Verso Books

Book Synopsis**Longlisted for the 2023 Cundill History Prize**The iconic deserts of the American southwest could not have been colonized and settled without the help of desert experts from the Middle East. For example: In 1856, a caravan of thirty-three camels arrived in Indianola, Texas, led by a Syrian cameleer the Americans called "Hi Jolly." This "camel corps," the US government hoped, could help the army secure the new southwest swath of the country just wrested from Mexico. Though the dream of the camel corps - and sadly, the camels - died, the idea of drawing on expertise, knowledge, and practices from the desert countries of the Middle East did not. As Natalie Koch demonstrates in this evocative, narrative history, the exchange of colonial technologies between the Arabian Peninsula and United States over the past two centuries - from date palm farming and desert agriculture to the utopian sci-fi dreams of Biosphere 2 and Frank Herbert's Dune - bound the two regions together, solidifying the colonization of the US West and, eventually, the reach of American power into the Middle East. Koch teaches us to see deserts anew, not as mythic sites of romance or empty wastelands but as an "arid empire," a crucial political space where imperial dreams coalesce.Trade ReviewArid Empire explores the dual relationship between colonization of the U.S. Southwest and diplomatic relations in the Middle East -- Hunter Bassler * KPNX Channel 12 *With lucid prose, a big narrative sweep and an impressive command of the facts, Natalie Koch exposes the connections -- both historic and modern -- between two dry spots on the globe with vastly different human cultures that forged strong economic and military ties. The 'double exposure' between Arizona and Arabia is a vital contribution to geographic scholarship, as well as a missing piece of the puzzle for residents of both America's backyard Sahara and the Arabian Peninsula's version of the Mojave. -- Tom Zoellner, author of Rim to RiverI've waited for a book like this for a long time. Arizona's place in our collective imagination has been as a water-starved, overheated, dangerous crossing point for Latin American migrants. But it is these things and more. From the experimental agricultural programs to the refugee settlement communities and, yes, the camels, it has also been a site for the projection of imperial power in the Middle East, North Africa, and the rest of the world. Now that Natalie Koch has helped us see it so clearly, we won't ever be able to unsee it. -- Geraldo Cadava, author of The Hispanic Republican and Standing on Common GroundArid Empire is a surprising history book about the centuries-old cyclical relationship between two deserts half a world away from each other - and their continued mutual influence. -- Jeff Fleischer * Foreword Reviews *Koch successfully capitalizes on a series of carefully documented case studies to unpack the United States' often elusive and indirect pseudocolonial ambitions. In doing so, she reveals how, in the name of scientific progress and technological advancement, US policymakers and private companies - with close ties to institutions of higher education - gained access to desert resources and profited from them, all while claiming to reject old-world colonial attitudes. The outcomes were nonetheless similar. -- Pamela Karimi * Science *Like the sunglasses in the classic sci-fi film They Live, Arid Empire gives us the lenses we need to detect and critique 20th century ideologies at work in the 21st. -- Zachary Sugg * Water Alternatives *At once a fascinating history of US and Arab attempts to make the desert productive in human terms and a comprehensive discussion of what colonizing the desert means. -- Ron Jacobs * Counterpunch *Arid Empire offers an insightful and beautifully written history with a unique and most-welcome transregional premise. -- Sean Lawrence * Enviromental History *Simultaneously a work of historical geography, political ecology, international relations, and cultural studies, Natalie Koch's Arid Empire denaturalizes settler-colonial and modernist myths by uncovering connections between the long-term economic developments of Arizona and the Arabian Peninsula. -- Clarence Dodge * The AAG Review of Books *Table of ContentsAcknowledgementsFiguresArea MapsChapter 1, Double Exposure Chapter 2, DatesChapter 3, DiplomacyChapter 4, DesalChapter 5, DreamsChapter 6, Deserts

