L.R. James, and attends to the thorny and contradictory nature of working-class consciousness. Through it all, our attentions are turned to the everyday life of "ordinary" people, whose actions anticipate a wholly new society they have not yet recognized or named.In short, Ignatiev reflects on the incisive questions of his time and ours: How can we drive back the forces of racism in society? How can the so-called "white" working class be won over to emancipatory politics? How can we build a new human community?Trade ReviewA persistent voice against white privilege * The New York Times *there is no political or literary trend-or President-capable of derailing Ignatiev's true lifelong project. In his writing, and in Race Traitor and Hard Crackers, Ignatiev demonstrated the transformative power of working-class stories. His radicalism was always tethered to specific people, who, in their own ways, inspired sympathy and a desire for connection. That specificity will always be relevant; it may be especially so at a moment of cynical alienation, when identities have become recitations rather than communities. -- Jay Caspian Kang * New Yorker *This book is the gift of a life well-lived - as steelworker, scholar, race traitor, and fierce anti- racist. Noel Ignatiev had a singular and memorable voice, here preserved for posterity. We will need his ideas and example moving forward. -- Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship: A Human HistoryThis collection of Noel Ignatiev's writings over the past six decades could not come at a more important time in the struggle as white supremacy; they are as pertinent today as they were when they were written. -- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United StatesIgnatiev demonstrated the transformative power of working-class stories. His radicalism was always tethered to specific people, who, in their own ways, inspired sympathy and a desire for connection. That specificity will always be relevant; it may be especially so at a moment of cynical alienation, when identities have become recitations rather than communities * New Yorker *Noel Ignatiev was a tiller in the field of identity studies long before most of us even knew there was such a field. Beyond that, he located the field at the crossroads of race and class. He was an important, innovative thinker, as well as a committed activist for social justice. -- Russel Banks, author of Continental Drift and CloudsplitterNoel Ignatiev was a giant in one of the most important fields of research to emerge in recent times: how was it that those who had been warring on the shores of Europe on religious and ethnic grounds were magically transformed upon crossing the Atlantic into the new Identity Politics of "whiteness"? As the brilliant Ignatiev correctly suggests, the survival of humanity may very well hang on understanding this phenomenon - then acting decisively. -- Gerald Horne, author of White Supremacy Confronted.from time to time a study comes along that truly can be called 'path breaking,' 'seminal,' 'essential,' a 'must read.' How the Irish Became White is such a study. -- John Bracey, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachussetts, AmherstReaders are given a comprehensive view of factory militant and abolitionist Ignatiev's powers of investigating the unstable, often ambivalent 'complexities and contradictions' that shape existence under capitalist social relations. -- Dylan Davis and Patrick King * Los Angeles Review of Books *A dialectical approach to politics that both accounts for the lived experience of trying to transform society and hones strategies based on study, debate, accumulated knowledge, and the emerging capacities of those around us...an engaging set of provocations, and practical discussions of revolutionary strategy. -- Mike King * Boston Review *

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Book SynopsisIn his book, The Monster at Our Door, the renowned activist and author Mike Davis warned of a coming global threat of viral catastrophes. Now in this expanded edition of that 2005 book, Davis explains how the problems he warned of remain, and he sets the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of previous disastrous outbreaks, notably the 1918 influenza disaster that killed at least forty million people in three months and the Avian flu of a decade and a half ago. In language both accessible and authoritative, The Monster Enters surveys the scientific and political roots of today's viral apocalypse. In doing so it exposes the key roles of agribusiness and the fast-food industries, abetted by corrupt governments and a capitalist global system careening out of control, in creating the ecological pre-conditions for a plague that has brought much of human existence to a juddering halt.Trade ReviewMike Davis's The Monster at our Door...gives me everything that the news cycle doesn't: a sense of the interconnected forces and the history that set us up for what we're experiencing. -- Molly Dektar * Vogue *[A] tour de force... Read Mike Davis' new updated book before the monster rebounds and we spiral down again. * Counterpunch *Provocative and controversial, as always, and a worthy addition to the literature of plague and pestilence. * Kirkus Reviews *

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Book SynopsisThe question of ownership is the critical fault line of our times. During the pandemic this issue has only become more divisive. Since March 2020 we have witnessed the extraordinary growth of asset manager capitalism and the explosive concentration of wealth within the hands of the already super-rich. This new oligarchy controls every part of our social and economics lives.In the face of crisis, the authors warn that mere redistribution within current forms of ownership is not enough; our goal must be to go beyond the limits of the current system, dominated by private enclosure and unequal ownership. Only by reimagining how our economy is owned and by whom can we address the crises of our time - from the fallout of the pandemic to ecological collapse - at their roots.Building from this insight, the authors argue the systemic change we need hinges on a new era of democratic ownership: a reinvention of the firm as a vehicle for collective endeavour and meeting social needs. Against the new oligarchy of the platform giants, a digital commons that uses our data for collective good, not private profit. In place of environmental devastation, a new agenda of decommodification - of both nature and needs - with a Green New Deal and collective stewardship of the planet's natural wealth. Together, these proposals offer a road map to owning the future, and building a better world.Trade ReviewHowever queasily anxious it makes the political class, the question of who should own what in our economy still hangs in the air, unanswered. This pacy and accessible book unpacks the issues and offers solutions with a welcome dash of imagination and optimism. -- Aditya Chakrabortty, Senior Economics Commentator, The GuardianOwning the Future offers a vision for a future beyond capitalism. It will require nothing less than a radical democratization of ownership. An ambitious book that should inspire many to help workout the details of a much needed transition. -- Katharina Pistor, author of The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and InequalityAmid a growing divide between those who own assets and those who don't, Owning the Future offers an essential guide to the shifting landscape of property, politics, and power today, from the enclosure of knowledge in vaccine IP to the outsized power of massive asset managers. Seamlessly blending social theory and case studies, Adrienne Buller and Mathew Lawrence lucidly diagnose the pathologies of private ownership across a range of sectors - housing, data, ecosystems - and make a powerful case for the necessity of public and democratic alternatives. -- Alyssa Battistoni, co-author of A Planet to WinA must-have guide for anyone interested in reimagining ownership in our age of compounding crises. Lawrence and Buller map out how we can escape from a world of escalating competition over dwindling assets towards a future where the inherent value of every person is recognised. Read this if you want to maintain any hope in a different vision of the twenty-first century. -- Kojo Koram, author of Uncommon WealthBuller and Lawrence imagine a world where corporates are democratized, the stock market loses its power, and the state invests in a common fund for citizens and makes real and substantial investments in decarbonization. This is no fever dream. It is a well-reasoned plan of action and far more possible than we think. -- Mark Blyth, author of Austerity: The History of a Dangerous IdeaYou will finish this gripping book equipped with the tools to rethink what property means, ready to reimagine and transform ownership so that we can effectively redistribute power, decommodify the provision of essential goods and services, and expand the meaning of the commons. A powerful exposé of how, together, we can own the future on an habitable planet. -- Isabelle Ferreras, author of Firms as Political EntitiesPraise for Planet on Fire * : *This clear and incisive book starts from the immensely important insight that we cannot understand climate breakdown outside of the capitalist social relations that produced it. Planet on Fire reminds us that climate breakdown is intimately linked to all the overlapping crises humanity faces - from the rise of the far right, to growing socioeconomic inequality, to the COVID-19 pandemic - and that ecosocialism is the only route to an equal and sustainable world. -- Grace BlakeleyEloquent, clear-sighted and erudite... an important analysis of the interlocking political and economic forces driving us towards ecological catastrophe, and a credible route-map towards an alternative -- Will DaviesOffers blueprints, rally-points for energies, and chronicles of useful pasts for a decarbonized future. In the end, the climate crisis, they remind us, is not about individual morality or scientific authority but power and politics. This is a handbook for the fights to come. -- Quinn SlobodianThe authors' vision of the path to climate justice is an antidote to disaster politics in so many ways, not least because it is both fair and unexpectedly luxurious. Each page is absolutely brimming with ideas as they meticulously take us through every important sector of the economy and reveal carefully thought through recommendations for reform. By focusing on power and who wields it they correctly identify the levers for change and who must now be empowered to push them. -- Michelle Meagher

