Verso Books

Book SynopsisBurn It Down! is a testament to what is possible when women are driven to the edge. Collecting over seventy-five manifestos from around the world, Burn It Down! is a rallying cry and a call to action. Among this quarrel- some sisterhood, you’ll find ACT UP’s Queer Nation Manifesto, Emma Goldman’s 1896 Anarchy and the Sex Question, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and The Combahee River Collective Statement

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Book SynopsisBut where do these ideas come from and how have they impacted on the world? In his brilliant history of a dangerous idea, Stuart Jeffries tells a narrative that starts in the early 1970s and continue to today. He tells this history through a riotous gallery that includes, amongst others: David Bowie * the Ipod * Frederic Jameson * the demolition of Pruit-Igoe * Madonna * Post-Fordism * Jeff Koon's 'Rabbit' * Deleuze and Guattari * the Nixon Shock * The Bowery series * Judith Butler * Las Vegas * Margaret Thatcher * Grand Master Flash * I Love Dick * the RAND Corporation * the Sex Pistols * Princess Diana * the Musee D'Orsay * Grand Theft Auto* Perry Anderson * Netflix * 9/11We are today scarcely capable of conceiving politics as a communal activity because we have become habituated to being consumers rather than citizens. Politicians treat us as consumers to whom they must deliver. Can we do anything else than suffer from buyer's remorse?Trade ReviewMarvellously entertaining, exciting and informative. -- John Banville * Guardian Books of the Year [For Grand Hotel Abyss] *This seemingly daunting book turned out to be an exhilarating page-turner.Grand Hotel Abyss is an outstanding critical introduction to some of the most fertile, and still relevant, thinkers of the 20th century. -- Michael Dirda * Washington Post [For Grand Hotel Abyss] *Attempts something rather daring . An easily accessible, funny history of one of the more formidable intellectual movements of the 20th century . an easy, witty, pacy read -- Owen Hatherley * [for Grand Hotel Abyss] *Throughout the book, Jeffries demonstrates that he is comfortable and conversant with the often thorny philosophical ideas of his subjects. A rich, intellectually meaty history. * Kirkus [for Grand Hotel Abyss] *Stuart Jeffries has produced a compelling and politically pressing group portrait of the philosophers associated with the Frankfurt School. Their thinking has never seemed less forbidding and more inspiring -- Matthew Beaumont * [for Grand Hotel Abyss] *An engaging and accessible history of the lives and main ideas of the leading thinkers of the Frankfurt School * New York Review of Books [for Grand Hotel Abyss] *

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Book SynopsisWritten between 1944 and 1947, Minima Moralia is a collection of rich, lucid aphorisms and essays about life in modern capitalist society. Adorno casts his penetrating eye across society in mid-century America and finds a life deformed by capitalism. This is Adorno's theoretical and literary masterpiece and a classic of twentieth-century thought.Trade ReviewA volume of Adorno is equivalent to a whole shelf of books on literature. -- Susan SontagThe best thoughts of a noble and invigorating mind. * Observer *Theodor Adorno's masterpiece of aphorisms and short prose meditations * Time Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisClassical liberalism regarded universal suffrage as a mortal threat to property. So what explains the advent of liberal democracy, and how stable today is the marriage between representative government and the continued rule of capital?Across every continent, people think inequality is a 'very big problem'. Even the Davos Economic Forum and the OECD say they are worried. And yet capitalist states don't respond. How has democracy been transformed from a popular demand for social justice into a professional power game?To dispel our worsening political malaise, Göran Therborn argues, requires a 'disruptive democracy' of radical social movements, such as the climate strike. Inequality and the Labyrinths of Democracy opens with a major new essay mapping the social fractures of the present era. There is also a compact historical survey of worldwide patterns of democratization and a landmark analysis of the OECD economies, 'The Rule of Capital and the Rise of Democracy', originally published in New Left Review and collected here in book form for the first time.Trade ReviewAt a time when historians and economists tend to retire behind the barricades of their increasingly specialized professions, answering the big comparative questions about the pathways into and out of modernity, the global processes of inequality and the forces of possible change have been largely left to the sociologists. In my view, Göran Therborn, has made more essential contributions in these fields than anyone else, by a combination of analytical lucidity, common sense and an extraordinary command of international comparative data. -- Eric Hobsbawm, author of The Age of ExtremesA tour de force. Therborn explores the complex relationship between capitalism and democracy with great originality and insight -- Colin Crouch, author of Post-Democracy After the CrisesHow much inequality can democracy withstand before it collapses? Göran Therborn addresses this fundamental question and gives us cause to hope for a more egalitarian future -- Donatella della Porta, author of Where Did the Revolution Go?One of the world's leading analysts. Therborn has given us valuable intellectual tools with which to work. -- Chris Maisano * Jacobin *

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Book SynopsisRaymond Williams was a pioneering scholar of cultural and society, and one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century. In this, a collection of difficult to find essays, some of which are published for the first time, Williams emerges as not only one of the great writers of materialist criticism, but also a thoroughly engaged political writer.Published to coincide with the centenary of his birth and showing the full range of his work, from his early writings on the novel and society, to later work on ecosocialism and the politics of modernism, Politics and Culture shows Williams at both his most accessible and his most penetrating.An essential book for all those interested in the politics of culture in the twentieth century, and the development of Williams's work.Trade Review“The left's foremost cultural historian and critic... an acute and perceptive political commentator.”– Comment“Williams is the Western thinker who, along with Antonio Gramsci, has done most to enlarge our understanding of the political complexities of culture.”– Village Voice

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Book SynopsisThe Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin's most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Benjamin also comments on the engravings of Durer and the theatre of Calderon and Shakespeare. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history. Georg Lukacs, an opponent of Benjamin's aesthetics, singled out The Origin of German Tragic Drama as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.Trade ReviewHe drew, from the obscure disdained German baroque, elements of the modern sensibility: the taste for allegory, surrealist shock effects, discontinuous utterance, a sense of historical catastrophe. -- Susan SontagIf the killing of Lorca was Fascism's first great crime against literature, Benjamin's death was undoubtedly the second. * The Listener *Walter Benjamin is the most important German aesthetician and literary critic of this century. -- George Steiner

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Book SynopsisQuestions of class, power and distribution have reemerged as central concerns in the public discourse. When we talk about class, we don't always know what is meant. Is class about income or affect or the ownership of the means of production? Perhaps it is about authority or autonomy? But what happens when, as is often the case in complex advanced economies, people can occupy social and economic roles that seem to indicate membership in more than one class? And what does this mean for the supposed relationship between class and potential political capacity and affinity?In Classes, Erik Olin Wright, the greatest American Marxist sociologists, rises to the twofold challenge of both clarifying the abstract, structural account of class implicit in Marx, and of applying and refining the account in the light of contemporary developments in advanced capitalist societies. What Wright calls "contradictory class locations" can make the class landscape appear much more complex than the simple model presented in Marx. Despite this complexity, common interests and therefore political alliances can still be found. In a society, like the US, characterized by extreme inequality, Classes provides not just a useful descriptive account of the operation of class but also the tools to understand the interplay of class interests and political (re)alignment.Trade Review“The most impressive book on class I have read in some years.”—Michael Mann, Contemporary Sociology“An empirically supported reformulation of class theory that achieves exemplary standards of critique, complexity and clarity.”—Claus Offe“Erik Olin Wright’s Classes is almost certain to be the most important book on social classes this decade ... The book presents a major breakthrough in the conceptualization of class relations ... and it will be required reading for all macro-sociologists.”—American Journal of Sociology

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Book SynopsisRadical journalist Claud Cockburn fought successfully against the political and media establishment, writing for publications as varied as The Times and Private Eye. To Graham Greene, he was the greatest journalist of the twentieth century.Born in China in 1904 and educated alongside Evelyn Waugh, Cockburn launched into a stellar career as a Times correspondent, first in Berlin, then New York, interviewing Al Capone in Chicago, and finally Washington. He resigned in 1932 to start The Week, an anti-Nazi and anti-establishment newsletter with an influence out of all proportion to its circulation. British officials were horrified by the scoops he published. These included stories on the political influence of German appeasers - the Cliveden Set - in the British elite and the previously suppressed news of Edward VIII’s abdication.Cockburn wrote dispatches while fighting in the Spanish Civil War. In Spain, he helped W. H. Auden and clashed with George Orwell. ClaudR