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Book SynopsisAs we rebuild our lives in the wake of Covid-19 and face the challenges of ecological disaster, how can the left win a world fit for life? Planet on Fire is an urgent manifesto for a fundamental reimagining of the global economy. It offers a clear and practical road map for a future that is democratic and sustainable by design. Laurie Laybourn-Langton and Mathew Lawrence argue that it is not enough merely to spend our way out of the crisis; we must also rapidly reshape the economy to create a new way of life that can foster a healthy and flourishing environment for all. Planet on Fire offers a detailed and achievable manifesto for a new politics capable of tackling environmental breakdown.Trade ReviewWe now face an environmental crisis that has to be confronted. This book sets out the scale of the emergency as well as marks out the route to a better society. This is an essential read. -- John McDonnell, MPFor all who would build tomorrow not merely suffer it; for all who would heal the rifts that threaten us today between the generations and among the peoples; for all who know that human beings and human societies alike stand always within Nature never above it; for all who know that we must now turn our backs once and for all on domination, oppression, and exploitation, of Nature and of each other: this book is a manifesto and a call to arms. Please read it." -- John Ashton, UK climate change envoy 2006-12This book lays bare how capitalism led to the age of environmental breakdown and what this will mean for human societies. Most importantly, it focuses on explaining what an eco-socialist future would look like and that this future is a realistic, achievable and hopeful alternative to the predominant narrative of doom which typically surrounds discussions of environmental destruction. -- Carola Rackete, activist and author of It's Time to ActEloquent, clear-sighted and erudite, Planet On Fire is an important analysis of the interlocking political and economic forces driving us towards ecological catastrophe, and a credible route-map towards an alternative -- Will DaviesThis clear and incisive book starts from the immensely important insight that we cannot understand climate breakdown outside of the capitalist social relations that produced it. Planet on Fire reminds us that climate breakdown is intimately linked to all the overlapping crises humanity faces - from the rise of the far right, to growing socioeconomic inequality, to the COVID-19 pandemic - and that ecosocialism is the only route to an equal and sustainable world. -- Grace BlakeleyFor all who would build tomorrow not merely suffer it; for all who would heal the rifts that threaten us today between the generations and among the peoples; for all who know that human beings and human societies alike stand always within Nature never above it; for all who know that we must now turn our backs once and for all on domination, oppression, and exploitation, of Nature and of each other: this book is a manifesto and a call to arms. Please read it. -- John Ashton"Capitalism would create a desert and call it profit." Halfway through Planet on Fire, Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton drop this devastating judgement-but they don't stop at doom. Instead they offer blueprints, rally-points for energies, and chronicles of useful pasts for a decarbonized future. In the end, the climate crisis, they remind us, is not about individual morality or scientific authority but power and politics. This is a handbook for the fights to come. -- Quinn SlobodianThis book lays bare how capitalism led to the age of environmental breakdown and what this will mean for human societies. Most importantly, it focuses on explaining what an eco-socialist future would look like and that this future is a realistic, achievable and hopeful alternative to the predominant narrative of doom which typically surrounds discussions of environmental destruction. -- Carola RacketeA clear, powerful vision for ecosocialist transition. Don't miss this book. -- Jason HickelTrump may have left, but Trumpism is here to stay. In response, a transformative Green New Deal is more urgent than ever, charting a course beyond fossil fuel capitalism and deepening eco-apartheid and inequality. This vital contribution is a roadmap for how we get there and a political guide for the times ahead. -- Kate AronoffThe authors' vision of the path to climate justice is an antidote to disaster politics in so many ways, not least because it is both fair and unexpectedly luxurious. Each page is absolutely brimming with ideas as they meticulously take us through every important sector of the economy and reveal carefully thought through recommendations for reform. By focusing on power and who wields it they correctly identify the levers for change and who must now be empowered to push them. * Michelle Meagher, author of Competition is Killing Us: How Big Business is Harming Our Society and Planet - and What To Do About It *Reading Planet on Fire feels like traversing a humming, interdependent ecosystem of ideas, porous to the post-crash movements and thinkers shaping today's progressive environmentalism ... Starkly realistic whilst unflinchingly radical, Planet on Fire is a guidebook of hope for this crucial decade. -- Flora Parkin * LSE International Development *A practical starting point for reworking power structures that are dependent on extraction and initiating the new, society-oriented systems ... essential reading. -- Martha Dillon * It's Freezing in LA! *Offers an urgent alternative. -- George Eaton * New Statesman *Framing the situation in terms of the global inequality that fuels extractive global capitalism, and its roots in colonialism, Lawrence and Layborne-Langton put this power imbalance at the heart of their analysis. It enables them to offer some worthwhile answers for how we might solve our interconnected crises. -- Ann Pettifor * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisDuring the 1960s and 1970s, Workerism and Autonomia were prominent Marxist currents. However, it is rarely acknowledged that these movements inspired many visual artists such as the members of Archizoom, Gordon Matta-Clark and Gianfranco Baruchello. This book focuses on the aesthetic and cultural discourse developed by three generations of militants (including Mario Tronti, Antonio Negri, Bifo and Silvia Federici), and how it was appropriated by artists, architects, graphic designers and architectural historians such as Manfredo Tafuri. Images of Class signposts key moments of this dialogue, ranging from the drawings published on classe operaia to Potere Operaio's exhibition in Paris, the Metropolitan Indians' zines, a feminist art collective who adhered to the Wages for Housework Campaign, and the N group's experiments with Gestalt theory. Featuring more than 140 images of artworks, many published here for the first time, this volume provides an original perspective on post-war Italian culture and new insights into some of the most influential Marxist movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries worldwide.Trade ReviewA tremendous achievement: through critically exploring what it terms "visual practices and communicative strategies", Images of Class uncovers crucial, hitherto ignored dimensions of the workerist adventure. -- Steve Wright, author of Storming Heaven Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist MarxismThe 1970s in Italy were a decade of social conflicts and intense cultural and aesthetic innovation, but only now, thanks to the Galimberti's book we can have a glimpse of the visual dimension of the movement of Autonomia and of the cultural field that is generally known as "operaismo". -- Franco "Bifo" BerardiMasterful in sweep and molecular in detail, Jacopo Galimberti's volume draws upon thorough archival work and a nuanced understanding of Italy's post-war extraparliamentary left. As the book's incisive case studies reveal, the period's proliferating images of class were matched by an assault upon established classes of imagery. The defiance of capitalist wage relations found an equivalent not merely in the iconography of social contestation, but new formats and forums, new means of circulation and dissemination, from architectural interventions to graphic novels to ephemera which refused institutionalization. Galimberti shows us a time and place when the collective "class vernacular" of operaismo and autonomia had not yet ceded to something else. We can still rail against that something else, in Italy and elsewhere: urban gentrification, critical grandstanding, a bloated art market, the aesthetic apotheosis of the individual. But this book helps us remember what came first and what might, one day, come again. -- Ara H Merjian, New York UniversityRich in innovative insights, Images of Class proposes a fresh approach to a tumultuous historical period that generated original political theories and social movements. This inspiring and beautiful volume is a must-read. -- Leopoldina Fortunati, author of The Arcane of ReproductionA very significant contribution in the English language to the historicization of operaismo...Images of Class performs novel research on the development of these Marxian and dissident tendencies alongside visual, literary, and architectural production and theory. -- Andreas Petrossiants * Social Text *