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Book SynopsisSilicon Valley wants us to believe that technology will revolutionize our cities and the ways we move around. Autonomous vehicles will make us safer, greener, and more efficient. On-demand services like Uber and Lyft will eliminate car ownership. Micromobility devices like electric scooters will be at every corner, and drones will deliver goods and services. Meanwhile visionaries like Elon Musk promise to eliminate congestion with tunnels, and Uber help with flying cars. The future of transport is frictionless, sustainable, and according to Paris Marx, a threat to our ideas of what a society should be.Road to Nowhere exposes the problems with tech's visions of the future and argues that we cannot allow ourselves to be continually distracted by technological fantasies that delay the collective solutions we already know are effective. Technological solutions to social problems and the people who propose them must be challenged if we are to build cities and transportation systems which serve the public good.In response, Paris Marx offers a vision for a more collective way of organizing transportation systems which considers the needs of poor, marginalized, and vulnerable peoples. The book also argues that rethinking mobility can be the first step in a broader reimagining of how we organize our social, economic, and political systems to serve the many, not the few.Trade ReviewThe last decade has been a trainwreck for Silicon Valley's dreams of mobility. Paris Marx's invaluable new book explains how and why big tech's utopian transit projects crashed and burned, why these disasters will keep finding funding if they are not opposed, and what the alternative might look like. The path to a better, more equitable future of transit begins with the Road to Nowhere. -- Brian Merchant, author of The One DeviceA lively summary of the ways Big Tech has distracted us from the urgent task of making our cities work for everyone. -- Jarrett Walker, author of Human TransitAn astute and engaging critique of Silicon Valley's visions for transportation, Marx highlights the problems of technology being driven by the needs of capital and crafts a compelling vision of a world where technology is instead used to deliver social good -- Wendy Liu, author of Abolish Silicon ValleyDraws a compelling picture of the evolution of the Western vision of mobility. -- Konrad Bleyer-Simon * Green European Journal *I recommend Road to Nowhere not only for what it says about transport, but for its approach to technologies more generally ... [it] is far ahead of the depressing pile of texts that put a 'left' gloss on techno-optimism -- Simon Pirani * Ecologist *I know it is heresy, but electric cars are still cars and they won't save us. Marx has written a wonderful book that explains why, and is persuasive about that better, more equitable future we could all have if we looked to Main Street instead of Sand Hill Road. -- Lloyd Alter * Treehugger *Road to Nowhere is a sharply rendered, compelling, and illuminating text that combines diffuse histories and complex processes into a clear narrative. Marx's work helps us better understand the past and contemplate the kind of futures we might bring about. -- Matthew Seidel * Protean Magazine *As greenhouse gas emissions ramp up, housing prices reach astronomical heights, and we all stay stuck in traffic, Paris Marx's new book Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation looks at how the quest for market share got us to this point and why visions of the future from California tech billionaires cannot solve these problems. -- Clement Nocos * Broadbent Institute *[Road to Nowhere] traces the historical echo between automakers' takeover of the North American continent and the present monopolistic powers of the tech industry. -- David A. Banks * Real Life Magazine *You may find yourself driven to drink by the events recounted in this book, but Marx is a designated driver you can count on. -- Rob Larson * Jacobin *Road to Nowhere stands as an intervention into broad discussions about the future of mobility, particularly those currently taking place on the political left. -- Zachary Loeb * Boundary2 *The most concise, well-reasoned critique of that corner of the tech industry that most directly affects cities: transportation. -- James Brasuell * Planetizen *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1 1. How the Automobile Disrupted Mobility 9 2. Crafting the Ideology of Tech 36 3. Electric Vehicles and Their Dirty Secret 63 4. Uber's Assault on Cities and Labor 89 5. Self-Driving Cars Did Not Deliver 114 6. Carving New Paths for Cars 140 7. The Coming Fight for the Sidewalk 160 8. The Real Futures That Tech Is Building 180 9. Toward a Better Transport Future 202 Conclusion 228

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Book SynopsisIn this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood rewrites the history of political theory, from Plato to Rousseau. Treating canonical thinkers as passionately engaged human beings, Wood examines their ideas not simply in the context of political languages but as creative responses to the social relations and conflicts of their time and place. She identifies a distinctive relation between property and state in Western history and shows how the canon, while largely the work of members or clients of dominant classes, was shaped by complex interactions among proprietors, labourers and states. Western political theory, Wood argues, owes much of its vigour, and also many ambiguities, to these complex and often contradictory relations.In the first volume, she traces the development of the Western tradition from classical antiquity through to the Middle Ages in the perspective of social history - a significant departure not only from the standard abstract history of ideas but also from other contextual methods. From the Ancient Greek polis of Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus and Sophocles, through the Roman Republic of Cicero and the Empire of St Paul and St Augustine, to the medieval world of Averroes, Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, Wood offers a rich, dynamic exploration of thinkers and ideas that have indelibly stamped our modern world.In the second volume, Wood addresses the formation of the modern state, the rise of capitalism, the Renaissance and Reformation, the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment, which have all been attributed to the "early modern" period. Nearly everything about its history remains controversial, but one thing is certain: it left a rich and provocative legacy of political ideas unmatched in Western history. The concepts of liberty, equality, property, human rights and revolution born in those turbulent centuries continue to shape, and to limit, political discourse today. Assessing the work and background of figures such as Machiavelli, Luther, Calvin, Spinoza, the Levellers, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, Ellen Wood vividly explores the ideas of the canonical thinkers, not as philosophical abstractions but as passionately engaged responses to the social conflicts of their day.Trade ReviewMeiksins Wood is a rare breed - an academic with the soul of a storyteller. * Morning Star *Few historians of comparative political thought are in the same league as Ellen Wood, who surveys the whole sweep of ancient and medieval thinkers with equal magisterial brilliance of insight. -- Professor Paul Cartledge, University of CambridgeA challenging analysis, which successfully integrates theory with historical changes. The clarity of the writing makes her account readily accessible to any reader ready to engage a fresh approach to the history of political theory. -- Sheldon WolinImmensely impressive, bold and erudite. Meiksins Wood's conclusions are undeniably nuanced, challenging and important. This book ought to be compulsory reading for us all. * Times Higher Education Supplement *This book is clearly written, incisively argued, and immensely informative. * CHOICE *A notable book, wide-ranging and perceptive. Wood addresses the heartland of the historiography of political thought from Machiavelli to Rousseau, the territory of its most successful recent practitioners. -- Jonathan Clark * Times Literary Supplement *The writing is so supple and accessible, and the argument so persuasive, it's like watching a cloudy mixture of ideas being turned into a clear solution. -- Adrienne RichWood was an extraordinarily rigorous and imaginative thinker, someone who breathed life into Marxist political theory and made it speak-not to just to me but to many others-at multiple levels: historical, theoretical, political. -- Corey Robin * Jacobin *