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Book SynopsisFor several years after 1968, Herbert Marcuse was one of the most famous philosophers in the world. He became the face of Frankfurt School Critical Theory for a generation in turmoil. His fame rested on two remarkable books, Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man. These two books represent the utopian hopes and dystopian fears of the time. In the 1960s and 70s, young people seeking a theoretical basis for their revolution found it in his work. Marcuse not only supported their struggles against imperialism and race and gender discrimination, he foresaw the far-reaching implications of the destruction of the natural environment. Marcuse's Marxism was influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, Hegel and Freud. These eclectic sources grounded an original critique of advanced capitalism focused on the social construction of subjectivity and technology. Marcuse contrasted the "one-dimensionality" of conformist experience with the "new sensibility" of the New Left. The movement challenged a society that "delivered the goods" but devastated the planet with its destructive science and technology. A socialist revolution would fail if it did not transform these instruments into means of liberation, both of nature and human beings. This aspiration is alive today in the radical struggle over climate change. Marcuse offers theoretical resources for understanding that struggle.Trade ReviewA student and friend of Herbert Marcuse in the late 1960s, Andrew Fenberg gives in this new book an outstanding contribution not only to the knowledge of his philosophy, but also to the "ruthless criticism" of advanced capitalism. Feenberg shows, with great insight, how Marcuse's Marxism, rooted in Phenomenology, Hegelian dialectics, and Freudian Eros, was able to combine rationality and imagination, producing a radical version of Critical Theory which won the hearts and souls of the rebellious youth of the 1960's. And which is still very much relevant in our times, because, as Feenberg concludes, climate change validates his revolutionary call for a new society, based on life-affirmative values. -- Michael Löwy, author of On Changing the Word: Essays in Political Philosophy, from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin (Haymarket Books).For a half century, Andrew Feenberg has tirelessly explicated, interrogated and applied the lessons of his controversial mentor, Herbert Marcuse. The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing is the culmination of these efforts, building on the strengths of Marcuse's thought, while candidly confronting its weaknesses, in the hope of convincing a new generation of readers of its abiding relevance. -- Martin JayAndrew Feenberg's new book is a tour de force. With detailed yet crystal-clear analyses of Marcuse's major writings in their historical context, it reconstructs the implicit ontology of meaning that sustains Marcuse's unique version of critical theory. Arguing that Marcuse's embrace of phenomenology far outlived his break with Heidegger, Feenberg demonstrates its importance in chapters devoted to Marcuse's reading of Marx, Hegel, and Freud, engaging unflinchingly, yet constructively, with the more controversial aspects of those readings and the famous debates they provoked. Two final chapters - on techno-science and on the environmental crisis - concretize the potential contained in Marcuse's idea of "libidinous reason" for tackling the ideological and structural impasses of our own desperate times. -- Steven Crowell (Rice University)The title of Feenberg's book is to be taken literally: the ruthless critique of everything existing is today needed more than ever, and this critique has to denounce ruthlessly also the limitations of today's forms of Leftist critiques of the establishment which de facto help the establishment to reproduce itself. Is Political Correctness the right way to undermine sexism and racism? Is the elevation of nature into Mother Earth the right way to prevent the destruction of our environment? In short, what we need is to repeat today what Marcuse, in his critique of traditional Marxism, did in the 1960s, and Feenberg does this at the highest possible level. -- Slavoj Zizek

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Book SynopsisEuropean Empires from Conquest to Collapse is a vivid anticolonial reckoning with the history of imperial warfare. Global in scope, it deftly surveys the fighting forces and military engagements of the Great Powers, from the British in India to the scramble for Africa. Victor Kiernan lays bare the doctrines and realities of colonial fighting, dispelling official legends. Europe often boasted that coloni- alism was ‘civilised’, but the facts show it could be barbaric. Kiernan traces how guerrilla insurgency against colonial oppression developed into one of the most sophisticated branches of the art of war.With a foreword by Tariq Ali, author of Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes.

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Book SynopsisNearly every county and major city in the United States has a jail, the short-term detention center controlled by local sheriffs that funnels people into prisons and long-term incarceration. Jails are now the fastest-growing sector of the US carceral state. As jails grow, they transform the region around them. Whole towns and small cities see health care provision and employment opportunities become subordinate to carceral concerns.If jails are everywhere, resistance is too. Campaigns against new or expanded jails have emerged in large and mid-sized cities and in dozens of small towns and rural counties across the US. While there is some coordination and communication between those involved in these struggles, they tend to be isolated from each other and from broader movements. The Jail Is Everywhere brings together an incredible range of knowledge and experience from jail fights across the country. It maps this new terrain, foregrounding the hard-forged analyses of anti-jail organizers themselves as they take us through campaigns that, while appearing local, are at the new center of the carceral state. With a foreword by Ruth Wilson Gilmore.Trade ReviewA collection of writing spotlighting the 'monster' that is the American prison system...Social justice activists and those with an interest in criminal justice issues will especially appreciate these well-researched, thoughtful essays that reveal just how much power government policies have given to the American carceral system. * Kirkus *[The Jail is Everywhere] paints a vivid picture of a grassroots, nationwide decarceral movement. Activists involved on the ground will find this valuable, while others will receive a substantial education in the politics and economics of incarceration. * Publishers Weekly *With its bevy of perspectives and individual case studies, The Jail Is Everywhere is a revealing overview of the growing problem of jail expansion in the US, with a survey of approaches to addressing it. * Foreword Reviews *The Jail Is Everywhere is a vibrant collection that equips the reader, and anyone interested in organizing against the many forms of carceral expansion, with a swathe of helpful strategies and tactics ... a crucial anthology, skillfully assembled. * Carceral Geography Working Group *A remarkably refreshing read, rooted in the messy but everyday realities of abolitionist organizing. The Jail Is Everywhere demonstrates that knowledge about the function of the carceral state and its multi-tentacled reach into U.S. politics, economy, and culture can only truly be unearthed through active struggle. -- Charlotte Rosen * Inquest *This is not only an important book for people who want to understand the operation of the current carceral state. It's a critical read for folks who might be fighting prison expansion or construction in their neighborhoods. -- Bill Littlefield * Arts Fuse *Table of ContentsForeword- Ruth Wilson GilmoreIntroduction: The Jail Is Everywhere- Jack Norton, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, and Judah Schept1. A Quiet Jail Boom- Jasmine Heiss2. The Long Fight Against Jail Expansion in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois- An Interview with James Kilgore of Build Programs Not Jails3. County Jails and the Immigrant Dragnet- Silky Shah4. Decarcerating Sacramento: Confronting Jail Expansion in California's Capital- Liz Blum5. "Not One More Dollar Goes into This Jail": Becoming Abolitionists in Upstate New York- Andrew J. Pragacz and Kevin Revier6. "You Start with Where You Are and with the People Who Are Around You": Organizing Against Jails Across Tennessee- An Interview with Dawn Harrington and Gicola Lane of Free Hearts7. Carceral Communities: Local Resistance to the Prison-Industrial Complex in the Mountain South- Amelia Kirby8. Communities Over Cages-the (Ongoing) Campaign to Close the Atlanta City Jail- Xochitl Bervera and Wes Ware9. Federal Courts, FEMA Dollars, and Local Elections in the Struggle Against Phase III in New Orleans- An Interview with Lexi Peterson-Burge of Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition10. Real Solutions: Organizing for Alternatives to a Big New Jail in a Small Republican County- Sarah Westover and Matt Witt11. Lessons from the No New Jails Network and the New York City Struggle Against Carceral Feminism- An Interview with Mon Mohapatra of the No New Jails NetworkConclusion: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration- Jack Norton, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, and Judah ScheptAcknowledgmentsAppendix: "The County Jail"- Stanley Boone

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Book SynopsisThe historic uprising in the wake of the murder of George Floyd transformed the way Americans and the world think about race and policing. Why did it achieve so little in the way of substantive reforms? After Black Lives Matter argues that the failure to leave an institutional residue was not simply due to the mercurial and reactive character of the protests. Rather, the core of the movement itself failed to locate the central racial injustice that underpins the crisis of policing: socio-economic inequality.For Johnson, the anti-capitalist and downwardly redistributive politics expressed by different Black Lives Matter elements has too often been drowned out in the flood of black wealth creation, fetishism of Jim Crow black entrepreneurship, corporate diversity initiatives, and a quixotic reparations demand. None of these political tendencies addresses the fundamental problem underlying mass incarceration. That is the turn from welfare to domestic warfare as the chief means of regulating the excluded and oppressed. Johnson sees the way forward in building popular democratic power to advance public works and public goods. Rather than abolishing police, After Black Lives Matter argues for abolishing the conditions of alienation and exploitation contemporary policing exists to manage.Trade ReviewA virtuoso performance! Weighing the successes and limitations of Black Lives Matter, Johnson concludes that identity-based mobilization-confusing what people look like with what they need-cannot substitute for majoritarian political coalition-building. -- Barbara J. Fields, Columbia UniversityCedric Johnson delivers that increasingly rare experience in political writing: surprise. Whether telling the story of Louis Armstrong's first hearing of Mack the Knife or reporting on the inequities of Chicago's public transportation system or mounting a mini-memoir of his encounter with crime in Louisiana and Rochester, Johnson invests the drama of Marxist theory with new energy and vital detail. No matter how dark and dreary the landscape may be, it gets lit up wherever Johnson casts his sharp and appraising eye. -- Corey Robin, author of The Enigma of Clarence ThomasA brilliant scholar who is first and foremost concerned with equality and justice. It's those very commitments that lead him, in After Black Lives Matter, to question today's antiracism and its nostrums. -- Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist ManifestoA compelling argument for reinstating a meaningful anticapitalist analysis and politics into the fight to end police violence and the harms of the criminal justice system in the United States. Readers will undoubtedly come away with new perspectives that deepen their understanding of the successes and limitations of Black Lives Matter and its political vision. -- Leslie Kern, author of Feminist CityEssential reading for those weary of platitude-driven texts on race and criminal justice and in the market for an empirically grounded political analysis that points to practicable solutions to one of the biggest problems of our day. -- Touré F. Reed, author of Toward FreedomA provocative and expansive critique from the left of the loose collection of protest actions, organizations, and ideological movements-whether prison abolition or calls to defund the police-that make up what we now call Black Lives Matter...After Black Lives Matter should be commended both for the clarity of its message and the bravery of its convictions. -- Jay Caspian Kang * New Yorker *

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Book SynopsisWhile industrial states competed to colonize Asia and Africa in the nineteenth century, conversion to Christianity was replaced by a civilizing mission. This new secular impetus strode hand in hand with racial capitalism in the age of empires: a terrestrial paradise was to be achieved through accumulation and the ravaging of nature.Far from a defence of religion, The States of the Earth argues that phenomena such as evangelism and political Islam are best understood as products of empire and secularization. In a world where material technology was considered divine, religious and secular forces both tried to achieve Heaven on Earth by destroying Earth itself.