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Book SynopsisThe Fall and Rise of American Finance traces the collapse and reconstitution of American financial power from the disintegration of robber baron J. P. Morgan's vast empire to the rise of finance behemoth BlackRock. Contrary to what is taken for common sense by figures from Hillary Clinton to Bernie Sanders, Maher and Aquanno insist that financialization did not imply the hollowing out of the "real" economy or the retreat of the state. Rather, it served to intensify competitive discipline to maximize efficiency, profits, and the exploitation of labor-with the support of an increasingly authoritarian state.Trade ReviewWorthy heirs to their teacher, the great Leo Panitch, Maher and Aquanno sketch an alternative history of the last century that every critical scholar of finance must now engage and contend with. -- Quinn Slobodian, author of Crack-Up CapitalismA groundbreaking historical work with vital implications for theory and politics. The Fall and Rise of American Finance changes our vision of the present-and the future. -- Clara E. Mattei, author of The Capital Order Critical political economists tend to separate finance and 'the real economy,' seeing the former as parasitic on the latter. But what if finance has always been there and has always been the mechanism that disciplined capitalism as a whole? Maher and Aquanno explore this alternative reading of financialization. It is a compelling and convincing account. -- Mark Blyth, Professor of International Economics at Brown UniversityTable of ContentsPreface1: The Latest Phase of American Capitalist DevelopmentThe Fall and Rise of American FinanceA New Picture of FinancializationRethinking Finance and the Corporation2: Classical Finance Capital and the Modern StateFinancial Capital and Industrial CapitalFrom Bank Capital to Finance CapitalFinance Capital and CompetitionState Power, Class Power, and Crisis3: Managerialism and the New Deal StateRemaking Capitalist FinanceThe New Industrial OrderClass Struggle and the Crisis of Managerialism4: Neoliberalism and Financial HegemonyThe Financialization of the Non-Financial CorporationAsset-Based Accumulation and Market-Based FinanceFinancialization and Authoritarian StatismThe 2008 Crisis and the Question of Decline5: The New Finance Capital and the Risk StateCrisis Management and the Risk StateThe Rise of the Big ThreeThe New Finance CapitalPrivate Equity, Hedge Funds, and Finance Capital6: Crises, Contradictions, and PossibilitiesThe Statization of Market-Based FinanceThe Macroeconomic Policy of Finance CapitalThe False Promise of Universal OwnershipDemocratizing FinanceNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisIn Marx's Literary Style, the Venezuelan poet and philosopher Ludovico Silva argues that much of the confusion around Marx's work results from a failure to understand his literary mode of expression. Through meticulous readings of key passages in Marx's oeuvre, Silva isolates the key elements of his style: his search for an "architectonic" unity at the level of the text, his capacity to express himself dialectically at the level of the sentence, and, above all, his great gift for metaphor. Silva's unique sensitivity to Marx's literary choices allows him to illuminate a number of terms that have been persistently, and fatefully, misunderstood by many of Marx's most influential readers, including alienation, reflection, and base and superstructure. At the heart of Silva's book is his contention that we we cannot hope to understand Marx if we treat him as a scientist, a philosopher, or a literary writer, when he was in fact all three at once. Originally published in 1971, this is a key work by one of the most important Latin American Marxists of the twentieth century. This edition, which marks the first appearance of one of Silva's works in English, features an introduction by Alberto Toscano.Trade ReviewWe've waited a long time for an English-language edition of this brilliant, agenda-setting work. The book is indispensable. To read it is to learn how inadequate it is to describe any metaphor - and certainly any of Marx's - as "mere" ever again. -- China MiévilleSilva demonstrates with wonderful clarity that Marx's literary style - especially his metaphors and his irony - is not merely ornamental but absolutely essential to his argument. -- Michael Hardt, author of The Subversive SeventiesIn this lively, compact, and refreshingly unpretentious study, Ludovico Silva shows how attention to Marx's style not only enhances our pleasure in reading him, but also sharpens our theoretical understanding of his texts. Silva's early analysis of Marx's way of making his thinking "plastically perceived" through the rhythm, tone, and careful patterning of his writing helps us more clearly distinguish Marx's metaphors from his concepts, and in doing so, better understand the dialectical play between them. Marx's Literary Style is a recovered classic. -- Sianne Ngai, author of Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist FormTranslated with gusto by Paco Brito Núñez, to whose initiative anglophone readers owe a debt of gratitude, Marx's Literary Style is one of those short little books that packs a punch far in excess of its diminutive size...It is impossible to read Marx's Literary Style and not emerge with a very different understanding of the literary to that with which one began. -- Daniel Hartley * Jacobin *In 1971 the little booklet of a Venezuelan author, Ludovico Silva, Marx, appeared, published in Italian in 1973 by Bompiani. I believe it can no longer be found and it would be worthwhile to reprint it. Referring to the history of Marx's literary formation (few know that he also wrote poems, albeit very bad ones, in the opinion of the few who have read them), Silva meticulously analyzed all of Marx's work. -- Umberto EcoSilva's long-overdue English debut offers another view on the full, resonant brilliance of Marx's work: how masterfully he harmonized modes of language that ranged from positivist to poetic, and how urgently he sought to identify what hinders our realizing the world of which he dreamed. -- Sam Russek * Protean Magazine *Silva's book, rich with insight regarding Marx's prose, also provides insight into the nature of Marx's economic and political analysis. The reader is able to think dialogically and dialectically along with him. At the same time, he helps the reader do the same with Marx, who Silva convincingly argues is a great stylist. -- Michael Principe * Marx & Philosophy Review of Books *

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Book SynopsisIn the struggle for a better world, setbacks are inevitable. Defeat can feel overwhelming at times, but it has to be endured. How then do the people on the front line keep going? To answer that question, Hannah Proctor draws on historical resources to find out how revolutionaries and activists of the past kept a grip on hope.Burnout considers despairing former Communards exiled to a penal colony in the South Pacific; exhausted Bolsheviks recuperating in sanatoria in the aftermath of the October Revolution; an ex-militant on the analyst’s couch relating dreams of ruined landscapes; Chinese peasants engaging in self-criticism sessions; a political organiser seeking advice from a spiritual healer; civil rights movement activists battling weariness; and a group of feminists padding a room with mattresses to scream about the patriarchy. Jettisoning self-help narratives and individualizing therapy talk, Proctor offers a different way forward - neither denial nor despair.