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Book SynopsisIn this book, first published in Hebrew in 1975 and now available in English for the first time with an introduction by Noam Chomsky, Amnon Kapeliouk traces the policies and attitudes that led to the 1973 Arab-Israel war. He describes the multiple diplomatic overtures from Egyptian presidents Nasser and Sadat after 1967 that Israel ignored or contemptuously rejected, as well as the complacent attitude that had become fully entrenched in the Israeli military establishment. On the political level, the triumvirate of Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan and Israel Galili feature prominently as a study in arrogance and incompetence. Kapeliouk also notes the protest movement that arose among active-duty soldiers as well as veterans in the wake of the war demanding political accountability for the failures of the war. Finally, the book examines Israel's policy of colonizing the territories occupied in 1967, starting with the Golan Heights and later spreading to the West Bank ("Judaea and Samaria") and the Sinai - a policy that did much to convince the leaders of Arab states that war was their only option.Introduced by Noam Chomsky and Irene Gendzier.Trade ReviewAmnon Kapeliouk's Not by Omission demonstrates conclusively that the 1973 Arab-Israeli War did not have to happen. Israel's dismissal of every Egyptian peace overture gave Egyptian President Anwar Sadat no option but to launch a war if he hoped to regain the Sinai Peninsula, occupied by Israel since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Nonetheless, the arrogant over-confidence of Israel's military leadership that Arab armies would not dare to attack Israel so soon after their devastating defeat left Israel unprepared for war. The most impressive achievement of Not by Omission is that is based on publicly available documentation - newspaper reports and 42 published pages (out of 1,500) of the report of Israel's National Commission of Inquiry into the failures of the military. That is to say, diligent Hebrew-reading observers could have drawn conclusions similar to those Kapeliouk reached in real time. Why didn't they? -- Joel BeininThis superb analysis of the fateful policies of the Israeli political leadership that almost produced a national disaster in 1973 retains a crucial relevance 20 years after its original publication, and deserves the widest readership. It convincingly demonstrates that Israel rejected a golden opportunity after the 1967 War to achieve peace with its Arab neighbors as well as regional stability because of its unwillingness to forego further expansionist territorial ambitions. -- Richard A. FalkAvailable in English for the first time, the late Amnon Kapeliouk's study of the pivotal 1973 Yom Kippur/Ramadan War is a significant contribution to the field of Middle East Studies and deserves to be read widely. A critical yet intimate examination of Israel's political and military leaders and thinkers, Not by Omission, analyzes their failures and why they occurred, and how, for a time, they changed Israel and the Arab world particularly after Israel's stunning victory in the 1967 war. An important work full of prescient insights that remain as relevant today as when they were first written nearly 50 years ago. -- Sara Roy, Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard UniversityAmnon Kapeliouk was a courageous Israeli journalist and writer who placed the Palestinians at the centre of his work. Long before it became fashionable, he argued that the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 was unsustainable, morally and politically, and that, without a just peace, Israelis would face an uncertain future. Kapeliouk's most influential book was Lo Mehdal (Not By Omission, 1975) explaining why the 1973 war was not just an error of Israel's tactical intelligence, but was based on an entire misconception of Arab grievances and the determination to right them. -- Ian Black * Guardian *Amnon Kapeliouk, one of the oldest active journalists in Israel, worked for Al HaMishmar and Yedioth Aharonoth, as well as Le Monde and Le Monde Diplomatique. He was also known for his close ties to Yasser Arafat and other leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization. * Haaretz *

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Book SynopsisIn this ground-breaking work, Paul Gilroy proposes that the modern black experience can not be defined solely as African, American, Carribean or British alone, but can only be understand as a Black Atlantic culture that transcends ethnicity or nationality. This culture is thorough modern and, often, overlooked but can deeply enriches our understanding of what it means to be modern.This condition comes out of historical transoceanic experience, established first with the slave trade but later seen in the development of a transatlantic culture. And Gilroy takes us on a tour of the music that, for centuries, has transmitted racial messages and feeling around the world, from the Jubilee Singers in the nineteenth century to Jimi Hendrix to rap. He also explores this internationalism as it is manifested in black writing from the "double consciousness" of W. E. B. Du Bois to the "double vision" of Richard Wright to the compelling voice of Toni Morrison. As a consequence, Black Atlantic charts the formation of a nationalism, if not a nation, within this shared, disasporic culture.Trade ReviewPaul Gilroy is one the most incisive thinkers of his generation...One can only hope that his voice travels far and wide. * Independent *In debates in recent years around questions of race, nation and culture, Paul Gilroy has stood out as an independent, unorthodox and (often for that very reason) exciting new voice. * Times Higher Educational Supplement *Whilst others scarcely put a toe in the water, in The Black Atlantic Gilroy goes in deep and returns with riches. * Guardian *At that moment, in US scholarship, the emphasis was still on minimising the role of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the making of capitalism. So to have the Black Atlantic argue so powerfully for its constitutive role in the making of modernity was really important. -- Saidiya HartmanIt was in this book that Gilroy laid out his concept of the 'black Atlantic', the idea that black culture is essentially a hybrid, a product of centuries of exchange, slavery and movement across the Atlantic. Exploring everything from the lives and work of African American philosophers such as WEB Du Bios, to black popular music, Gilroy demonstrates that black culture is both 'local' and 'global', and cannot be constrained within any single national culture. It flows across the black Atlantic of the book's title. The influence of Gilroy's work can be felt not only in modern scholarship but even in the work of the visual artist John Akomfrah. -- David OlusogaThe Black Atlantic, still his most influential work, used the writings of enslaved people and their descendants to demonstrate their centrality to the making of the modern world. * Guardian *He's the foremost intellectual in the United Kingdom: not an if, not a but, not a maybe -- Steve McQueen

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Book SynopsisThe last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow will soon disappear. They leave behind a collective memory of segregation shaped increasingly by its horrors and heroic defeat but not a nuanced understanding of everyday life in Jim Crow America. In The South, Adolph L. Reed Jr. - New Orleanian, political scientist, and according to Cornel West, "the greatest democratic theorist of his generation" - takes up the urgent task of recounting the granular realities of life in the last decades of the Jim Crow South.Reed illuminates the multifaceted structures of the segregationist order. Through his personal history and political acumen, we see America's apartheid system from the ground up, not just its legal framework or systems of power, but the way these systems structured the day-to-day interactions, lives, and ambitions of ordinary working people. The South unravels the personal and political dimensions of the Jim Crow order, revealing the sources and objectives of this unstable regime, its contradictions and precarity, and the social order that would replace it. The South is more than a memoir or a history. Filled with analysis and fascinating firsthand accounts of the operation of the system that codified and enshrined racial inequality, this book is required reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of America's second peculiar institution the future created in its wake. With a foreword from Barbara Fields, co-author of the acclaimed Racecraft.Trade ReviewErasing the Color Line -- Christopher Hitchens * New York Times *[A] trenchant history of the Jim Crow South....This spare, earnest recollection shines a unique light on the fight for racial equality in America. * Publishers Weekly *A remembrance of the author's early life below the Mason-Dixon line, while also making a case for class-based inequality as a historical constant -- Aaron Bogart * White Review, Best Books 2022 *Reed seeks to delineate exactly what Jim Crow was and wasn't. He is speaking directly to the errors of today, which threaten to calcify the reality of the past into doctrinaire historical misunderstandings. -- Jeremy Ray Jewell * Arts Fuse *If some observers today are tempted to look at the racial injustices that still abound... and claim that little has changed since the days of Jim Crow, Reed shows the folly of such a conclusion -- Jason Sokol * Washington Post *Part memoir, part history, and part political treatise, The South chronicles Reed's life under Jim Crow to correct what he sees as misleading representations of the past. -- Elias Rodriques * Bookforum *In The South, Reed recounts growing up in New Orleans while blending in his analysis of segregation. Like his criticisms of Obama or The 1619 Project, Reed's perspectives on Jim Crow are both incisive and incendiary. -- Jonah Goldman Kay * Los Angeles Review of Books *Reed has added nuance and insight to understanding the segregated South as it came to a formal end. -- Steve Suitts * Southern Spaces *

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Book SynopsisIn the wake of the mass protests over the police murder of George Floyd, nearly every major consumer brand proclaimed their commitments to antiracism, often with new ad campaigns to match their Tweets. Despite the historic scale of protests and ruling class approval, the most substantive reforms advanced by Black Lives Matter remained out of reach. Still less was achieved around policies that might help the most dispossessed and precarious Americans. Why has anti-racism been such a powerful source of mobilization but such a poor means of building political opposition capable of winning big reforms?Writing against the grain of popular left sentiments, Johnson cautions against the revival of ethnic politics. Instead, he calls for broad-based left politics as the only viable means for ending the twin crises of racial inequality and police violence. Redistribution, public goods, and multi-ethnic working-class solidarity are the only viable response to the horrors of police violence and mass incarceration. It just so happens that fighting the conditions that make crime and violence inevitable is also the means by which we can build a working-class majority and a more equal and peaceful nation.