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Book Synopsis"We came to Britain in search of better opportunities or to get some of the wealth which had been misappropriated from the Caribbean, but what in reality did we find?"Speak Out brings together the writings of Brixton Black Women's Group for the first time, in a landmark collection. Established in response to the lack of interest in women's issues experienced in male-dominated Black organisations, the Brixton Black Women's Group's aim was to create a distinct space where women of African and Asian descent could meet to focus on political, social and cultural issues as they affected black women. BBWG published its own newsletter, Speak Out, which kept alive the debate about the relevance of feminism to black politics and provided a black women's perspective on immigration, housing, health and culture.Trade ReviewAn important testament to the pioneering Black British feminists of the 1970s and '80s who set up groups and centres, and bravely and brilliantly campaigned against discrimination and for social change in the face of extreme opposition. Long ignored and undervalued, their grassroots activism adds unique and essential layers to the recorded histories of the era -- Bernardine Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, OtherFor a new generation of feminist thinkers the relevance of this collection cannot be overstated. Intended for local distribution, the articles are a testament to the continuous theoretical study, fierce discipline, comradeliness and revolutionary love central to resistance against the most violent arms of the state...A balm, an instruction manual a historical object that defies temporality and a response to the forces that seek to depoliticise the history of racialised women's struggle for freedom in Britain. -- Lola Olufemi, author of Feminism Interrupted and Experiments in Imagining Otherwise Militant and original, the Brixton Black Women's Group forged a Marxist analysis entirely their own, driven by the urgency of the triple jeopardy they faced as workers, as women, and as Black people in Britain. The ideas here are alive with the energy, rage, and deep, courageous love that propel political struggle. This is not just a book, it's a whole world -- Sita Balani, author of Deadly and SlickT'his collection beautifully narrates how Black British feminists played an integral role in resistance to state violence, community health, popular education, internationalism and many other struggles which made Black Power in Britain a movement to be reckoned with -- Adam Elliott-Cooper, author of Black Resistance to British Policing[This] new collection brings together their rich archive of newsletters and essays on labor, legislation, housing, and reproductive justice...undisputedly worthwhile -- Rianna Jade Parker * BOMB *

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Book SynopsisWhen democracy is under threat from authoritarianism, models of resistance must come to the fore. Giustizia e Libertà, founded by the Italian thinker and activist Carlo Rosselli in 1929, is one intriguing historical example. Operating both in exile and as part of a clandestine network at home, the organization fought against fascism and Nazism, while criticizing Stalinism. To defeat the enemy, the group aimed to go beyond the Marxist notion of class and to assert fresh concepts of nationhood and Europe. The book traces the group’s trajectories and debates and follows its legacy to the present.- ‘Bresciani’s book is a remarkable contribution to the current debate on the distinctive nature of fascism(s)’ - CARLO GINZBURG, author of NEVERTHELESS: MACHIAVELLI, PASCAL- ‘The story that Bresciani tells with great finesse in this necessary book is the heroic history that accompanied the birth of democracy in Italy’ - NADIA URBI

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Book SynopsisWith the rise of coal power, the producers who oversaw its development acquired the ability to shut down energy systems, a threat they used to build the first mass democracies. Oil offered the West an alternative, and with it came a new form of politics. Oil created a denatured political life the central object of which-the economy-appeared capable of infinite growth. What followed was a Western democracy dependent on an undemocratic Middle East. We now live with the consequences: an impoverished political practice, incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy - namely, the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order.For the updated edition of this classic title, Timothy Mitchell has written a new preface, reassessing its arguments in the light of recent political events.Trade ReviewA challenging, sophisticated, and important book that undermines expectations in the best kind of intellectual provocation. * Foreign Policy *It's a book that tackles a really big subject, in a sweeping but readable fashion, and after reading it, it's hard to imagine thinking about political power the same way again ... This book utterly blew me away. -- Matt Stoller * Naked Capitalism *Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy examines the simultaneous rise of fossil-fuelled capitalism and mass democracy and asks very intelligent questions about the fate of democracy when oil production declines. -- Benjamin Kunkel * New Statesman *A brilliant, revisionist argument that places oil companies at the heart of 20th century history - and of the political and environmental crises we now face...If we're ever to curb such behaviour, and to regain some comprehension of our planet's preciousness, we need first to understand how it came about. Not a book for the season of indulgence, this one. But one that demands to be widely shared. -- Susanna Rustin * Guardian *Carbon Democracy is a sweeping overview of the relationship between fossil fuels and political institutions from the industrial revolution to the Arab Spring, which adds layers of depth and complexity to the accounts of how resource wealth and economic development are linked. * Financial Times *This study of the basis of modern democracy over the past century connects oil-producing states of the Middle East with industrial democracies of the West. Mitchell argues that carbon democracy in the West has been based on the assumption that unlimited oil will produce endless economic growth, and he concludes that this model cannot survive the exhaustion of these fuels and associated climate change. Tim Mitchell has written a remarkable book that deserves a wide audience. -- Mahmood Mamdani, author of Good Muslim, Bad MuslimA remarkable account of the politics of oil and nation building in the Middle East. * The Herald *An insightful historical account of how changes in energy production have expanded and restricted possibilities for democratic governance. Mitchell's provocative approach is a critical intervention into the study of the politics of energy. Recommended. * Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries *

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Book SynopsisFifty years after the appearance of The Dialectical Imagination, his pioneering history of the Frankfurt School, Martin Jay reflects on what may be living and dead in its legacy. Rather than treating it with filial piety as a fortress to be defended, he takes seriously its anti-systematic impulse and sensitivity to changing historical circumstances. Honouring the Frankfurt School's practice of immanent critique, he puts critical pressure on a number of its own ideas by probing their contradictory impulses. Among them are the pathologization of political deviance through stigmatizing "authoritarian personalities," the undefended theological premises of Walter Benjamin's work, and the ambivalence of its members' analyses of anti-Semitism and Zionism. Additional questions are asked about other time-honored Marxist themes: the meaning of alienation, the alleged damages of abstraction, and the advocacy of a politics based on a singular notion of the truth. Rather, however, than allowing these questions to snowball into an unwarranted repudiation of the Frankfurt School legacy as a whole, the essays also acknowledge a number of its still potent arguments. They explore its neglected, but now timely analysis of "racket society," Adorno's dialectical reading of aesthetic sublimation, and the unexpected implications of Benjamin's focus on the corpse for political theory. Jay shows that it is a still evolving theoretical tradition which offers resources for the understanding of - and perhaps even practical betterment - of our increasingly troubled world.Trade ReviewA century after its founding, the Institute for Social Research, now better known as the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, continues to generate provocative ideas and critical perspectives on the world that we inhabit. Just as from the vantage point of Adorno, Benjamin, Horkheimer, and others, however, there can be no genuinely critical thought that is not mediated in decisive ways by the history of its own genesis, thereby rendering the task of inheriting the refractory legacy of the Frankfurt School a difficult and ongoing undertaking. Martin Jay's powerful new study provides us with a beautifully articulated path through the thicket of that inheritance, thoughtfully lingering along the way to illuminate central tropes and concerns that emerge from this constellation of writers. By focusing on the characteristic critical gesture that unites many Frankfurt School thinkers-that of immanent critique-Jay succeeds in opening up a productive and unfailingly fascinating perspective on a critical legacy that, even a century on, remains open and still to come. In Jay's masterful hands, the texts that constitute this legacy have lost none of their urgency and abiding interest. -- Gerhard Richter, L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature, Brown UniversityThroughout these thought-provoking studies Martin Jay's characteristic lucidity and unrivalled command of the relevant source material is on display. Jay is sensitive both to the socio-political contexts of Frankfurt School thinking and to the continuing relevance of the School's legacy. Even those steeped in the tradition of Critical Theory will learn something new from his wide-ranging and sometimes provocative reflections. -- Peter Dews, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of EssexThat Martin Jay is not only the leading historian of the Frankfurt School, but one of its most creative and interesting practitioners in the third generation, becomes irrevocably apparent in this superb collection of articles. Circling around the notion of "immanent critique", these articles explore the viability of some of this tradition's core ideas in a time of political turbulences and postcolonial challenges. In so doing, Martin Jay teaches us how to actualize Critical Theory without credulously sticking to the original texts. -- Axel HonnethTable of Contents1 1968 in an Expanded Field: The Frankfurt School and the Uneven Course of History2 Adorno and the Role of Sublimation in Artistic Creativity and Cultural Redemption3 Blaming the Victim? Arendt, Adorno and Erikson on the Jewish Responsibility for Anti-Semitism4 The Authoritarian Personality and the Problematic Pathologization of Politics5 The Age of Rackets? Trump, Scorsese and the Frankfurt School6 Go Figure: Fredric Jameson on Walter Benjamin7 Leib, Körper and the Body Politic8 Marx and Mendacity: Can There Be a Politics without Hypocrisy?