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Book SynopsisComforting a family member or friend, soothing children, providing company for the elderly, ensuring that people feel well enough to work; this is all essential labour. Without it, capitalism would cease to function. They Call It Love investigates the work that makes a haven in a heartless world, examining who performs this labour, how it is organised, and how it might change. In this groundbreaking book, Alva Gotby calls this work 'emotional reproduction', unveiling its inherently political nature. It not only ensures people's well-being but creates sentimental attachments to social hierarchy and the status quo. Drawing on the thought of the feminist movement Wages for Housework, Gotby demonstrates that emotion is a key element of capitalist reproduction. To improve the way we relate to one another will require a radical restructuring of society.Trade ReviewA fascinating and exhaustive explanation as to why emotions are a political issue. -- Brit Dawson * AnOther Magazine *They Call It Love shines a light on the invisible labour involved in love, examining who is responsible for performing it, how it can blossom, and why we do it. -- Adele Walton * Dazed *Gotby makes clear our emotional lives are inherently political. Her analysis of the politics of reproductive labour is a cogent criticism of the bourgeois capitalist logics of feeling, of the free labour of intimacy and of normative femininity. -- Adèle Cassigneul * MAI Journal *They Call It Love is a very fine book - one that balances polemical force with careful and rigorous research. In advancing its account of emotional reproduction, it brings together existing bodies of work on unwaged social reproduction and remunerated emotional labour to great effect, shining a light upon a too often overlooked (and heavily gendered) form of work. It is sharp, thoughtful, and well-written, and represents a substantial scholarly achievement. Alva Gotby is a writer and thinker to watch out for. -- Helen Hester, author of Xenofeminism, co-author of After WorkThis thorough book sheds new light on the critics of the political economy on emotional life. It is a welcome addition to the studies on the social meaning of the immaterial production that takes place in the domestic sphere. They Call It Love is a fascinating insider's account of the hidden, economic dimension of our emotional lives whose subject matter will make for passionate arguments and conversations among feminists and scholars in general. -- Leopoldina Fortunati, author of The Arcane of ReproductionGotby's book importantly attempts to underscore and theorise the role of emotions within social reproduction theory. Her concept of 'emotional reproduction' is a reminder that fife-making work is not devoid of affect. -- Sara Farris, author of In the Name of Women’s RightsThey Call It Love is a call to attention: Alva Gotby astutely maps the work of emotional support and care that is done day in and day out and across everyday life. Gotby not only insists that more value be attributed to emotional reproduction, but makes a sophisticated and compelling case for a radical repurposing of emotions, needs, and desires in the struggle for change - a struggle that is necessarily also a struggle for new ways of being together. -- Emma Dowling, author of The Care CrisisGotby powerfully, and persuasively, argues that the labour of love is at the heart of the anti-capitalist struggle . a beautifully written and engaging book that introduces complex ideas and explains them incredibly well. -- Patrycja Sosnowska-Buxton * Sociological Review *

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Book SynopsisIn Who Will Build the Ark?, leading radical thinkers debate left alternatives to runaway global heating, capitalist crisis and wider environmental breakdown, clarifying the stakes in today's key disputes between Green New Deal supporters and proponents of 'degrowth'. In a series of landmark texts first published by New Left Review, Herman Daly and Benjamin Kunkel discusses the possibility of an egalitarian, steady-state economy, while Robert Pollin warns against the worldwide slump 'degrowth' could bring and calls instead for a single-issue campaign - 2 per cent of global GDP dedicated to the switch to renewable energy - as the swiftest solution to the emissions crisis. Nancy Fraser envisages an eco-socialist exit from capitalism's multifold crises, while Troy Vettese advocates eco-austerity and half-earth rewilding. Lola Seaton draws out the strategic implications of these contested perspectives, in a set of unavoidable 'green questions'. In the realm of contemporary politics, Alyssa Battistoni writes on the dead-end of COP diplomacy, Cédric Durand asks whether energy shortages will derail the transition away from fossil fuels, and Thomas Meaney compares Green New Deal proposals to the pinched reality of Biden's Inflation Reduction Act.The world's major powers accept the likelihood of dangerous climate change, yet seem incapable of averting it. Can radical green models generate the social leverage needed to do so? Or, as Mike Davis puts it: Who will build the Ark?Trade ReviewIn recent years, an intense debate has unfolded over the policy and politics of the green transition. Important contributions to this debate have appeared in New Left Review's 'Debating Green Strategy' series. -- Max Krahé * Phenomenal World *

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Book SynopsisIn recent years, the promises of the populist moment have faltered, as seen in the defeats of Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, Jean-Luc Melenchon. In addition, the pandemic has brought about a strong need for protection, creating a favorable terrain for authoritarian forms of politics. This new situation represents a challenge for the left, whose rationalism and modernist idea of progress is rightly suspicious of such demands. How, therefore, can the left deal with the economic, social and ecological crisis that the pandemic has brought to the fore? Chantal Mouffe argues that the left should not underestimate the importance of affects when developing a strategy for political change. In fact, after years of 'post-politics', we are witnessing a 'return of the political'. And in response Mouffe proposes the creation of a broad coalition of movements under the banner of a 'Green Democratic Revolution'. This entails the protection of society and its material conditions in a way that empowers people instead of making them retreat in a defensive nationalism or in a passive acceptance of technological solutions. It is protection for the many, not the few, providing social justice and fostering solidarity.Towards a Green Democratic Revolution is a bold rallying cry for political organisation in the post-pandemic era.Trade ReviewMouffe is unrepentant. Her new book, Towards a Green Democratic Revolution, maintains that left populism is more relevant than ever in light of climate breakdown and the Covid pandemic. -- Oliver Eagleton * New Statesman *Praise for For a Left Populism * : *Influencing left parties as they enter government, from Greece to Portugal to Mexico. It is a beach-sized introduction to a major left thinker of the twenty-first century. -- Paul Mason * Guardian *An admirable attempt to get us thinking again about what a worthwhile politics might look like, one based on notions of equality, ecology, sovereignty, solidarity and social justice -- Gavin Jacobson * New Statesman *Refreshingly bereft of the sputtering outrage and bafflement that characterizes the growing genre of liberal self-help books, Mouffe channels populism's agonistic clarity -- Thea Riofrancos * n+1 *Praise for Agonistics * : *Mouffe represents a position that every serious student of contemporary political thought must acknowledge and come to terms with * Philosopher's Magazine *