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Book SynopsisSelected as one of the 15 best political and current affairs books of 2022 by The TimesIs Socialism Possible in Britain? analyses Jeremy Corbyn's tenure as Labour leader and the prospects for parliamentary socialism in a post-Corbyn Britain. Lively and insightful, it is informed by an insider's view of the most radical period in Labour's history. A veteran of the Stop the War Coalition, Andrew Murray was seconded to Corbyn's office from the Unite trade union and witnessed an extraordinary daily bombardment from sections of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the media. He candidly assesses the leadership's response to the antisemitism controversy and the dilemmas of Brexit, as well as Keir Starmer's restoration of a turgid neo-Blairism. The problems that beset Corbyn are likely to confront any similar political project. Is Socialism Possible in Britain? explores how they can be more effectively addressed in the future - a future which we must hope is not so far away.Trade ReviewThe most fluent and authoritative account to have emerged from the left...humorous and candid -- Gabriel Pogrund * Times, Best Books 2022 *A vital corrective to establishment efforts to erase Corbynism and deny how close it came to power. -- Ronan Burtenshaw, Editor of TribuneEngaging and very readable, with profound insights and a coruscating wit. * Morning Star *Insightful, indeed inspiring. -- Kevin Maguire * Daily Mirror *The best of the Corbyn camp's books. Murray powerfully points at rotten pillars of the global order that the Labour right sometimes defends. -- Tom Clark * Times Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisThrough a series of lively and accessible biographical essays, Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism century Eastern Europe. By examining the revolutionary careers of five prominent socialist women active in the 19th and 20th centuries-the aristocratic Bolshevik, Alexandra Kollontai; the radical pedagogue, Nadezhda Krupskaya; the polyamorous firebrand, Inessa Armand; the deadly sniper, Lyudmila Pavlichenko; and the partisan turned scientist turned global women's activist, Elena Lagadinova-Kristen Ghodsee tells the story of the personal challenges faced by earlier generations of socialist and communist women. None of these women were "perfect" leftists. Their lives were filled with inner conflicts, contradictions, and sometimes outrageous privilege, but they still managed to move forward their own political projects through perseverance and dedication to their cause. Always walking a fine line between the need for class solidarity and the desire to force their sometimes callous male colleagues to take women's issues seriously, these five women pursued novel solutions with lessons for activists of today. In brief conversational chapters-with plenty of concrete examples from the history of the state socialist countries in Eastern Europe and contemporary reflections on the status of women in the world today-Ghodsee renders the big ideas of socialist feminism accessible to those newly inspired by the emancipatory politics of insurgent left feminist movements around the globe.Trade ReviewWe've needed this book longer than we know: celebrating and learning from revolutionary socialist women, Red Valkyries gifts us with models essential to today's struggles. Kristen Ghodsee breaks down the wall liberal feminism built in women's history, bringing to life a vision of emancipation that continues to be worth fighting for. -- Jodi Dean, author of ComradeWritten with clarity and zest, Red Valkyries is an illuminating introduction to the extraordinary lives of prominent socialist women in the Soviet Union and Bulgaria. -- Sheila RowbothamIn our historical moment, quotas of women in power positions and correct manners or expressions are obfuscating the long historical link between feminism and radical politics. Ghodsee's Red Valkyries is exactly the book needed to correct this misperception and help feminism to rejoin its radical past. The five figures analyzed were fighters who pursued the feminist cause through their full engagement in revolutionary political struggle. Can we still imagine this, in our era obsessed with victimization? -- Slavoj ZizekRed Valkyries is a fascinating alternative history of the feminist movement, told from the perspective of the east rather than the west. The women Ghodsee profiles are committed socialists who realise that women's liberation is incompatible with capitalism, and who also frequently struggle against the centralisation of power within their own countries. Required reading for anyone seeking out an alternative to #girlboss feminism. -- Grace BlakeleyA beautiful book about the intimate lives and bold ideas of a range of Communist women, people who built their revolutionary dreams into reality. Ghodsee lifts up the immense contradiction between the future-oriented social hopes of these revolutionaries, these exiles from the future, and the grip of the social conventions of the present. -- Vijay PrashadFunny and politically illuminating, Ghodsee writes with the clear-sighted directness of the revolutionary women she describes. Women's sexual, political and daily emancipation were the eye of the socialist storm for Kollantai, Krupskaya, Armand and Lagadinova. Ghodsee's book breathes new life into their stories of how to create a world without patriarchy. -- Elizabeth Armstrong, Smith CollegeKristen Ghodsee's new book is a well-documented and immensely personal guide to the 20th-century East European socialist women's movement. The author extracts from silence and saves from oblivion five women who have made an attempt to change not only their own, personal history, but also political, social and cultural history of women in Europe and worldwide. It is a story about a communist revolution in which women played a significant role, creating and implementing the project of a better world for all people. Reflections on the past are not, however, used to celebrate it nostalgically, but to draw conclusions for the future - how to act to build an alternative to the hegemony of capitalism and nationalism. This well-written, passionate story about the "red Valkyries" shows that socialism is not a song of the past, but still valid and long-awaited response to the challenges of the present world. Ghodsee argues that the history is not over, but rushes forward. Speeding up, however, it needs signposts to avoid falling into the abyss. The Red Valkyries will be perfect for this role. -- Agnieszka Mrozik, Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of SciencesUntil the late 20th century, you could pay close attention in school, graduate from a prestigious university with a degree in history and still never find out who Harriet Tubman was. Outrageous, right? But due to capitalist ideology and Cold War hangover, you could still do all that and never learn about Alexandra Kollontai or Inessa Armand, or any of history's great Communist women. Kristen Ghodsee's riveting account of these complicated, imperfect and inspiring lives is an outstanding corrective to our miseducation, one that's long overdue. -- Liza FeatherstoneCompelling...by telling unfamiliar and forgotten stories, [Red Valkyries] suggests there are other fronts on which the battle can be fought than those favoured by western feminists. -- Desmond Bullen * Northern Soul *Illuminating...Ghodsee equips us with five extraordinary role models whose tenacity, perseverance and dedication to revolutionary politics should serve as inspiration to anyone seeking to build a better world for all. -- Rachel Collett * Red Pepper *This is an eye-opening deep dive into an underexamined aspect of feminist history. -- Publishers WeeklyAs an expert in her field, [Ghodsee] deftly covers vast amounts of history, political theory, and complicated personal relationships....A timely and fascinating volume for those interested in Russian and socialist history. -- Halie Kerns * Library Journal *Ghodsee weaves these women's ideologies and feminist views into the larger picture of a time, that of multiple world wars, open revolution, burgeoning socialist societies, and the knowledge that extreme change was needed in dire circumstances. -- Kathleen Townsend * Booklist *A compelling book, a call for a broader understanding of the history of women's political practice, the ideas that informed it, and its implications for our own time. -- Ben Clarke * Chicago Review of Books *Any utopia first needs to be imagined. For that endeavor, Ghodsee's gripping book, with its important ideas distilled (yet not made banal) for those who might be encountering them for the first time, is available. -- Oana Uiorean * LIBER *