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Book SynopsisWhen he died suddenly in 1967, Isaac Deutscher had completed only the compelling first chapter of a long-anticipated biography of Lenin, published here. It covers Lenin's family background, birth and early years in the backwater town of Simbirsk up to the execution of his brother, a traumatic formative event. Drawing on a lifetime of background research, including access to the closed section of Trotsky's archives, Lenin's Childhood gives a novel interpretation of the earliest influences on Lenin's personality and thinking. Most of all, it is a glimpse into an unfinished work which would have striven to save Lenin from fanatical anti-revolutionary condemnation and, perhaps more important, from uncritical communist beatification.This anniversary edition includes an introduction by Deutscher's biographer, Gonzalo Pozo, which situates the Lenin project within Deutscher's oeuvre and discusses the sources, influences and evolution of his never completed life of Lenin.Table of ContentsIntroduction to the Anniversary Edition - Gonzalo PozoIntroduction - Tamara DeutscherLenin's Childhood

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Book SynopsisCommissioned by Oliver Stone in 2015 to commemorate the Russian Revolution, Tariq Ali's captivating screenplay of the life and times of Vladimir Lenin puts flesh on the bones of the historical record and gets its pulse racing. From the author of The Dilemmas of Lenin, the drama captures the enigma of its central character. Ali shows Lenin in his rush from Switzerland to Petrograd by train to grasp his moment in history and the force of his personality on the tumult he found there. He made a revolution and remade a nation. Interwoven with the politics is an exploration of Lenin's personal life, especially his love for Inessa Armand.In the introduction, Ali argues that, despite the difficulties, a serious cinematic assessment of Lenin is still needed. Unfortunately, two very different attempts to film one failed. This first draft provides the basis for something on a grander scale at some stage in the future. Praise for The Dilemmas of Lenin 'Aims to rescue Lenin from both liberal caricature and Soviet hag- iography by recovering the realism and dynamism of his political thought' David Sessions, Nation'An incredibly powerful, panoramic, and insightful study of the central revolutionary figure of the twentieth century' Paul LeBlanc, author of Lenin and the Revolutionary Party Table of ContentsIntroductionThe Lenin ScenarioChronology of Lenin's Life and WorksGlossary of Names

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Book SynopsisWhy did a movement as powerful as the one inspired by the murder of George Floyd fall short of securing its most militant demands? After Black Lives Matter argues that the core of the movement itself failed to locate the central racial injustice that underpins the crisis of policing: socioeconomic inequality.Trade ReviewA provocative and expansive critique from the left of the loose collection of protest actions, organizations, and ideological movements-whether prison abolition or calls to defund the police-that make up what we now call Black Lives Matter...After Black Lives Matter should be commended both for the clarity of its message and the bravery of its convictions. -- Jay Caspian Kang * New Yorker *Essential reading for those weary of platitude-driven texts on race and criminal justice and in the market for an empirically grounded political analysis that points to practicable solutions to one of the biggest problems of our day. -- Touré F. Reed, author of Toward FreedomA virtuoso performance! Weighing the successes and limitations of Black Lives Matter, Johnson concludes that identity-based mobilization-confusing what people look like with what they need-cannot substitute for majoritarian political coalition-building. -- Barbara J. Fields, Columbia UniversityA compelling argument for reinstating a meaningful anticapitalist analysis and politics into the fight to end police violence and the harms of the criminal justice system in the United States. Readers will undoubtedly come away with new perspectives that deepen their understanding of the successes and limitations of Black Lives Matter and its political vision. -- Leslie Kern, author of Feminist CityCedric Johnson delivers that increasingly rare experience in political writing: surprise. Whether telling the story of Louis Armstrong's first hearing of Mack the Knife or reporting on the inequities of Chicago's public transportation system or mounting a mini-memoir of his encounter with crime in Louisiana and Rochester, Johnson invests the drama of Marxist theory with new energy and vital detail. No matter how dark and dreary the landscape may be, it gets lit up wherever Johnson casts his sharp and appraising eye. -- Corey Robin, author of The Enigma of Clarence ThomasA brilliant scholar who is first and foremost concerned with equality and justice. It's those very commitments that lead him, in After Black Lives Matter, to question today's antiracism and its nostrums. -- Bhaskar Sunkara, founding editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist ManifestoTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Frayed Thin Blue Line1. Policing Capitalist Society2. Making Consumers and Criminals: The Postwar Urban Transformation and the Origins of Policing as We Know It3. The Roots of Black Lives Matter: Racial Liberalism and the Problem of Surplus Population4. The World of Freddie Gray: Dispossession, Rebellion and Containment in Revanchist Baltimore5. Whose Streets? Building the Just City in Rahm Emanuel's Chicago and Beyond6. The Labor of OccupationConclusion: Abolish the ConditionsAcknowledgmentsNotes

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Book SynopsisHave you ever relied on the kindness of strangers? What brings people together to find hope and solidarity? What do we owe each other as citizens and comrades?Questions of care, intimacy, education, meaningful work, and social engagement lie at the core of our ability to understand the world and its possibilities for human flourishing. In Lean On Me feminist thinker Lynne Segal goes in search of hope in her own life and in the world around her. She finds it entwined in our intimate commitments to each other and our shared collective endeavours.Segal calls this shared dependence 'radical care'. In recounting from her own life the moments of motherhood, and of being on the front line of second-wave feminism, she draws upon lessons from more than half a century of engagement in left feminist politics, with its underlying commitment to building a more egalitarian and nurturing world. The personal and the political combine in this rallying cry to transform radically how we approach education, motherhood, and our everyday vulnerabilities of disability, ageing, and enhanced needs.Only by confronting head-on these different forms of interdependence and care can we change the way we think about the environment and learn to struggle - together -against impending climate catastrophe.Trade ReviewLean on Me contains crucial lessons, from one of the most important figures of the British Women's Liberation Movement, for our contemporary politics. Our dependence on the care of others, Lynne Segal reminds us, is not just an inescapable requirement of human life, but moreover the ultimate source of its meaning. -- Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to SexBoth memoir and manifesto, this wonderful book charts a personal history of feminist socialism - and, with her usual humane wisdom, our author points the way to a better politics. -- Baroness Helena Kennedy of the Shaws KCSuch a powerful, honest and passionate account of a life lived with and for others, one that cuts right through the ideology of the singular individualist. Interdependence is how we thrive and survive and Lynne Segal shows how we do this daily over a lifetime. A wonderfully warm, vivid, compassionate book. A model for us all. -- Bev Skeggs, Professor, Sociology, University of LancasterDraws on a lifetime of effervescent political and intellectual engagement. Blending moving memoir with interdisciplinary analysis, Lynne Segal teaches, entertains and inspires us to rethink dependency, socialise our resources and re-enchant our worlds. Magnificent! -- Jo Littler, author of Left FeminismsDrawing on a long and rich life of activism and intellectual work, Segal now turns her forensic gaze to one of the most pressing themes of our age: how we care for each other. Examining her subject through the prism of modern capitalism, our ravaged planet and the rise of populism, Segal is clear that radical solutions are urgently needed. Only these will allow us to reaffirm our human interdependence and provide recognition, care and support, particularly to those most in need. -- Melissa Benn, author of Life Lessons[Segal] remains hopeful that a more caring future is possible ... In an age of increasing despair about the welfare state, an empowering message can go a long way. -- Amy Hall * New Internationalist *A first-hand account of a life spent invoking the power of the collective. -- Rachel Andrews * Irish Times *Segal is clear that the fight for a more compassionate society requires some major political changes ... These are not abstractions, but ideas rooted in movements for fairer pay, democratically run services and climate justice. Segal urges us to link them up and amplify them - it's sound advice. -- Mike Phipps * Labour Hub *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Kindness of Strangers1. Call That a Mother?2. Valuing Education3. A Feminist Life4. Admitting Vulnerability5. Repairing the Planet6. Caring Futures

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Book SynopsisEverything To Play For asks if videogames can achieve egalitarian goals instead of fuelling hyper-materialist, reactionary agendas. Combining cultural theory and materialist critiques with accessible language and personal anecdotes, industry insider Marijam Did engages both novices and seasoned connoisseurs. From the innovations of Pong and Doom to the intricate multiplayer or narrative-driven games, the author highlights the multifaceted stories of the gaming communities and the political actors who organise among them. Crucially, the focus also includes the people who make the games, shedding light on the brutal processes necessary to bring titles to the public.The videogame industry, now larger than the film and music industries combined, has a proven ability to challenge the status quo. With a rich array of examples, Did argues for a nuanced understanding of gaming’s influence so that this extraordinary power can be harnessed for good.

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Book SynopsisEvery week it seems there is a fresh scandal involving abhorrent, racist, misogynist behaviour by police officers. Yet these are the very people women are supposed to approach for help when faced with violence. And many feminists, hoping to use the criminal justice system to protect women, fight for stronger laws and longer sentences for those who harm them.Why Would Feminists Trust the Police? traces the history of British feminism’s alliances and struggles with the law and its enforcers. Drawing on the legacy of Black British feminism, Leah Cowan reminds us of the vibrant and creative alternatives envisioned by those who have long known the truth: the police aren’t feminist, and the law does not keep women safe.

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Book SynopsisIn What Is Cultural Criticism?, two leading critics grapple with problems of literature, politics and intellectual practice. The debate opens with Francis Mulhern’s account of what he terms ‘metacultural discourse’. This embraces two opposing critical traditions, the elite pessimism of Kulturkritik and the populist enthusiasms of Cultural Studies. Each in its own way dissolves politics into culture, Mulhern argues. Collini, on the other hand, protests that cultural criticism provides resources for genuine critical engagement with contemporary society. Tension between culture and politics there may be, but it works productively in both directions.This widely noticed encounter is that rare thing, a sustained debate in which, as Collini remarks, the protagonists not only exchange shots but also ideas. It concludes with Mulhern’s engagement with Collini’s writing on the subordination of universities to metrics and bureaucracy, and a companion re

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Book SynopsisUnder the Banner of King Death is a tale of mutiny, bloody battle, and social revolution, bringing to life an itinerant community of outsiders behind today's legends. This graphic novel breaks new ground in our understanding of piracy and pirate culture, giving us real reasons to love the rebellious and stouthearted marauders of the seas.At the pinnacle of the Golden Age of Atlantic piracy, three unlikely companions are sold into servitude on a merchant ship and thrust into a voyage of rebellion. They are John Gwin, an African American fugitive from bondage in South Carolina; Ruben Dekker, a common seaman from Amsterdam; and Mark (a.k.a. Mary) Reed, an American woman who dresses as a man.When the crew turn to mutiny, they and the freed slaves establish democracy aboard The Night Rambler. This new dispensation provides radical social benefits, all based on the documented practices of real pirate ships of the era: democratic decision-making, a social security net, health and disability insurance, and an equal distribution of spoils taken from prize ships. But before long the London elites enlist a war-hungry captain to take down The Night Rambler in a war that pitches high society against high-seas freebooters.Adapted from the scholarship and research of celebrated historian Marcus Rediker, Under the Banner of King Death is an inspiring story of the oppressed steering a course against adversity and injustice.