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Book SynopsisThe health emergency that broke out in 2020 is a landmark event in the development of capitalism, confirming the underlying change signalled by the Great Crisis of 2007-9. The Pandemic Crisis has catapulted the state to the centre of economic activity. However, a historic impasse is steadily becoming apparent at the core of the world economy Productive accumulation is flaccid, as both profitability and labour productivity are weak. Financialisation has entered a new phase, as "shadow banking" grew relative to other banks but is entirely dependent on the state. The power of the state derives from command over fiat money and can certainly deliver enormous boosts to aggregate demand, but that is not enough to tackle the weakness of the productive sector. The rise in inflation for the first time in forty years indicates the impasse. There is a transparent need for intervention on the supply side, directly challenging capitalist property rights. There is no evidence, however, that the ruling blocs in core countries would engage in such policies.The Pandemic Crisis also brought to the fore fresh divisions of core and periphery across the world economy. Imperialism has assumed new forms, spurred by globally active financial capital and internationalised productive capital. A renewed contest for hegemony has emerged as US power declined. The economic challenge of China will unfold steadily in the years ahead, intensifying political tensions and military rivalries. This book is the work of a research collective comprising authors from several parts of the world. It analyses these vital issues from the perspective of Marxist political economy and puts forth alternative anticapitalist proposals.Trade ReviewA meticulous analysis of what happened when the greatest health crisis since 2018 crashed into the greatest capitalist crisis since 1929. A must read. -- Yanis VaroufakisCapitalism, in its current neoliberal variant, is a perfectly designed system for producing ruinous financial bubbles, massive increases in inequality, and the destruction of the planet. In The State of Capitalism, Costas Lapavitsas and the EReNSEP Writing Collective explain with great scope and force how this has been happening before our eyes for the past 40 years, in all regions of the globe. Critically, they also advance a clear-eyed political program for transcending neoliberalism and building viable democratic socialist alternatives. -- Robert Pollin, Distinguished University Professor of Economics and Co-Director, Political Economy Research InstituteThe State of Capitalism provides an elegant and exhaustive analysis of the changing faces of financialization, neoliberalism, state power and US empire - and how the left must adapt and respond. Lapavitsas develops a typically brilliant and incisive narrative on the transformation of global capitalism since the turn of the century, and shows how these changes formed the foundations of the era of perennial crisis in which we now live. -- Grace BlakeleyIf you wish to conclude your year consolidating your understanding of the world economy and its geopolitical elements, this book certainly offers the opportunity to do so. It is well written and easily accessible to the non-economist. -- Mathew D. Rose * Brave New Europe *

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Book SynopsisThe Autonomous City is the first popular history of squatting as practised in Europe and North America. Alex Vasudevan retraces the struggle for housing in Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen, Detroit, Hamburg, London, Madrid, Milan, New York, and Vancouver. He looks at the organisation of alternative forms of housing-from Copenhagen's Freetown Christiana to the squats of the Lower East Side-as well as the official response, including the recent criminalisation of squatting, the brutal eviction of squatters and their widespread vilification.Pictured as a way to reimagine and reclaim the city, squatting offers an alternative to housing insecurity, oppressive property speculation and the negative effects of urban regeneration. We must, more than ever, reanimate and remake the urban environment as a site of radical social transformation.Trade ReviewAn encyclopaediac and vital history of a topic which is often overlooked but is invariably at the heart of radical city politics. -- Anna Minton, author of Ground ControlThe Autonomous City is a detailed and sympathetic history of squatting movements in Europe and the United States. In addition, it is a discussion of its meaning in the ever fluctuating meanings of urban living. Part academic treatise and part action-packed history, Vasudevan's text provides the reader with a nuanced look at the nature and meaning of the housing crisis in the capitalist West and the solutions housing occupations can provide. In doing so, he brings in the political, cultural and historical meanings behind the squatters and the communities they occupy and create. This is an essential book for anyone interested in the meaning of housing in modern society. It is also a sort of a guidebook for those tired of waiting for the economic and political systems of their respective nations to resolve the crisis that exists in almost every urban zone and who are willing to take matters into their own collective hands. -- Ron Jacobs * Counterpunch *Sweeping research on the surprisingly radical history of occupying abandoned buildings and living in them. -- Lauren Oyler * New Republic *Delving into the history of squatting and radical housing activism, Vasudevan's book traces the ways housing insecurity and affordability crises intertwine with movements to claim and reclaim homes and apartments. -- Patrick Sisson * Curbed *A significant contribution to the written history of squatting movements and struggles to transform the city. It is wide-ranging and well-researched, which should appeal to a wide readership including architects, urban planners, scholars of social movements and anyone with a casual interest in squatting and urban politics. * RIBA Journal *Sheds new light on the transformative role of urban squatting in cities across Europe and North America since the Second World War. Departing from the persistent mythologies and best-known examples of urban squatting Vasudevan reveals understudied examples of activists taking over ordinary as well as iconic, vacant buildings. -- Helen Jarvis * Times Literary Supplement *Carefully researched and discursive study. -- Will Self * New Statesman *Poses difficult and timely questions... a scrupulously detailed, thought-provoking study... a resource for all urban dwellers. * LA Review of Books *This admirable, jargon-free book provides rich, interesting stories about urban squatter movements and makes a significant contribution to political and urban studies and to the field of public policy. * CHOICE *[The Autonomous City] deserves its place on the bookshelf alongside all others which embrace the vision of a more autonomous urban future. * Anarchist Studies *

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Book SynopsisLoved Egyptian Night fundamentally reassesses the Arab Spring, refuting the stories the Western powers fed to the world. There is no doubt that the toppling of Ben Ali in Tunisia in January 2011 and what it led to amounted to a political revolution. But the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and Syria - countries with quite different histories and political traditions - were never revolutions. As Hugh Roberts explains, the bitter ends of these episodes were inscribed in their misunderstood beginnings. To celebrate these uprisings as 'revolutions' preempts and inhibits critical analysis and expresses an abdication of intellectual responsibility. After so much wishful thinking, what remains is the debris of a cynical pretension. Outside interference, ostensibly on behalf of these 'revolutions', reduced Libya to anarchy and condemned Syria to a devastating proxy war now in its twelfth year. In Egypt, the Free Officers' state was re-booted in its most brutal ever