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Book SynopsisIn the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of Black Lives Matter the call for the abolition of the police became a central demand for the movement. In this extraordinary, revelatory memoir, Derecka Purnell recounts her own path towards abolitionism. Her story starts in St. Louis, where she was often unhoused and experienced food insecurity, and where calling 911 was often the only option in a crisis. She describes her political awakening and activism through watching the aftermaths of events including Hurricane Katrina, the murder of Trayvon Martin and the uprising in her hometown of Ferguson following the death of Michael Brown. Through Harvard Law School she comes to see that that solution can be found not just in the debate on better policing but the end of the policing itself. Through her own story she makes a powerful, passionate argument for rethinking a fair, equal society where there is no place for state violence and racial repression. Purnell confronts the history of police as a means to capture runaway slaves and uphold white supremacy, to the over-policing and murder of Black people in today's cities. She argues that the police are doing exactly what they were created to do and, in response, imagines new systems that work to address the root causes of violence instead. A revolutionary book about the hope for freedom, Becoming Abolitionists will inspire readers to imagine and create new communities that can guarantee safety, equality, and real justice for all.Trade ReviewAt once specific and sweeping, practical and visionary, Becoming Abolitionists is a triumph of political imagination and a tremendous gift to all movements struggling towards liberation. Do not miss its brilliance! -- Naomi Klein, author of This Changes EverythingWith deep insight and moral clarity, Purnell shares her compelling journey of political education and personal transformation, inviting us not only to imagine a world without police, but to muster the courage to fight for the more just world we know is possible. Becoming Abolitionists is essential reading for our times. -- Michelle Alexander, bestselling author of The New Jim CrowOne of the most perceptive and passionate thinkers of any generation, Derecka Purnell, has written a genuinely revolutionary text for our times-one that resists easy answers or solutions and never shies from the hard questions. She proves that abolition is not an event or a utopian dream state, but rather a journey of assembly struggling to create new worlds of freedom as we fight the unfree world we inhabit. Beautifully written, passionate, honest, Becoming Abolitionists charts a journey we all must take if we plan to survive, let alone live together. -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom DreamsA vital resource for anyone committed to the struggle for social justice, written by one of the sharpest and most inspiring voices to emerge in a generation. Taking readers on a journey from her childhood in St. Louis to the protests in Ferguson, the halls of Harvard, the streets of Soweto and beyond, Derecka Purnell's heart-rendering analysis gives us the tools to envision a new society with endless possibilities. Even more, Purnell's extraordinary blend of personal memoir, history, and critical theory provides a roadmap to build a safer and more just world. Like the Autobiography of Angela Davis, Becoming Abolitionists is sure to remain an essential text for decades to come. -- Elizabeth Hinton, author of America on Fire and From the War on Poverty to the War on CrimePurnell is undoubtedly one of the most important writers and activists of our generation, offering us a vivid, moving and compelling book for anyone interested in one of the most urgent issues of our times. Purnell weaves experiences of racism and resistance to articulate a blistering critique of racial capitalism, state power and imperialism, taking readers on a journey towards the radical alternatives to police and prisons which have shaped Black political movements in the 21st century -- Adam Elliott-Cooper, author of Black Resistance to British PolicingDerecka Purnell has one of the most exciting minds of a generation, and Becoming Abolitionists gives us all an excuse to praise her. This book is an explosion of deep intellect matched with great love, showing a journey toward radical politics that embraces the messiness. Derecka does not expect we all wake up and become abolitionists immediately--it didn't happen that way for her--but by showing both her intellectual and emotional path toward abolitionist thinking, she provides a roadmap that is also compassionate to those moving in a slower lane. But with an argument rooted in history, criticism guided by deep care, and writing that pulses with urgency, Becoming Abolitionists will convince you that is exactly what we all need to do before you even put the book down. -- Mychal Denzel Smith, author of Invisible Man Got The Whole World WatchingBecoming Abolitionists brilliantly lays out the connections between policing and other forms of oppression and shows why even well-meaning "reforms" won't get us where we need to go. This profound, urgent, beautiful, and necessary book is an invitation to imagine and organize for a less violent and more liberatory world. Everyone should read it. -- Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist but We’ll Miss It When It’s GoneA beautiful invitation to understand what is possible if we commit to unlearning our dependence on police and address the underlying injustices that cause harm in our communities. This is the book we have been waiting for and knew we needed to advance abolitionist efforts. Purnell is the abolitionist writer of her generation -- Bettina Love, author of Abolitionist TeachingPart memoir & part manifesto for our times. Beautifully written, the book takes the reader on a personal journey from the Midwest to South Africa with a pit stop in New England. As a member of the 'Trayvon Generation,' Derecka offers us invaluable insights into how young activists are navigating and challenging current injustices. If you've been curious about the modern abolitionist movement, this book is a must read! -- Mariame Kaba, bestselling author of We Do This Til We Free UsArgues convincingly that police departments and prisons are irredeemably implicated in racist ideologies and the perpetuation of violence despite long-standing efforts at reform . . .An informed, provocative, astute consideration of salvific alternatives to contemporary policing and imprisonment * Kirkus Starred Review *[Purnell] draws convincing parallels between the past and the present to demonstrate that today's policing systems are vestiges of this oppressive framework ... even if you disagree with her, you are compelled to listen. -- Nesrine Malik * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisThe fissures that have split the United Kingdom in the last decades have run through Northern Ireland. Since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the fragile peace has been threatened by Brexit, the rise and fall of the D U P and the failure of power-sharing arrangement between the main parties at the Stormont Assembly. As the very future of Northern Ireland is now in jeopardy, will Britain face up to its imperial legacy and address the deep inequalities that remain in the aftermath of the Troubles, and the uneven development of the 'New Ireland'?Geoffrey Bell offers an insightful history of Ulster Unionism from the 1960s to the present day. In recent years this has come to a crisis point. What is the future of the Union in the post-Brexit reality? How will the relationship between Northern Ireland and Westminster develop? Can the United Kingdom survive?Trade ReviewComprehensively accounts for the evolution, rise and current decline of 'Ulster' unionism and its settler-colonial interaction with British politics. -- Niall Meehan, author of The Embers of RevisionismProvides an incisive and up to date analysis of the history and ideology of unionism that is indispensable to any debate about the future of Ireland and its relationship with Britain. Geoff is the leading thinker of our time on the role and future of unionism in all its forms -- John McDonnell, MPAfter a brief moment in the Westminster spotlight, Northern Irish unionism finds itself once more pushed back to the margins, but anyone who wants to understand the likely fate of the United Kingdom needs to study this frequently misunderstood political force in its own right. Geoff Bell's detailed account of modern unionist politics shows that the short-term alliance with British Conservativism after 2016 could not bridge a widening chasm between the political cultures of London and Belfast. Bell also demonstrates that for all its professions of neutrality, the British political class remains a partisan actor in Irish affairs. -- Daniel Finn, author of Another Man's TerroristA timely, and hugely informative perspective on the events in the north of Ireland surrounding Brexit, Stormont, and political unionism....should be required reading for anybody seeking to understand the movement of unionist tectonic plates in recent years. -- Chris Hazzard, Sinn Féin MP for South DownPowerful...I agree with much of what Bell says...A committed supporter of reunification...[Bell] has written extensively, and with disdain, about the history of unionism. -- Max Hastings * Sunday Times *[Bell] offers a portrait of a community in political and demographic decline - but which will be vital to the success of any future reunification ... a solid if sombre case that there is no end in sight to "division, prejudice and inequality" in a future united state. -- Jude Webber * Financial Times *A clear and concise explanation of how Northern Ireland got to where it is today and how support for Unionism continues to fragment. That is no easy task. Geoff Bell succeeds. -- Chris Bambery * Counterfire *An excellent survey of Unionism in Northern Ireland -- Dave Lister * Chartist *Table of ContentsChapter 1. "Crackpots"Chapter 2. Precious UnionChapter 3. The Appearance of Northern IrelandChapter 4. BetrayalsChapter 5. Tories Out, DUP In!Chapter 6. What About the Workers?Chapter 7. The Not So Good FridayChapter 8. The Twilight of British Unionism?Chapter 9. The Twilight of Ulster Unionism