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Book SynopsisLate Capitalism is the first major synthesis to have been produced by the contemporary revival of Marxist economics. It represents, in fact, the only systematic attempt so far ever made to combine the general theory of the ‘laws of motion’ of the capitalist mode of production developed by Marx with the concrete history of capitalism in the twentieth century. A landmark in Marxist economic literature, Late Capitalism is specifically designed to explain the international recession of the 1970s and is an invaluable guide to understanding the nature of the world economy today. This edition includes a new introduction by Cédric Durand assessing the book’s continued relevance.

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Book SynopsisHistorian Kjell Östberg presents the first comprehensive study of one of the most influential political movements of our time. Swedish Social Democracy was an inspiration to young socialists around the world for generations. But little remains of the Swedish model today.For almost a century, Social Democracy prevailed in Sweden, which for many appeared to be on the verge of becoming a truly socialist country. What followed instead was a jarring adaptation to a rising neoliberal world order. Large parts of the public sector have now been privatised, social inequality is rapidly worsening, and right-wing populists have come to represent much of the working class.Östberg discusses the reformist strategy, class organizations and social mobilisation, women’s struggle, and the creation of the Swedish welfare society. It is a history emblematic of the transformations in global politics of the last half century.

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Book SynopsisThe relationship between philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin and playwright-poet Bertolt Brecht was both a lasting friendship and a powerful intellectual partnership. Having met in the late 1920s in Germany, Benjamin and Brecht both independently minded Marxists with a deep understanding of and passionate commitment to the emancipatory potential of cultural practices continued to discuss, argue and correspond on topics as varied as Fascism and the work of Franz Kafka. Faced by the onset of the ‘midnight of the century’, with the Nazi subversion of the Weimar Republic in Germany and the Stalinist degeneration of the revolution in Russia, both men, in their own way, strove to keep alive the tradition of dialectical critique of the existing order and radical intervention in the world to transform it.In Understanding Brecht we find collected together Benjamin’s most sensitive and probing writing on the dramatic and poetic work of his friend and tutor. Stimulated

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Book SynopsisThe Situationist International, which leaped to the fore during the Paris tumult of 1968, has extended its revolutionary influence right up to the present day. In Leaving the Twentieth Century, the movement is captured for the first time in its full range and diversity.McKenzie Wark traces the group’s development from the bohemian Paris of the ’50s to the explosive days of May ’68. She introduces the group as an ensemble, revealing the work and activities of thinkers previously obscured by the reputation of founding member Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and exploring the vital lives its members—including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Alexander Trocchi, and Jacqueline de Jong—Wark uncovers a group riven with conflicting passions. She follows the narrative beyond 1968, to the Situationists International’s disintegration and beyond: the ideas of T. J. Clark, the Fourierist utopia of Raoul Vaneigem, René VienetR

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Book SynopsisAlthough contemporary Western societies refer to themselves as democratic, the bulk of the population spend much of their lives in workplaces that have more in common with tyranny. Gigantic corporations such as Amazon, Meta, Exxon, and Walmart are among the richest and most powerful institutions in the world yet accountable to no one but their shareholders. The undemocratic nature of conventional firms generates profound problems across society, hurting more than just the workplace and contributing to environmental destruction and spiraling inequality.Against this backdrop, Isabelle Ferreras proposes a radical but realistic plan to democratize the private firm. She suggests that all large firms should be bicamerally governed, with a chamber of worker representatives sharing equal governance power with the standard board representing owners. In response to this proposal, twelve leading experts on corporate behavior from multiple disciplines consider its attractiveness, viability

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Book SynopsisThe Russian Revolution was a literary as well as political upheaval. With a focus on the revolutionary works of Andrei Platonov and the futurist collective Oberiu, leading Russian literary thinker Valery Podoroga shows how profoundly the Soviet experiment overturned the traditional expectations of fiction and poetry. The production of this groundbreaking new work was inextricably interwoven with the political and historical debates of the time.This volume expands on Podoroga’s critical exploration of the analytic anthropology of literature. Here he delves into the ways literature can be used in ‘world-building’, both in terms of what happens inside the narrative and how it reflects the external world. He explores the function of the work outside of its time: both as a means to project itself into the future and as a document of a former age. How are we to read the past through these works of the imagination?With an introductory essay from the author

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Book SynopsisLula is among the greatest political figures in Brazilian history. The only president in the country with a working-class background, combined with a party that was profoundly original in its roots, he exercised charismatic power and influence in a more lasting way than any other public figure in the republican period.Since 2011, Fernando Morais, one of Brazil's leading writers, has gained direct, frank and frequent access to Lula. To these dozens of hours of testimonies, he has added a reporter's flair and captivating prose to compose a biography that paints a picture in all its grandeur and complexity.In a narrative that makes use of flashforwards and flashbacks to maintain an electrifying pace, Morais goes from Lula's childhood to the annulment of his convictions, in 2021 - passing through the new unionism, the ABC strikes, the foundation of the PT and the first election campaign.

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Book SynopsisWhen the state recedes, the commune-form flourishes. This was as true in Paris in 1871 as it is now whenever ordinary people begin to manage their daily lives collectively. Contemporary struggles over land - from the zad at Notre-Dame-des-Landes to Cop City in Atlanta, from the pipeline battles in Canada to Soulèvements de la terre - have reinvented practices of appropriating lived space and time. This transforms dramatically our perception of the recent past. Rural struggles of the 1960s and 70s, like the 'Nantes Commune,' the Larzac, and Sanrizuka in Japan, appear now as the defining battles of our era. In the defense of threatened territories against all manners of privatization, hoarding, and infrastructures of disaster, new ways of producing and inhabiting are devised that side-step the state and that give rise to unprecedented kinds of solidarity built on pleasurable, fruitful collaborations. These are the crucial elements in the present-day reworking of an

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Book SynopsisBritain was once the leading economy in Europe; it is now the most unequal. In Shattered Nation, leading geographer and author of Inequality and the 1% shows that we are growing further and further apart. Visiting sites across the British Isles and exploring the social fissures that have emerged, Danny Dorling exposes a new geography of inequality. Middle England has been hit hard by the cost-of-living crisis, and even people doing comparatively well are struggling to stay afloat. Once affluent suburbs are now unproductive places where opportunity has been replaced by food banks. Before COVID, life expectancy had dropped as a result of poverty for the first time since the 1930s.Fifty years ago the UK led the world in child health; today, twenty-two of the twenty-seven EU countries have better mortality rates for newborns. No other European country has such miserly unemployment benefits; university fees so high; housing so unaffordable; or a government economically

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Book SynopsisHistory and Class Consciousness was the most important of Georg Lukács's early theoretical writings, published in Germany in 1923. The subject of high praise and passionate criticism, it had a major impact on all the Marxist debates that followed, introducing key new concepts such as 'totality', 'reification' and 'imputed class consciousness'. This centenary edition, with a new preface by Michael Löwy, comprises a series of essays exploring, among other topics, the definition of orthodox Marxism, the question of legality and illegality, Rosa Luxemburg as a Marxist, the changing function of historic Marxism, and the substantiation and consciousness of the proletariat. This classic book has influenced many key philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Adorno, Debord, Heidegger, Lefebvre, Merleau-Ponty and Zizek, and it can lay claim to being one of the cornerstones of contemporary thought.Trade ReviewOne of the indispensable works of the twentieth century. -- Raymond WilliamsGeorge Lukács's History and Class Consciousness is a truly extraordinary work, and its English translation, after almost fifty years of neglect by English and American publishers, is a major event. The full quality of Lukács's brilliance is most powerfully manifested in this 'youthful' work (done when merely 38!), where he reveals himself as by far and away the most talented philosopher among 20th-century Marxists, and as their most penetrating critic of contemporary culture. He is a major stimulus in the development of what is certainly the most creative school of social theorists in the 20th century, and of whom Herbert Marcuse is only the best-known member. For all this, then, we owe homage to Georg Lukács. -- Alvin W. Gouldner * New York Times Book Review *Lukacs' book History and Class Consciousness leads Marx back to Hegel to a significant extent, and leads the latter meaningfully beyond himself; here, too, a metaphysics of understanding oneself in existence, of raising our head, our reality above the crooked process, traces its dialectical arcs. -- Ernst BlochHistory and Class Consciousness, a work of genius inseparable from the brief moment when the Bolshevik Revolution seemed to be the beginning of a world revolution. -- Etienne BalibarFor Lukacs, Marxism is, or should be, this integral philosophy without dogma. Weber understood materialism as an attempt to deduce all culture from economics. For Lukacs, it is a way of saying that the relations among men are not the sum of personal acts or personal decisions, but pass through things, the anonymous roles, the common situations, and the institutions where men have projected so much of themselves that their fate is now played out outside them. The exceptional merit of Lukacs-which makes his book, even today, a philosophical one-is precisely that his philosophy was not by implication to be understood as dogma but was to be practiced, that it did not serve to 'prepare' history, and that it was the very chain of history grasped in human experience. His philosophical reading of history brought to light, behind the prose of everyday existence, a recovery of the self by itself which is the definition of subjectivity. -- Maurice Merleau-PontyOn the level of currents of thought we must no doubt go back to Lukacs, whose History and Class Consciousness was already raising questions to do with a new subjectivity. -- Gilles DeleuzeLukács's critique of 'reification' in History and Class Consciousness shows the path toward a philosophy of social praxis, according to which social objectivity must be understood as the creation of human beings themselves in the process of reproducing their material and cultural worlds. -- Seyla BenhabibI can still remember the way that first page of Lukács made my head spin. The cosmic chutzpah of the man was staggering. I'd known plenty of Marxists who were willing to admit that Marx might be wrong about many tjings; in spite of this, they said, he was right about the essential things and that was why they were Marxists. Now here was a Marxist saying that Marx might be wrong about everything, and he couldn't care less, that the truth of Marxism was independent of anything that Marx said about the world, and hence that nothing in the world could ever refute it; and that as the essence not merely of Marxist truth, but of Marxist Orthodoxy. -- Marshall BermanThe charter document of Hegelian Marxism. -- Martin JayTable of ContentsTranslator's NotePreface to the centenary edition (2023)Preface to the new edition (1967)PrefaceWhat is Orthodox Marxism?The Marxism of Rosa LuxemburgClass ConsciousnessReification and the Consciousness of the ProletariatI The Phenomenon of Reifi The Phenomenon of ReificationII The Antinomies of Bourgeois ThoughtIII The Standpoint of the ProletariatThe Changing Function of Historical MaterialismLegality and IllegalityCritical Observations on Rosa Luxemburg's "Critique of the Russian Revolution"Towards a Methodology of the Problem of OrganisationNotes to the English EditionIndex

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Book SynopsisFredric Jameson introduces here the major themes of French theory: existentialism, structuralism, poststructuralism, semiotics, feminism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. In a series of accessible lectures, Jameson places this effervescent period of thought in the context of its most significant political conjunctures, including the Liberation of Paris, the Algerian War, the uprisings of May ’68, and the creation of the EU.The philosophical debates of the period come to life through anecdotes and extended readings of work by the likes of Sartre, Beauvoir, Fanon, Barthes, Foucault, Althusser, Derrida, Deleuze, groups like Tel Quel and Cahiers du Cinéma, and contemporary thinkers such as Rancière and Badiou. Eclectic, insightful, and inspired, Jameson’s seminars provide an essential account of an intellectual moment comparable in significance to the Golden Age of Athens, historically fascinating and of persistent relevance.