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Book SynopsisOne is not born a worker or a boss, one becomes one from father to son... or almost. Social reproduction is not an iron law; it admits of exceptions that must be accounted for in order to measure its scope. This book aims to understand the passage from one social class to another and to forge a method of approaching these particular cases which remain a blind spot in the theory of social reproduction. It analyzes the political, economic, social, familial and singular causes that contribute to non-reproduction, and their effects on the constitution of individuals transiting from one class to another.At the crossroads of collective history and intimate history, Chantal Jaquet identifies class locations, the interplay of affects and encounters, and the role of sexual and racial differences. She invites us to break out of disciplinary isolation in order to grasp singularity at the crossroads of philosophy, sociology, psychology and literature. This requires deconstruction of the concepts of social and personal identity, in favour of a concepts like complexion and the criss-crossing determinations. Through the figure of the transclass, it is thus the whole human condition that is illuminated in a new light.Trade ReviewTransclasses sets out to fill a lacuna created by the impoverished vocabulary of class by theorizing the class identities of "exceptional" subjects who defy the predictions of social determinism and leave their formative social status behind. Terms of stigma - parvenu, careerist, déclassé, class defector - are used to socially shame such subjects, but as Jaquet demonstrates, to hew to these caricatural typologies is to miss out on the power of class transitioning at the microscales of lived experience and in an intersectional frame. If we have been used to thinking, with Althusser, in terms of the reproduction of capitalism, Jaquet goes one further, producing a model of non-reproductive modes of existence that, far from superseding class or ignoring the reproductive drive of capital, expand their conceptual parameters. An experiment in concept-work that draws on self-narration in literature and auto-ethnography (from Stendhal to Richard Wright, Pierre Bourdieu, Annie Ernaux and Didier Eribon), Transclasses will be essential reading for interdisciplinary fieldworkers committed to new lexicons of identity, class struggle and social change. -- Emily Apter, New York University, author of Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse and the Impolitic (Verso, 2018)For more than a half-century sociologists, political theorists and scholars in the humanities have addressed the question of how a social order reproduces itself, above all, the relations of exploitation and domination that characterize it. Chantal Jaquet, whose studies of Spinoza have helped transform our understanding of that difficult philosopher, asks us instead to examine the phenomenon of non-reproduction, that is, the production of those who fail to fulfil or who resist the roles and functions to them. Her path-breaking work should be read by all those interested in understanding social transformation. -- Warren Montag

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Book SynopsisA relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.Can passion be mistaken for love? When Ida meets Arnold, also married, at a conference, she impulsively invites him to share her bed. She returns home, already half-obsessed, and the dissolution of her marriage and break-up of her family pass almost without her noticing. Arnold has a more relaxed attitude toward the affair. But neither his coolness nor the alarming talk she hears about him can dampen her desire. When she finally has Arnold for herself, all the surface niceties and indulgences they enjoy - travel, sex, beers for

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Book SynopsisBlue-Collar Empire tells the shocking story of the AFL-CIO’s global anticommunist crusade—and its devastating consequences for workers around the world.Unions have the power not only to secure pay raises and employee benefits but to bring economies to a screeching halt and overthrow governments. Recognizing this, in the late twentieth century, the US government sought to control labor movements abroad as part of the Cold War contest for worldwide supremacy. In this work, Washington found an enthusiastic partner in the AFL-CIO’s anticommunist officials, who, in a shocking betrayal, for decades expended their energies to block revolutionary ideologies and militant class consciousness from taking hold in the workers’ movements of Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

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Book SynopsisFor a long time, the term 'ideology' was in disrepute, having become associated with such unfashionable notions as fundamental truth and the eternal verities. The tide has turned, and recent years have seen a revival of interest in the questions that ideology poses to social and cultural theory, and to political practice. Mapping Ideology is a comprehensive reader covering the most important contemporary writing on the subject. Including Slavoj Zizek's study of the development of the concept from Marx to the present, assessments of the contributions of Lukács and the Frankfurt School by Terry Eagleton, Peter Dews and Seyla Benhabib, and essays by Adorno, Lacan and Althusser, Mapping Ideology is an invaluable guide to the most dynamic field in cultural theory.

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Book SynopsisAll That Is Solid Melts into Air is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest books on modernity. A kaleidoscopic journey into the experience of modernization, it captures the dizzying social changes that swept up and transformed the lives of millions of people. Berman delves into the aesthetic and intellectual controversies of art, literature, and architecture: from the writing of Goethe, Marx and Dostoevsky to the Paris of Baudelaire and Haussmann, the Petersburg of the Tsarist builders and Pushkin, and the New York of devastated wastelands and creative artists.Trade ReviewA bubbling cauldron of ideas. * New Statesman *A wonderful book ... generous, exuberant and dazzling. -- John Leonard * New York Times *Berman lights up every text he examines. * Newsweek *The imaginative range, intellectual force and infectious generosity of this book are what place it incontestably in the gallery of canonical texts. -- Mica Nava * Times Higher Education Supplement *

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Book SynopsisIn this short, highly readable book, the master of world-systems theory provides a succinct anatomy of capitalism over the past five hundred years. Considering the way capitalism has changed and evolved over the centuries, and what has remained constant, he outlines its chief characteristics. In particular, he looks at the emergence and development of a world market, and of labor; in doing so, he argues that capitalism has brought about immiseration in the Global South. As long as they remain within a framework of world capitalism, Wallerstein concludes, the economic and social problems of developing countries will remain unresolved.Historical Capitalism, published here with its companion essay Capitalist Civilization, is a concise, compelling beginners' guide to one of the most challenging and influential assessments of capitalism as a world-historic mode of production.