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Book SynopsisIn this definitive account of the Peninsular War (1808-14), Napoleon's six-year war against Spain, Ronald Fraser examines what led to the emperor's devastating defeat against the popular opposition - the guerrillas - and their British and Portuguese allies. As well as relating the histories of the great political and military figures of the war, Fraser brings to life the anonymous masses - the artisans, peasants and women who fought, suffered and died - and restores their role in this barbaric war to its rightful place while overturning the view that this was a straightforward military campaign. This vivid, meticulously researched book offers a distinct and profound vision of "Napoleon's Vietnam" and shows the reality of the disasters of war: the suffering, discontents and social upheaval that accompanied the fighting.With a new Introduction by Perry Anderson.Trade ReviewFraser has re-created a world, barely glimpsed by previous historians, of the Spanish popular resistance and suffering during the anti-Napoleonic war ... An excellent work. -- Carlos Martinez Shaw * El Pais *A milestone in the historiography of the war. -- Alistair Hennessy * New Left Review *Fraser has breathed life into a historic era... The real protagonist of his work is the people and their tragedy. -- Luis Ribot * El Mundo *A superb complement to Fraser's classic Blood of Spain, of 'history from below'. -- Ricardo Garcia Carcel * ABC *Like Goya in The Disasters of War, Fraser has engraved in the written word the spirit and sacrifices of the popular anti-Napoleonic resistance, a precursor of the anti-fascist resistance of the [Spanish] Civil War. -- Andreu Mayayo * El Periodico de Catalunya *A magisterial reconstruction of the Peninsular war of 1808-1814 -- Tariq Ali * Guardian *This scholarly work investigates those who waged Spain's popular struggle between 1808 and 1814, and why. It's history from the ground up: momentous events lived by those whose voice is rarely heard...Fraser builds a mosaic from "shard-like" fragments, a labour of detection that would have swamped anyone with a less sure grip on the sweep of Spanish history. -- Elizabeth Nash * Independent *Superb . a fine history of the popular resistance Napoleon could not defeat. -- Chris Bambery * Counterfire *

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Book SynopsisIn this sparkling, innovative, fully-illustrated work, world-renowned choreographer Annie-B Parson translates the components of dance-time, proximity, space, motion and tone- into text. As we follow Parson through her days-at home, reading, and on her walks down the street-and in and out of conversations on everything from Homer's Odyssey to feminist art to social protest, she helps us see how everyday movement creates the wider world. Dance, it turns out, is everything and everywhere.With the insight and verve of a soloist, Parson shows us how art-making is a part of our everyday lives and our political life as we move, together and apart, through space.Trade ReviewA gorgeous meditation on dance, visual art, and literature, as well as living, loving, and mourning. Parsons brings to the page the starling quality of her introspective, astounding, and lyrical stage work, urging us to look more closely at those small and large moments that steer us through the dance of life. -- Edwidge Danticat, author of Create Dangerously"Bodies in space". I have heard Annie-B use this phrase dozens of times. It occurs to me this phrase refers to choreography and dance, but is also a transposable life philosophy...Of all the ways to move a body in space, through space, Annie-B creates the stage to have the most beautiful and beguiling ones be seen. -- St. VincentI'm a long time fan of Annie-B's work. I see in it the quotidian made extraordinary...the familiar made foreign. -- David ByrneParson's path is one that continues to push the boundaries of dance -- Dan Meyer * Playbill *The choreographer who democratized dance. * Financial Times *In this quiet, minute and understatedly virtuosic text, Annie-B Parson walks us through the intricate dances of pedestrianism and domesticity. Gently but firmly pressing back against linear heroic narratives that have tended to efface the practices of women artists, she braids together strands of beauty, resistance and reverie, slyly pulling her readers into an exquisite, inclusive choreography of living. -- Barbara Browning, author of The GiftTraipsing from The Odyssey to Trisha Brown, Hilma af Klint to Anne Carson, Parson braids together ideas through words and illustrations as she touches on the connections between protest, ritual and spectacle, how the pandemic asked pedestrians to rechoreograph their relationship to other bodies in space, Zoom and Tik Tok as creative forms, and more. -- Courtnney Escoyne * Dance Magazine *Parson reframes banal encounters into beautiful, crystalline observations. -- Ava Wong Davies * Elephant *The Choreography of Everyday Life is many things: a pandemic diary, a discourse of Greek tragedy, and a tribute to Parson's many inspirations, from Trisha Brown to Hilma af Klint. Mostly though, it's a leisurely walk through a brilliant mind. This book weaves together personal and theoretical reflections with evocative images from famous works of art and Parson's own casual snapshots. The result will be oddly familiar to any follower of her company Big Dance Theater. It's a delightful clash of high art and low culture, sparklingly intelligent yet warmly conversational. -- Andy Boyd * The New Books Network *A thoughtful addition to a dance library collection. * Library Journal *Annie-B has choreographed for Davids (Bowie and Byrne), St. Vincent, Spike Lee, and Lorde, among others - giving movement to artists for whom movement is as essential to their work and melodies. Now, she's exploring how dance functions in everyday life, both in her own and on a societal level. In this illustrated work, Parson distills movement into text, exploring movement in feminist art to protests * Nylon *This small but perfectly formed book gathers in the sacred and the profane, the virtual and visceral, poetical and political * Morning Star *Award-winning choreographer Annie-B Parson uses this slim but potent volume to show readers how the movements of day-to-day life function as choreography in the same way dancers on a stage execute choreography as a group. Reading this book made me look at the mundane activities of my everyday life with fresh eyes. If dance is everything and everywhere, as Parson asserts, then all our small movements add to something much bigger than any one individual. It's an interesting idea for our current moment, where connection seems more necessary than ever but increasingly rare. -- David Vogel * Buzzfeed *Parson's insights are a welcome reminder of the political value of dance, which has long served as a powerful aid to protest, its expressive beauty lending eloquence to public demonstrations of outrage or sorrow. -- Charlie Tyson * The Atlantic *Parson's prose made me nostalgic...voraciously pinballing between art forms, always in search of the perfect verb. * The Washington Post *To Annie-B Parson, choreography isn't confined to the studio and the stage; rather, practically everything around us abounds with movement that's worth paying attention to. In her new, aptly titled book, The Choreography of Everyday Life, an inventive, observant, and witty ode to her relationship with dance and movement over the course of her lifetime, she delves into exactly that belief. -- Andrew Zuckerman * Time Sensitive *This small and precious book can tell us the oldest and most profound story of how the body experiences space, inhabits it and is inhabited by it...the title to read this season. -- Sara Marzullo * Harper's Bazaar *'If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so,' Alan Watts wrote as he contemplated our search for meaning. 'The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.' The metaphor comes alive with uncommon vitality in The Choreography of Everyday Life by choreographer Annie-B Parson, who has shaped living artworks by cultural icons ranging from David Bowie and David Byrne to Mikhail Baryshnikov and the Martha Graham Dance Company. -- Maria Popova * The Marginalian *A small glimpse into the creative mind of an acclaimed contemporary artist of our time. * Dance Teacher *The book itself is a careful choreography. The spacing, brackets, punctuation, and images denote pauses, pairings, emphases, and visual cues. Verbs grow muscles, and metaphors become great choreographic tools. And though Parson appears to be an avid fan of Trisha Brown's rejection of fanfare, there remains a healthy dose of drama throughout. -- Wendy Perron * Notable Dance Books of 2022 *The Choreography of the Everyday is an extraordinary project. There's a scrap-book quality, visually and thematically. The pages are sprinkled with her photographs, her drawings, her post-its, or diagrams, or images of an ancient stele with dancing figures on it. -- Maggie LangeThere is an aliveness to the book, threads pulling together and apart, weaving back to front, front to back, moving from thousands of years ago to the present. It connects me to the book, the author, and into a larger world - where we see choreography all around us. * thINKingDANCE *Table of ContentsNo chapters -- one continual text

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Book SynopsisThe world does not need a world government to govern itself. Roberto Mangabeira Unger argues that there is an alternative: to build cooperation among countries to advance their shared interests. We urgently need to avert war between the United States and China, catastrophic climate change, and other global public harms. We must do so, however, in a world in which sovereign states remain in command.The opportunity for self-interested cooperation among nations is immense. Unger shows how different types of coalitions among states can seize on this opportunity and avoid the greatest dangers that we face. Unger offers a way of thinking about international relations as well as a transformative program: a realism with hope and a way to develop the international diversity that we want without the international anarchy that we fear. His ideas challenge the disillusionment and fatalism that threaten to overwhelm us.Trade Review“A very little book with a very big message.”—Oliver Letwin, Tablet