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Book SynopsisMural is the testimony of one of the most important and powerful poets of our age.Mahmoud Darwish was the unofficial laureate of Palestine. One of the greatest poets of the last half-century, his work evokes the loss of his homeland and is suffused with the pain of dispossession and exile. Here, his close friends John Berger and Rema Hammami present a beautiful new translation of two of Darwish’s later works: his long masterpiece Mural, a contemplation of his life and work written following life-threatening surgery, and his last poem, The Dice Player, which Darwish read in Ramallah a month before his death.Illustrated with original drawings by John Berger.

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Book SynopsisA Child in Palestine collects the work of one of the Arab world’s greatest cartoonists, Naji al-Ali, known as ‘the Palestinian Malcolm X’. Discovered in the 1950s, he was revered throughout the region for his outspokenness, honesty and humanity. Resolutely independent, al-Ali strove to speak to and for the ordinary Arab people. The pointed satire of his stark, symbolic cartoons brought him widespread renown. His most celebrated creation, the child Hanthala, exposed the brutality of Israeli occupation, the venality and corruption of the region’s regimes, and the suffering of the Palestinian people. Hanthala is today seen as a surrogate witness to ongoing horrors and a beacon for Palestinian resistance.

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Book SynopsisA thrilling and vivid work of history, Class War weaves together literature and politics to chart the making and unmaking of social class through revolutionary combat. In a narrative that spans the globe and more than two centuries of history, Mark Steven traces the history of class war from the Haitian Revolution to Black Lives Matter.Surveying the literature of revolution, from the poetry of Shelley and Byron to the novels of Émile Zola and Jack London, exploring the writings of Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Assata Shakur, Class War reveals the interplay between military action and the politics of class, showing how solidarity flourishes in times of conflict. Written with verve and ranging across diverse historical settings, Class War traverses industrial battles, guerrilla insurgencies, and anticolonial resistance, as well as large-scale combat operations waged against capitalism's regimes and its interstate system.In our age of economic crisis, ecological catastrophe, and planetary unrest, Steven tells the stories of those whose actions will help guide future militants toward a revolutionary horizon.Trade ReviewA survey of the literature of revolution, Mark Steven's history of global class war considers work by writers from Byron to Assata Shakur. It feels more crucial than ever to study the work of writers who practiced solidarity, and this book promises to be a vital contribution to the revolutionary canon. -- Most Anticipated Books of 2023 * Lit Hub *Class war is everywhere and in every era. And yet it is not in all places and times the same; it is the stuff of history, and history is what changes. In any regard it is war, and there will be no chance of winning if we do not reckon carefully with its transformations into the present and along the branching paths of the future. It is this movement, a real movement, that Mark Steven sets out to capture, making use of literature's necessary capacity for figuring both the broadest and most delicate social formations in motion. Here he offers a crystallography of veiled relations; there he summons the most explicit jeremiads. Louverture to LeGuin, this book is a wonder in its reach and attention, breathing vitality into core concepts while outmaneuvering the staid orthodoxies hobbling all too much class discourse in the 21st century. Like all the best history: a way forward. -- Joshua Clover, author of Riot. Strike. RiotBeautifully written and conceived, Class War is a history as absorbing as any nineteenth-century novel. Part literary criticism, part political theory, part polemic, it is also an act of recovery; Steven has written a necessary book. -- Anahid Nersessian, author of Keats's Odes: A Lover’s DiscourseWritten with verve and ranging across diverse historical settings, Class War traverses industrial battles, guerrilla insurgencies, and anticolonial resistance, as well as large-scale combat operations waged against capitalism's regimes and its interstate system. An exceptional and impressive work of history. -- Able Greenspan * Midwest Book Review *Literature and politics go hand in hand in this survey of revolutionary literature from the Haitian Revolution to Black Lives Matter, including the writing of Che Guevara, Frantz Fanon and Assata Shakur. * The New York Times Book Review *University lecturer Steven states boldly in the introduction that 'this book is intended as a guide to class war.' He then paints a wide canvas, writing about revolutions in Haiti, Cuba, Russia, and elsewhere, spanning centuries to prepare us for a class war that, he argues, is already happening. -- Leland Cheuk, The best new books for summer 2023 * The Boston Globe *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Class War Now1. The Burning South2. Army of Redressers3. Defend the City4. School of War5. Towards a Red Army6. Protracted Peoples' Wars7. For Complete Disorder8. The Armed Nucleus9. Fighting after Fascism10. Army of the WrongedPostscript: No War But Class War

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Book SynopsisIn an age of pandemics the relationship between the health of the city and good sanitation has never been more important. Waste and the City is a call to action on one of modern urban life's most neglected issues: sanitation infrastructure. The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the devastating consequences of unequal access to sanitation in cities across the globe. At this critical moment in global public health, Colin McFarlane makes the urgent case for Sanitation for All.The book outlines the worldwide sanitation crisis and offers a vision for a renewed, equitable investment in sanitation that democratises and socialises the modern city. Adopting Henri Lefebvre's concept of 'the right to the city', it uses the notion of 'citylife' to reframe the discourse on sanitation from a narrowly-defined policy discussion to a question of democratic right to public life and health. In doing so, the book shows that sanitation is an urbanizing force whose importance extends beyond hygiene to the very foundation of urban social life.Trade ReviewIn this brilliant book bristling with ideas and evidence from around the Global South, Colin McFarlane maps the world's sanitation crisis as well as a way out of it through a manifesto of rights to the city that connects up vernacular strategies of making infrastructure, a public right to wellbeing, and city efforts to improve systems. The book is full of hope and possibility without ever losing sight of the sanitation catastrophe we face.' -- Ash Amin, Emeritus 1931 Chair of Geography, Cambridge UniversityInteresting, insightful, sometimes surprising, beautifully written, challenges us to look at sanitation (and lack of it) in new ways. -- David Satterthwaite, International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED)In this immensely well written and accessible book, Colin McFarlane draws on over two decades of his research on sanitation, setting out his argument as to why access to toilets is fundamental not only to reducing poverty and inequality but also to what he refers to as citylife, or the right to a liveable urban life. His superb command of his subject starts with the fleshy, messy feminist understanding of sanitation as a bodily act and of the millions of people living through the crisis of sanitation, at the centre of which lies the social reproductive labour of women and girls. From people he moves comprehensively across sanitation's material infrastructures (the 'things' of sanitation) and lives (the urban ecologies of human and non-human animals and microbes and the politics of the body), to protest (human waste is political!) and allocation (who gets what sanitation resources, where). It is this networked view of sanitation, as far more than a simple technical or policy issue, that underpins the democratic right to citylife. This is a brilliantly incisive book, setting a global agenda for all of us who care about cities, poverty and inequality. For those urban researchers and activists for whom the urban sanitation crisis is not yet on that agenda it will be after reading this book. -- Linda Peake, Director, The City Institute, York University, TorontoMarks the culmination of his path-breaking research on the global sanitation crisis. Waste and the City is both a sober assessment of the scale of the challenge and also an affirmation of multiple social and political possibilities to create better urban worlds. -- Matthew Gandy, Professor of Geography, University of CambridgeWith both a conceptually wide-ranging lens and empirical precision, Colin McFarlane show how and why sanitation lies at the heart of contemporary urban inequalities, injustices, and ecologies. Drawing on cases from both rich and poor countries alike, this book makes clear that how societies understand, address, or ignore such daily necessities as sewage and the provision of toilets says a lot about whose lives matter. Beyond highlighting the unspoken gender and class biases in the provision of sanitation, the focus on new environmental and infrastructural urgencies set in motion by climate change makes this book particularly timely. -- Diane E. Davis, Harvard University Graduate School of Design