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Book SynopsisFirst published in 1967, Guy Debord's stinging revolutionary critique ofcontemporary society, The Society of the Spectacle has since acquired acult status. Credited by many as being the inspiration for the ideasgenerated by the events of May 1968 in France, Debord's pitiless attackon commodity fetishism and its incrustation in the practices of everydaylife continues to burn brightly in today's age of satellite televisionand the soundbite. In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, publishedtwenty years later, Debord returned to the themes of his previousanalysis and demonstrated how they were all the more relevant in aperiod when the "integrated spectacle" was dominant. Resolutely refusingto be reconciled to the system, Debord trenchantly slices through thedoxa and mystification offered tip by journalists and pundits to showhow aspects of reality as diverse as terrorism and the environment, theMafia and the media, were caught up in the logic of the spectacularsociety. Pointing the finger clearly at those who benefit from the logicof domination, Debord's Comments convey the revolutionary impulse atthe heart of situationism.Trade ReviewGuy Debord is a time bomb, and a difficult one to defuse.A" Michael Lowy

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Book SynopsisNancy Fraser's major new book traces the feminist movement's evolution since the 1970s and anticipates a new-radical and egalitarian-phase of feminist thought and action.During the ferment of the New Left, "Second Wave" feminism emerged as a struggle for women's liberation and took its place alongside other radical movements that were questioning core features of capitalist society. But feminism's subsequent immersion in identity politics coincided with a decline in its utopian energies and the rise of neoliberalism. Now, foreseeing a revival in the movement, Fraser argues for a reinvigorated feminist radicalism able to address the global economic crisis. Feminism can be a force working in concert with other egalitarian movements in the struggle to bring the economy under democratic control, while building on the visionary potential of the earlier waves of women's liberation. This powerful new account is set to become a landmark of feminist thought.Trade ReviewNancy Fraser is among the very few thinkers in the tradition of critical theory who are capable of redeeming its legacy in the twenty-first century. -- Axel HonnethFor more than a decade, Nancy Fraser's thought has helped to reframe the agenda of critical theory. -- Etienne BalibarNancy Fraser challenges us to reactivate the audacious spirit of second-wave feminism. Analyzing an imaginary aimed at eradicating exploitation as well as subjugation, she offers a rousing conclusion as to how we might mobilize feminism's best energies against the perils of the neoliberal present. -- Lynne SegalNancy Fraser is one of the most creative social philosophers and critical theorists of her generation. -- Cornel WestFortunes of Feminism goes a long way in bringing together Fraser's substantial body of work on redistribution and recognition . Scholars interested in these themes will find this invaluable - or at least they should. -- Gwendolyn Beetham * THES *Fraser asks: What became of feminism in the wake of the neoliberal turn?.This book is required reading for feminists of all persuasions, and for a broader audience of left readers who want to get an overview of feminist political and philosophical debates.[Fraser] helps us think about the crucial question of where the women's movements in all of their varieties are going. Equally crucially, she helps us to ask what the relationship of such movements is, should be, or could be, to the left broadly defined, in an era in which war and austerity threaten all of the modest social justice gains of the Golden Age. -- Hester Eisenstein * Science and Society *

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Book SynopsisThis volume continues the work of Martin Murray‘s book, South Africa: Time of Agony, Time of Destiny. It explores the social forces that are currently shaping the new South Africa and provides detail on the political and ideological rifts in the liberation movement, including analysis of the “homelands” parties, the trade unions and the ANC. The final chapter of this book surveys the results of the first multi-racial elections in South Africa and assesses their implications for the future of South Africa.Trade Review“Murray’s history of post-apartheid South Africa provides a strong sequel to his prior speculation on South Africa’s social future, charting new paths of possibilities through subsequent changes in South African society and their political results. This analyzes the relationships between the ANC, the Communist Party and trades unions, evaluating politics, interactions, and far-reaching results.—Midwest Book Review

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Book Synopsis"Anyone who survived the exterminations camps must have an untypical story to tell. The typical camp story of the millions ended in death ... We, the few who survived the war and the majority who perished in the camps, did not use and would not have understood terms such as 'holocaust' or 'death march.' These were coined later, by outsiders." Boy 30529 tells the story of a child who at the age of twelve lost everything: hope, home, and even his own identity. Born into a respectable Czech family, Felix's early years were idyllic. But when Nazi persecution threatened in 1938, his father travelled to England, hoping to arrange for his family to emigrate there. His efforts came too late, and his wife and children fell into the hands of the Fascist occupiers. Thus begins a harrowing tale of survival, horror and determination. Over the following years, Felix survived five concentration camps, including Terezín, Auschwitz and Birkenau, as well as, by the skin of his teeth, the Death March from Blechhammer in 1945. Losing both his brother and mother in the camps, Felix was liberated at Buchenwald and eventually reunited at the age of seventeen with his father in Britain, where they built a new life together. Boy 30529 is an extraordinary memoir, as well as a meditation on the nature of memory. It helps us understand why the Holocaust remains a singular presence at the heart of historical debate.Trade ReviewWith a detachment that makes the telling all the more powerful, Felix Weinberg has given witness to what he saw and experienced through the terror, misery and absurdity of his teenage years. This was, he explains, at first a gift to his family, and this intimacy without sentimentality draws us in to the loss at the heart of the book. It was also a history he had suppressed, and as Weinberg tells it, he explains that it's strange and painful to document it for the first time. He revisits the suddenness of round-ups, random killings, separations, forced labour and marches. This reminded me that the war against the Jews was above all else a war against our physical presence in Europe which this book replies to simply by having been written. Beyond that though, is the reply of a boy who escaped annihilation and found that by staying alive he could think, study, research and eventually teach at the highest level. In the face of genocide on any people, anywhere at any time, the book is the ultimate response: that we exist and have the right to exist. I wasn't only moved by it. I was strengthened by it. -- Michael Rosen, author, poetAn unusually good-natured memoir about life in the Nazi camps and the travails of being a postwar refugee. Weinberg ... has a quick, curious mind...A revelation ... told with both candor and odd innocence. * Kirkus Reviews *All those who care about the proper documenting of this horrendous era must be grateful to Felix Weinberg for giving us this insightful and ultimately uplifting account. -- Suzanne Bardgett, Imperial War MuseumA very witty and highly readable account of life in Nazi camps, with truly original information and an amazing sense of humour. A great lesson in resilience, survival, hope-and genuine modesty. -- Gilbert Achcar * The Arabs and the Holocaust *A sensitive, witty, intelligent-and ultimately, extremely moving-memoir. -- Richard Zimler, author of The Warsaw AnagramsFelix Weinberg's memoir stands out from other Holocaust memoirs in its accomplished style, its powers of exact recollection and depiction and in its dry humour. -- Professor Charmian Brinson, author of The Strange Case of Dora Fabian and Mathilde WurmTold with an honest, contemporary, sometimes wry viewpoint, Weinberg's graphic memories are haunting, as he searches the Web and historical archives to find out now what he did not know then, while it was happening to him: where he was marching, how many died. The dual perspective, then and now, and the blend of family intimacy (including occasional photos) with the gripping, authoritative historical overview make this an essential title for discussion. * Booklist *