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Book SynopsisIn Our Bloc, Momentum co-founder James Schneider lays out an action plan for the British left. To move from defeatism to renewed confidence, he proposes a Left Bloc: an explicit alliance of socialists in Parliament, the Labour grassroots, the trade unions and social movements.In the wake of Corbyn's defeat, Schneider makes a bold argument: the central question is not whether to stay in or leave the Labour Party. Instead, we should focus on federating our forces - to strengthen our movements and voices today, and lay the ground to construct the party we need to enter the state tomorrow.Now is not the moment to scale back our ambitions. Climate shocks, rising debt, inequality and energy costs are hard barriers to neoliberalism's viability. If we can build power and prepare to seize the moment, we have a world to win.Trade ReviewOur Bloc offers a powerful case for action. When movements come together, we change the world -- Jeremy CorbynInspirational. Our Bloc lifts the strategic debate. We need it. -- Hilary Wainwright, co-editor of Red PepperA razor-sharp intervention by one of the smartest strategists on the left. -- Richard Seymour, author of CorbynMany gains and opportunities seem more at hand than before I picked up Our Bloc. Smart, bracing reading for anyone looking for tips on where we go from here. -- Morgan Jones * Labour List *Urgent and engaging -- John McTernan * Guardian *Compellingly matter-of-fact and constructive, exuding a bright enthusiasm for shrewd organising. -- Lola Seaton * New Statesman *Refreshingly optimistic ... [Schneider] rightly ... identifies ­widespread sympathy for progressive policies much to the left of anything in ­mainstream politics, and constant simmering anger at the establishment. -- Nick Clark * Socialist Worker *Brisk, optimistic and ambitious ... a valuable corrective to pessimism induced by the crushing defeat of 2019 - and it fizzes with ideas. A great read. -- Ben Chacko * Morning Star *Our Bloc provides serious suggestions for how we can move forward -- Dominic Sorrell * Counterfire *

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Book SynopsisThe NATO occupation of Afghanistan is over, and a balance-sheet can be drawn. These essays on war and peace in the region reveal Tariq Ali at his sharpest and most prescient.Rarely has there been such an enthusiastic display of international unity as that which greeted the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Compared to Iraq, Afghanistan became the 'good war.' But a stalemate ensued, and the Taliban waited out the NATO contingents. Today, with the collapse of the puppet regime in Kabul, what does the future hold for a traumatised Afghan people? Will China become the dominant influence in the country? Tariq Ali has been following the wars on Afghanistan for forty years. He opposed Soviet military intervention in 1979, predicting disaster. He was also a fierce critic of its NATO sequel, 'Operation Enduring Freedom'. In a series of trenchant commentaries, he described the tragedies inflicted on Afghanistan, as well as the semi-Talibanisation and militarisation of neighbouring Pakistan. Most of his predictions proved accurate. The Forty Year War in Afghanistan brings together the best of his writings and includes a new introduction.Trade ReviewPraise for The Duel: 'Ali's discussion of Afghanistan is highly valuable because of the questions it raises . a starting point for a much-needed debate.' -- Ray Bonner * New York Times *Praise for The Extreme Centre: "The typical Financial Times reader might find his bias so irksome they cannot continue. This would be a pity." * Financial Times *Evergreen ... Ali has argued against each occupation from its beginning; the result is an embittered, haunting refrain. -- Eileen Gonzalez * Foreword Reviews *A key contribution to make sense of the decades-long events that culminated in the chaotic scenes at Kabul's airport in August 2021. -- Marc Martorell Junyent * Inside Arabia *Erudite and committed ... This collection is indispensable for forming an understanding of what has happened and why. -- Andrew Murray * Morning Star *No one, Left or Right, has followed the misadventure of US policy in Afghanistan with such dogged attention and keen insight. -- Paul Buhle * Counterpunch *Unlike pro-interventionist liberal and even conservative interpretations of Afghanistan's recent history, Ali's anti-imperialist understanding provides the glue that binds the bloody tale together. -- Ron Jacobs * Counterpunch *Brilliant and incisive ... a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the causes and consequences of the decades-long turmoil in Afghanistan. -- N.P. Ullekh * Open the Magazine *Witty, insightful, and full of detail ... a book replete with encounters and anecdotes, evocative descriptions, and a brutal honesty about the corrupting power of war. -- Terina Hine * Counterfire *

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Book SynopsisThe Communist International was the first organised attempt to bring about worldwide revolution and left a lasting mark on 20th-century history. The book offers a new and fascinating account of this transnational organisation founded in 1919 by Lenin and Trotsky and dissolved by Stalin in 1943, telling the story through the eyes of the activists who became its "professional revolutionaries". Studer follows such figures as Willi Münzenberg, Mikhail Borodin, M.N. Roy and Evelyn Trent, Tina Modotti, Agnes Smedley and many others less well-known as they are despatched to the successive political hotspots of the 1920s and '30s, from revolutionary Berlin to Baku, from Shanghai to Spain, from Nazi Germany to Stalin's Moscow. It traces their journeys from revolutionary hope to accommodation, defeat or death, looking at questions of motivation and commitment, agency and negotiation, of life and love, conflict and frustration. In doing so, it reveals a forgotten Comintern, the expression of a multi-dimensional revolutionary moment, which attracted not only working-class but feminist, anti-racist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist activists, highlighting the role of women in the Comintern and the centrality of anti-colonialism to the Communist project. The book concludes with a reflection on the ultimate demise of a historically unique undertaking.Trade ReviewOver the past quarter of a century, Brigitte Studer has established herself as the world's most original and creative historian of the Comintern. She has pioneered a style of history that transcends the Cold War story of leaders, institutions, ideological clashes, and organizational acronyms in order to explore the lives of those individuals who dedicated themselves to making communist revolution. In Travellers of the World Revolution she explores with verve and insight the lives of two dozen Comintern activists, men and women who were sent by Moscow across the world to set up communist parties, found newspapers, organize and finance political uprisings and military action, or engage in espionage on behalf of the Soviet motherland. Living out of suitcases, they were at constant risk of arrest, interrogation, torture, and even death; yet Studer also shows that much of their lives comprised a dull routine of keeping Moscow informed of what they were doing. As a study of revolutionary commitment it is a first-class piece of work. -- Steve A. Smith, All Souls College, OxfordTravellers of the World Revolution is a fascinating history of the Comintern from the perspective of the women and men who in the 1920s and 1930s staffed its offices from Moscow to Berlin, Shanghai, and Madrid. Tracking these polyglot border crossers, who worked as translators, bookkeepers, propagandists, instructors, couriers, and sometimes spies, Brigitte Studer uncovers their efforts to revolutionize the world and themselves. Her account of the everyday lives of the Comintern's daring world travellers reveals the appeal -- and the limits -- of dreams of economic, racial, and gender equality. -- Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, West Chester UniversityUsually, historians of the Communist International have focused on parties, congresses, and strategies. Brigitte Studer changes the perspective: she reconstitutes the epic, exciting, and tragic itinerary of a few generations of human beings who made revolution a form of life. She merges the carefulness of historical scholarship with the sensitivity of feminism and a postcolonial gaze, thus offering a completely new portrait of the Communist International. Her magisterial work is irreplaceable both for our historical knowledge and for the memory of the left in the twenty-first century. -- Enzo TraversoExpansive and impeccably researched, this is a valuable addition to scholarship on early 20th-century communism. * Publishers Weekly *A landmark publication...Studer's book is a fascinating and informative read for anyone wishing to understand this momentous period and the part played by the Comintern. -- John Green * Morning Star *Studer focuses on the thousands of professional revolutionaries who kept the International running. These polyglot activists earned very little money, traveling from country to country, often illegally, doing myriad jobs, and sometimes ending up in prison. They converged at different hotspots of world revolution: Moscow 1920, Berlin 1923, Shanghai 1925-27, Madrid 1936. Theirs is the story of the Comintern as a workplace. -- Nathaniel Flakin * Left Voice *