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Book SynopsisThe rich archive of twentieth-century debates on fascism can steer a path through an increasingly authoritarian present. Developing anti-fascist theory is an urgent and vital task. From the 'Great Replacement' to campaigns against critical race theory and 'gender ideology', today's global far right is launching lethal panics about the threats to traditional political, sexual and racial hierarchies.Drawing especially on Black radical and anti-colonial theories of fascism, Toscano makes clear the limits of associating fascism primarily with the kind of political violence experienced by past European regimes. Rather than looking for analogies from history, we should see fascism as a mutable process, one anchored in racial and colonial capitalism, which both predates and survives its crystallization in Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. It is a threat that continues to evolve in the present day.Trade ReviewThere are no unearned claims here. Rather, one feels that Toscano has thought through the political stakes of every single sentence in this crucial book. Late Fascism is painstaking in accounting for, differentiating, and connecting the many historical contexts and iterations of fascism - from the onset of colonial modernity, through the mid-twentieth century, to the present day. -- Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the FoxAlberto Toscano's Late Fascism brilliantly elucidates what Adorno once called 'the meaning of working through the past' to grasp fascism's capacious aptitude for untimely reappearances to resolve crises, real or not, to save capitalism from itself and restore the necessary political order such rescue operations require. Rather than drawing upon fascism's past in his approach, Toscano 's account persuasively lays to rest an interpretative scheme that explains such unscheduled repetitions by appealing to analogical comparisons of past and present as if they were the same. His own strategy positions history and memory against the present to disturb one another, unveiling uneven historical differences and incommensurables removed from an everyday dominated by exchange. Toscano's lasting achievement is the program of watchfulness he so carefully constructs to uncover the contemporaneity of late fascism in our midst, but never too late to recognize its ever-present morbidities. -- Harry Harootunian, Emeritus Professor of History, University of ChicagoIn this bold book, Alberto Toscano argues that the old checklist for identifying and understanding contemporary fascism won't work. To apprehend its present-day manifestations, we must consult writers from the Black radical tradition and critical ethnic studies. With his characteristic erudition, Toscano combines innovative readings of Western Marxism with insightful interpretations of the genealogies of anti-racism. This is an indispensable book for a distressing time. -- Roderick A. Ferguson, Yale UniversityAlberto Toscano is one of the most significant and original political theorists of our contemporary moment. In this work on the nature and aetiology of late fascism, he moves us beyond the European interwar examples as fascism's "ideal-type," and deconstructs the alleged opposition of fascism and liberal democracy. He instead emphasizes multiple origins, locations, and temporalities of fascisms; the imbrication of fascisms within colonialism, slavery, capitalism and counter-revolution; and is precise about fascisms' libidinal claims and the weaponizing of atavistic social energies turned against racial, religious, sexual and gendered others. Toscano engages an illuminating range of anti-fascist thought: from Ernst Bloch, Georges Bataille, and Leo Löwenthal, to Angela Davis and George Jackson; from Stuart Hall and Ruth Wilson Gilmore to Jairus Banaji and Furio Jesi - with dazzling results. -- Lisa Lowe, author of The Intimacies of Four ContinentsCan we speak of fascism before fascism? Alberto Toscano believes we can. In his learned excavation of debates across the twentieth century, he revives still unanswered questions about the location of the prison, the market, and the bedroom in theories of fascism. He also reminds us to ask what late fascism is afraid of. What is it trying to prevent? In this way, a study of fascism becomes a roundabout recovery of repressed and forgotten utopias-a flashlight in the dead of night. -- Quinn Slobodian, author of The GlobalistsLate Fascism is brilliant, incisive, and right on time. We are living through a moment when the "F" word is no longer taboo and the threat of fascism lurks everywhere. And yet, so mired in debates over definitions, typologies, and analogies that our understanding of fascism remains elusive. Alberto Toscano avoids this trap by turning to anti-fascist thinkers, whose groundings in anticolonial, antiracist, and anticapitalist struggles remind us that liberalism is no enemy of fascism, and fascists flower in the hot house of capitalism. -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical ImaginationToscano's wide-ranging, erudite study is both theoretically satisfying and politically inspiring - an essential reference for rethinking fascism and antifascist politics today. -- Michael Hardt, author of The Subversive SeventiesIn this book, Toscano provides us with the language and analysis necessary to theorize our current moment, one in which the danger of fascism is as real as ever. -- Jake Romm * Protean *Toscano's high-octane new book on heterodox theories of fascism ... traces the myriad ways it has been deployed over the past 100 years, mining each of them for parallels with the present. -- Oliver Eagleton * The New Statesman *Concise and intellectually ambitious. -- Andrew O'Hehir * Salon *Table of Contents1. Out of Time2. Racial Fascism3. Fascist Freedom4. A Phantom with Limbs of Steel5. Rushing Forward into the Past6. Ideas without Words7. Cathedrals of Erotic Misery

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Book SynopsisIf race is increasingly understood to be socially constructed, why does it continue to seem like a physiological reality? The trickery of race, Sita Balani argues, comes down to how it is embedded in everyday life through the domain we take to be most intimate and essential: sexuality. Modernity inaugurates a new political subject made legible as an individual through the nuclear family, sexual adventure and the pursuit of romantic love. By examining the regulation of sexual life at Britain's borders, in colonial India, and through the functioning of the welfare state, marriage laws, education, and counterterrorism, Balani reveals that sexuality has become fatally intertwined with the making of race.Trade ReviewThrough an astounding display of Sita Balani's skill and care with the craft of writing, Deadly and Slick collapses the binary categories of race, gender and sexuality to show how they are co-constitutive of each other. Read this book if you want to break through the myopia of more shallow discussions about how identity interacts with politics and follow Balani into deeper analytical realms. -- Kojo Koram, author of Uncommon WealthSmart, lucid and funny - an urgently needed account of the colonial histories and troubling presents that shape the politics of racism and sexuality. How can we understand how the powerful mobilise our desires and affinities in ways that deplete all our lives? Reading Balani will help you understand why we want the things we want, and also how we can start to see what we really need. -- Gargi Bhattacharya, author of Rethinking Racial CapitalismA fascinating, well-researched read. Balani not only throws a retrospective spotlight on the mercurial fluidity of race, gender, class, sexuality and culture in the colonial project, she digs into the crevices to expose every lethal outcome. -- Stella Dadzie, author of A Kick in the BellyAn essential and lucid analysis of the long-standing but changing relationship between sexuality and race. A must read. -- Maya Goodfellow, author of Hostile EnvironmentDeadly and Slick is a coruscating history of marriage, empire, racecraft, the capitalist family, and the rise of 'affective individualism,' distilling the very best of contemporary anti-colonial, queer and marxist theorizing, while weaving together stories about 'inchoate fascists' ranging from Lord Kitchener to Priti Patel, and from Raj-era memsahibs to QAnon. Sita Balani has distilled complex ideas about the Möbius strip of race and sex into clear and pleasurable prose that takes the reader on a grim tour of the taxonomical imagination in colonial societies, all the way from Carl Linnaeus to Jordan Peterson, with important albeit discomfiting conclusions for contemporary feminist politics. -- Sophie Lewis, author of Abolish the Family and Full Surrogacy NowDeadly and Slick is admirably nimble in navigating social and historical moving parts, all the while unfolding a compelling and coherent view of how racialisation has clung to the 'common sense' in contemporary Britain. Balani does the difficult and sometimes unglamorous intellectual work of wading through the rubble of the everyday and is rewarded with an original explosion and synthesis of high concepts. The book's excavation of subjectivity shuns pat psychologisation; its structural analysis moves beyond the stale and inert. Exciting reading for anyone who has been seeking new tools for understanding some of of the enduring ugliness of 'sexual modernity'. -- Amber Husain, author of Replace Me and Meat Love: An Ideology of the Flesh Table of ContentsI1 Sexual Modernity2 Sexual Science3 Racial Hygiene4 National FamilyII5 Divide and Assimilate6 Identity Crisis7 Dangerous Brown Women8 Think of the ChildrenCoda: The Promise that Would Never Be Kept

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Book SynopsisThe Care Manifesto puts care at the heart of the debates of our current crisis: from intimate care-childcare, healthcare, elder care-to care for the natural world. We live in a world where carelessness reigns, but it does not have to be this way.The Care Manifesto puts forth a vision for a truly caring world. The authors want to reimagine the role of care in our everyday lives, making it the organising principle in every dimension and at every scale of life. We are all dependent on each other, and only by nurturing these interdependencies can we cultivate a world in which each and every one of us can not only live but thrive.The Care Manifesto demands that we must put care at the heart of the state and the economy. A caring government must promote collective joy, not the satisfaction of individual desire. This means the transformation of how we organise work through co-operatives, localism and nationalisation. It proposes the expansion of our understanding of kinship for a more 'promiscuous care'. It calls for caring places through the reclamation of public space, to make a more convivial city. It sets out an agenda for the environment, most urgent of all, putting care at the centre of our relationship to the natural world.Trade ReviewWhy do we live in a world that rewards the uncaring, the care-free and the care-less? How long can we tolerate such a state? Not long according to this vital, urgent and compelling book about why radical change is needed. The manifesto not only critiques uncaring governments and corporations, but also offers an alternative. There is one and we desperately need it. * Bev Skeggs, Distinguished Professor, Lancaster Univeristy *This manifesto is a call to action for global progressives. The Care Collective shows the "systemic carelessness" of existing political, economic, and kinship orders are broken both for humans and the planet. They demonstrate that capacious care offers a practical and already existing starting point for change on all levels. -- Joan Tronto, author of Caring DemocracyAn inspiring and revolutionary call for an economy and society based on caring for the earth and each other . . .rings with both freshness and familiarity, moral clarity and political necessity. It's wonderful. -- Avi Lewis * The Leap *Rais[es] fundamental questions about care and caring in the contemporary context. * Morning Star *Robustly analytical ... the current crisis has forced the always urgent issue of care into the spotlight. * Observer *The Care Manifesto is a radiant invitation to transform our economy and society, a roadmap for how we can emerge from overlapping crises and weave a new social fabric. The ethic of universal care is an antidote to the spiralling carelessness that our current system shows towards people and the planet. The authors understand that care is not a commodity: it's a practice, a core value, and an organizing principle on which a new politics can and must be built. -- Naomi Klein, author of On FireFinally a 'care manifesto' that shows how powerful caring can and should be in changing global practices and institutions and in transforming our world! No longer a private concern nor the exclusive preoccupation of moralists speculating about the essential feminine, care is given by this text in the form of a bracing critique of neo-liberal profit-making. The Care Manifesto charts a path toward the transformation of kinship, the gendered division of labor, ecological activism, and secures the principles of interdependence that should guide progressive transnational institutions. The Care Collective writes with a compelling clarity, a capacity for reflection in the midst of urgent times, and remind us that care brings with it a complex history and a promising future. As they note, among the meanings of the Old English caru, are care, concern, anxiety, sorrow, grief, trouble - all terms that resonate with our times. Care implicates our lives in each others lives, mapping and animating a politics of promise for our times. -- Judith Butler, author of The Force of NonviolenceThe book of 2020 because not only does it find a way out of the crisis but it lays the basis for something better in its place. * Labour Hub *The ideas in the book are laudable and important -- Emily Kenway * Red Pepper *In showing us the power of mutual aid, coalition-building and solidarity, this book aids us in ensuring our activism is enacted through our daily actions within our communities and that whilst change starts within us, it doesn't end there. -- Adele Walton * gal-dem *

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Book SynopsisFleeing her moribund marriage in Cape Town, Beth accepts a diplomatic posting to Shanghai. In this anonymous city she hopes to lose herself in books, wine, and solitude, and to dodge whatever pangs of conscience she feels for her fealty to a South African regime that, by the 21st century, has betrayed its early promises.At night, she hears the sound of typing, and then late one evening Zhao arrives at her door. They explore hidden Shanghai and discover a shared love of Langston Hughes--who had his own Chinese and African sojourns. But then Zhao vanishes, and a typewritten manuscript--chunk by chunk--appears at her doorstep instead. The truths unearthed in this manuscript cause her to reckon with her own past, and the long-buried story of what happened to Kay, her fearless, revolutionary friend...Connecting contemporary Shanghai, late Apartheid-era South Africa, and China during the Great Leap Forward and the Tiananmen uprising--and refracting this globe-trotting and time-traveling through Hughes' confessional letters to a South African protege about the poet's time in Shanghai--How to Be a Revolutionary is an amazingly ambitious novel. It's also a heartbreaking exploration of what we owe our countries, our consciences, and ourselves.Trade ReviewOn The Blacks of Cape Town: Beautifully written and compelling. She shows how notions of belonging, of home and exile, are contingent on much more than place and history. -- James Smith * Africa in Words *How to Be a Revolutionary is a novel about the costs of remembering the past and the far more dire consequences of forgetting it. -- Eileen Gonzalez * Foreword *South African novelist Davids delivers a politically charged story of love and espionage. An intriguing story that...winds its way to an elegantly satisfying conclusion. * Kirkus Review *Deeply rewarding and pleasurable. -- Khairani Barokka * The White Review, Books of the Year 2021 *There is much to admire here: Davids is excellent on the grind of daily life under repressive regimes, whether it be the brutal terror of apartheid South Africa or the technocratic surveillance state that is present-day China. -- Peter Whittaker * New Internationalist *Kaleidoscopic...An admirably ambitious and absorbing exploration of activism, betrayal and daily life in interesting times, of increasing relevance in many parts of the world. -- Sarah Moss * New York Times *History, like revolutions, is complicated, and Davids is sensitive in her portrayal of the impossible choices that ordinary people face during moments of acute political crisis. -- Rhian Sasseen * Paris Review *C.A. Davids doesn't shy away from confronting big issues that constitute the human condition today. At its heart is the question of how the specific events and actions that comprise the lives of individuals might speak to, and indeed influence, a shared social consciousness. -- Mark Rappolt * ArtReview *Exquisite ... the sheer beauty of the prose and the shrewdness of the observations will keep the reader entranced. -- Glen Retief * Mail & Guardian *How To Be A Revolutionary is a fabulous, sometimes frightening flight of transnational imagination, a truly original debut novel by C.A. Davids. The parallel tales of these three uncertain "revolutionaries" include a fictional story of the poet Langston Hughes, and traverse across time and place, from the 1930's to the present day, circling around Shanghai, Cape Town and Harlem. This novel could be a textbook for how to write politics and history into a novel, without sentimentality or self-righteous ideology, because Davids' characters are all vital, flawed and persuasively real. As well, the narrative is rooted in a deep understanding of the political histories and worlds it portrays. This is also a profound and complex investigation of what it means to be both privileged and oppressed, and how there are no easy choices on either the "right" or "wrong" side of history. A fascinating read that takes you into many hearts of darkness. Davids is a talented new voice, and a visionary storyteller of the inescapable histories and experiences that connect us all. -- Xu Xi, author of Insignificance

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Book SynopsisHow does the criminal justice system affect women's lives? Do prisons keep women safe? Should feminists rely on policing and the law to achieve women's liberation?The mainstream feminist movement has proposed "locking up the bad men," and called on prisons, the legal system, and the state to protect women from misogynist violence. This carceral approach to feminism, activist and scholar Gwenola Ricordeau argues, does not make women safer: it harms women, including victims of violence, and in particular people of color, poor people, and LGBTQ people.In this scintillating, comprehensive study, Ricordeau draws from two decades as an abolitionist activist and scholar of the penal justice system to describe how the criminal justice system hurts women. Considering the position of survivors of violence, criminalized women, and women with criminalized relatives, Ricordeau charts a new path to emancipation without incarceration. With a new foreword by Silvia Federici.Trade ReviewWith a new foreword by Silvia Federici, this volume makes a feminist case for the abolition of the prison system as we have known it. Ricordeau deftly explores the harms of incarceration and the path to a more just system for all. -- Karla Strand, Best Books of August 2023 * Ms. Magazine *Professor Ricordeau's analysis of the absurdities of the system and the sizable obstacles facing those determined to find meaningful solutions combines scholarly discipline with a powerful, emotional appeal for justice. -- Bill Littlefield * The Arts Fuse *Do prisons ever really keep women safe? For a long time, mainstream feminism has been dominated by the view that bad men should simply be locked away. But, as activist and scholar Gwendola Ricordeau argues, this carceral approach has never made women safer: instead, it only makes society's most marginalized suffer. Here, she proposes a bolder, more radical vision. * Dazed *Gwenola Ricordeau's compelling new book, Free Them All, builds a contemporary case for the intersections between feminism and prison abolition, dismantling the notion that the criminalization of violence against women benefits or protects women. Ricordeau argues that our penal system protects no one, is driven by profit, and disproportionately harms victims of violence, poor people, people of color, and LGBTQ people.the translation work of Emma Ramadan and Tom Roberge is precise and lucid throughout. -- Rachel DeWoskin * LIBER *Table of ContentsPreface by Silvia FedericiIntroduction: My Heart Has Its ReasonsCh 1: Prison AbolitionCh 2: The Victimization of Women and their Treatment by the Penal SystemCh 3: Women in the Legal SystemCh 4: Women at the Doors of PrisonsCh 5: Prison Abolition and FeminismCh 6: Self-Emancipation from Prisons and the Building of Autonomy

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Book SynopsisAfter the feminist art collective LASTESIS created their performance "A Rapist in Your Path" in their native Chile, it went viral across the globe, becoming the anthem of the grassroots feminist movements in South America and around the world. This is their manifesto, an angry, unrepentant tour-de-force that moves through rage, femicide, abortion, homophobia, feminist art, and the oppression of the state to argue for a feminist world based on collective struggle and a visionary political art. Translated by Camila Valle.Trade ReviewLASTESIS, the Chilean feminist performance collective, shows today how popular art can be about changing the world, not entertaining. -- Nadya Tolokonnikova * Time Magazine *This book is poetry, manifesto, collective knowledge, rage, and action. LASTESIS demonstrates that the feminist movement is not anti-intellectual, but rather redefines concepts and political theses: theory is a chant, a performance, a language embedded in bodies, and a way of collective existence. -- Verónica Gago, author of Feminist InternationalIntroduces LASTESIS'S angry, galvanising and feminist vision to the Global North...Set Fear on Fire transforms the readers' own patriarchal terror into feminist rage. -- Naomi Larsson Piñeda * ArtReview *Poignant ... Set Fear On Fire is both its own powerful thing and part of something wider. -- Eilidh Akilade * The List *

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Book SynopsisCriticism of contemporary art is split by an opposition between activism and the critical function of form. Yet the deeper, more subterranean terms of art-judgment are largely neglected on both sides. These essays combine a re-examination of the terms of judgement of contemporary art with critical interpretations of individual works and exhibitions by Luis Camnitzer, Marcel Duchamp, Matias Faldbakken, Anne Imhof and Cady Noland. The book moves from philosophical issues, via the lingering shadows of medium-specificity (in photography and art music), and the changing states of museums, to analyses of the peculiar ways that works of art relate to time.To give artistic form to crisis, it is suggested, one needs to understand contemporary art's own constitutive crisis of form.Trade ReviewSpritely -- David Beer * The Critic *Praise for Anywhere or Not At All * : *An important achievement. This is the first book known to me that brings contemporary art as a whole to philosophical consideration. One of the orienting points for future work. -- John Rapko * Notre Dame, Philosophical Reviews *A brilliant book -- Blake Stimson * Philosophy of Photography *Osborne's capacity to synthesise the impact of new geopolitical realities on art practices make this book an important one not just for philosophers, art historians and critics, but new media theorists as well. -- Lisa Trhair * Critical Enquiry *An inestimably significant intervention into a range of debates in the history, theory, criticism, and philosophy of contemporary art and its various genealogies and lineages. For the range of thought-provoking and suggestive insights offered, it has few competitors in the field. -- James Lavender * Goodreads *Praise for The Postconceptual Condition * : *Compelling -- Max L. Feldman * Afterimage *Peter Osborne offers a fundamental reflection on the critical potential of art today, but also on its lacunas, an element that gives more value to the work. * Critique d’art *Very little philosophical writing is inspiring enough to catalyse art and bring it into being. Peter Osborne's writing is consistently in this category. -- Hito SteyerlIt is essential reading for anyone serious about contemporary art - or its philosophy. -- Ruth Noack, Curator of documeta 12

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