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Book SynopsisIn the fall of 2011, a small protest camp in downtown Manhattan exploded into a global uprising, sparked in part by the violent overreactions of the police. An unofficial record of this movement, Occupy! combines adrenalin-fueled first-hand accounts of the early days and weeks of Occupy Wall Street with contentious debates and thoughtful reflections, featuring the editors and writers of the celebrated n+1, as well as some of the world's leading radical thinkers, such as Slavoj Zizek, Angela Davis, and Rebecca Solnit.The book conveys the intense excitement of those present at the birth of a counterculture, while providing the movement with a serious platform for debating goals, demands, and tactics. Articles address the history of the "horizontalist" structure at OWS; how to keep a live-in going when there is a giant mountain of laundry building up; how very rich the very rich have become; the messages and meaning of the "We are the 99%" tumblr website; occupations in Oakland, Boston, Atlanta, and elsewhere; what happens next; and much more.Trade ReviewOccupy! abounds with insights on how the occupiers have dealt with internal challenges to their experiment in direct democracy. -- Andrew Ross * Guardian *Both analytical and full of vivid experience ... These blog-style pieces are interspersed with more substantive writings, which are the true strength of the collection ... but most interesting are those by lesser-known writers who bring us vivid historical analyses of various aspects of the occupations. -- Michael Sayeau * Observer *Unlike most quickie publications, the book is gorgeous, a testament to beautiful book design ... the essays are thoughtful pieces of first-person reportage. [A] clear-eyed and sober examination of the dream world that we created this fall, along with a few brief, tentative explorations of what it will become in the future. It's also an excellent proof-of-concept for speedily published book-length journalism that does work blogs and newspapers simply can't do. This is not some dashed-off smear of a money-making scheme; I recommend it heartily. -- Paul Constant * The Stranger *A heart warming anthology of the voices involved in this surprising grass roots movement. -- Robert Birnbaum * Our Man in Boston *Occupy!, an anthology from the occasional Occupy Gazette published by n+1, includes ... a lovely piece on the difficulties of organising an occupation's laundry, which works as a handy metaphor for some of the movement's larger challenges. * The Economist *

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Book SynopsisToday, media commentators, intellectuals and politicians declare that western science and rationality are threatened by irrational enemies. Evangelicals, postmodernists, and Islamists are on the march, they say. The Rome that science built is under siege. But there's a problem with these stirring attempts to defend the truth. They aren't true.In this urgent new book, Dan Hind confronts the great machinery of deception in which we live, and which now threatens to destroy our civilization. In particular, he takes to task a group of prominent intellectuals who have exaggerated the threat posed by the so-called forces of unreason-religion, postmodernism and other "mumbo-jumbo." The commentators, says Hind, distract us from much more pressing threats to an open democratic society based on freedom of speech and inquiry.This book shows that the real threats to reason aren't wacky or foreign or stupid; they reside in our state and corporate bureaucracies - and, one way or another, they probably pay your salary. In recovering the idea of Enlightenment, Hind explores its vital importance and reveals how it can help us to achieve a truly democratic politics, in which we have a genuine say in the decisions that are taken on our behalf.Trade ReviewA profound and much-needed contribution ... In the spirit of Enlightenment thinkers, he both reveals the contradictions and hypocrises of contemporary politics, and also points a way forward. -- Joel BakanSince September 11 2001, the idea of Enlightenment has been ripped from university textbooks and airlifted into battle between the West and its irrational enemies. In this elegant polemical essay, Dan Hind rightly quibbles with this supposedly Manichean tussle between the guarantors of Enlightenment in the West and everyone else. Hind wants to rescue the idea of Enlightenment from its usurpers, while pressing it into the service of something better. -- James HarkinFine, lucid and sharp ... well written and worth reading before the next wave of western tanks crosses a border, somewhere in the Middle East. -- Roy LiddleIn this thoughtful polemic Dan Hind argues that we are being misled by a debased 'Folk Enlightenment' which has little in common with the Enlightenment initiated by Bacon and championed by Voltaire, Hume and Kant. * Financial Times *

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Book SynopsisWhat does political agency mean for those who don't know what to do or can't be bothered to do it? This book develops a novel account of collective emancipation in which freedom is achieved not through knowledge and action but via doubt and inertia. In essays that range from ancient Greece to the end of the Anthropocene, Bull addresses questions central to contemporary political theory in novel readings of texts by Aristotle, Machiavelli, Marx, and Arendt, and shows how classic philosophical problems have a bearing on issues like political protest and climate change. The result is an entirely original account of political agency for the twenty-first century in which uncertainty and idleness are limned with utopian promise.Trade ReviewIn On Mercy, Malcolm Bull conducts a clever thought experiment on the question of whether mercy might not only be reconciled with justice but could displace it at the centre of our political life -- David A. Skeel * Wall Street Journal *Charmingly erudite and an important work of political philosophy -- Joe Humphreys * Irish Times (for On Mercy) *Highly compelling. Bull is to be congratulated on presenting such a thought-provoking study -- Alexander Marr * Apollo (for Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth) *Stimulating and delightful, subtle and deep -- Taylor Carman * Times Literary Supplement (on Anti-Nietzsche) *All of Bull's studies are utopian, in an oblique, offbeat way. In the spirit of Marx, you must see the future as in a glass darkly so as not to make a fetish of it. He combines a keenly analytical mind with a visionary impulse. It is a style for our times. -- Terry Eagleton * London Review of Books *

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Book SynopsisForty years after the defeat of Nazism, and twenty years after the great wave of decolonization, how is it that racism remains a growing phenomenon? What are the special characteristics of contemporary racism? How can it be related to class divisions and to the contradictions of the nation-state? And how far, in turn, does racism today compel us to rethink the relationship between class struggles and nationalism?This book attempts to answer these fundamental questions through a remarkable dialogue between the French philosopher Etienne Balibar and the American historian and sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein. Each brings to the debate the fruits of over two decades of analytical work, greatly inspired, respectively, by Louis Althusser and Fernand Braudel. Both authors challenge the commonly held notion of racism as a continuation of, or throwback to, the xenophobias of past societies and communities. They analyze it instead as a social relation indissolubly tied to present social structures-the nation-state, the division of labor, and the division between core and periphery-which are themselves constantly being reconstructed. Despite their productive disagreements, Balibar and Wallerstein both emphasize the modernity of racism and the need to understand its relation to contemporary capitalism and class struggle. Above all, their dialogue reveals the forms of present and future social conflict, in a world where the crisis of the nation-state is accompanied by an alarming rise of nationalism and chauvinism.

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Book SynopsisHu Feng, the 'counterrevolutionary' leader of a banned literary school, spent twenty-five years in the Chinese Communist Party's prison system. But back in the Party's early days, he was one of its best known literary theoreticians and critics-at least until factional infighting, and his short fuse, made him persona non grata among the establishment.His wife, Mei Zhi, shared his incarceration for many years. F is her account of that time, beginning ten years after her and Hu Feng's initial arrest. She herself was eventually released, after which she navigated the party's Byzantine prison bureaucracy searching for his whereabouts. Having finally found him, she voluntarily returned to gaol to care for him in his rage and suffering, watching his descent into madness as the excesses of the Cultural Revolution took their toll.Both an intimate portrait of Mei Zhi's life with Hu Feng and a stark account of the prison system and life under Mao, F is at once beautiful and harrowing.With support from English PENThis book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN's Writers in Translation programme supported by Bloomberg. English PEN exists to promote literature and its understanding, uphold writers' freedoms around the world, campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and promote the friendly co-operation of writers and free exchange of ideas. For more information visit www.englishpen.org.Trade ReviewWhat kind of people are those we don't execute? We don't execute people like Hu Feng ... not because their crimes don't deserve capital punishment but because such executions would yield no advantage ... Counterrevolutionaries are trash, they are vermin, but once in your hands, you can make them perform some kind of service for the people. -- Mao ZedongA brilliant literary writer and critic ... [F: Hu Feng's Prison Years] is a vivid portrayal of the suffocating intellectual life of Mao's years. -- Ngeow Chow Bing * China Report *

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