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Book SynopsisTo the governments and corporations that are currently buying up vast tracts of the Third World, it is called "land leasing." To its critics this new era of colonization is nothing more than "land grabbing." In this arresting account of how millions of hectares of fertile soil are being stolen to feed the wealthy thousands of miles away, journalist Stefano Liberti takes us from a Dutch-owned model farm in Ethiopia to an international conference in Riyadh, where representatives of Third World governments compete to attract the interest of Saudi investors; from institutional and commercial meetings in Rome to the headquarters of the Landless Workers' Movement in São Paulo.Trade ReviewExemplary reportage ... accurate, engaged, honest. * Corriere della Sera, in praise of A Sud Di Lampedusa *Liberti writes with the curiosity and passion of the great journalists of the past. * Internazionale, in praise of A Sud Di Lampedusa *

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Book SynopsisFor the first time, Ciro Bustos, Che's right-hand man in the struggle for Argentina, tells his story. As a young man inspired by the example of Cuba, Bustos was determined to bring revolution to the home country he shared with his hero. After a failed attempt to liberate Argentina, it was not until 1966 that he was contacted by the Cubans once again and told, "Che wants to see you."Under false papers, Bustos crossed the border into Bolivia, where Che was in hiding with his guerrilla forces; and here, for the first time, Che shared his plans for a continental revolution. In this fascinating memoir, Ciro Bustos tells us a story only he is able to recount: what really happened in Bolivia in 1967 and why he did not betray Che.Trade ReviewThe last vital element that completes the jigsaw of Che Guevara's extraordinary life. This long-awaited book is both an important contribution to history and a gripping read. -- Richard Gott, author of A New History of Cuba

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Book SynopsisExploring the genesis of neoliberalism, and the political and economic circumstances of its deployment, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval dispel numerous common misconceptions. Neoliberalism is neither a return to classical liberalism nor the restoration of "pure" capitalism. To misinterpret neoliberalism is to fail to understand what is new about it: far from viewing the market as a natural given that limits state action, neoliberalism seeks to construct the market and make the firm a model for governments. Only once this is grasped will its opponents be able to meet the unprecedented political and intellectual challenge it poses.Trade ReviewThe New Way of the World is the best modern realization of Foucault's pioneering approach to the history of neoliberalism. It wonderfully explores the European roots and branches of the neoliberal thought collective over the twentieth century, and warns that unthinking misrepresentations of its political project as espousing 'laissez-faire' has had the effect of allowing the Left to submit to its siren song. -- Philip MirowskiTo understand these debates [on neoliberalism], the book by Christian Laval and Pierre Dardot on the 'neoliberal society' offers us analytical keys. This monument of scholarship draws on the history of ideas, philosophy and sociology. * Le Monde *Extremely scholarly, this book is an insistent invitation to push theoretical and social critique of the present order beyond the standard analyses. * Le Monde diplomatique *

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Book SynopsisEvery week young children are hospitalized on the playing fields of Britain. Yet this data is never collected, nor is there any concerted attempt to work out how to make sport safer. Using meticulous, peer-reviewed research, the book sets out the true risks associated with the sport, raising uncomfortable questions for politicians and the educational authorities. Would parents be so willing to let their children play rugby if they knew that the average risk of serious injury over the course of a season could be at least 17 percent, or nearly one in six?Trade ReviewHorrifying and empowering, this is an instant classic and essential reading for every parent. Professor Pollock is utterly fearless. -- Max Pemberton, author of The Doctor Will See you NowAllyson Pollock is one of the leading public health scientists of her generation . In this carefully researched book, she confronts us with a hard choice: continue with the unfettered romance of a 'man's' game or adapt it to protect our young. -- Prof. John Ashton, President of the Faculty of Public Health

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Book SynopsisThe ultimate book on the worldwide movement of hackers, pranksters, and activists collectively known as Anonymous—by the writer the Huffington Post says “knows all of Anonymous’ deepest, darkest secrets”“A work of anthropology that sometimes echoes a John le Carré novel.” —Wired Half a dozen years ago, anthropologist Gabriella Coleman set out to study the rise of this global phenomenon just as some of its members were turning to political protest and dangerous disruption (before Anonymous shot to fame as a key player in the battles over WikiLeaks, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street). She ended up becoming so closely connected to Anonymous that the tricky story of her inside–outside status as Anon confidante, interpreter, and erstwhile mouthpiece forms one of the themes of this witty and entirely engrossing book. The narrative brims with details unearthed from within a notorio

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Book Synopsis"Anyone who survived the exterminations camps must have an untypical story to tell. The typical camp story of the millions ended in death ... We, the few who survived the war and the majority who perished in the camps, did not use and would not have understood terms such as 'holocaust' or 'death march.' These were coined later, by outsiders."In 1939 twelve-year-old Felix Weinberg fell into the hands of the Nazis. Imprisoned for most of his teenage life, Felix survived five concentration camps, including Terezin, Auschwitz, and Birkenau, barely surviving the Death March from Blechhammer in 1945. After losing his mother and brother in the camps, he was liberated at Buchenwald and eventually reunited at seventeen with his father in Britain, where they built a new life together. Boy 30529 is an extraordinary memoir of the Holocaust, as well as a moving meditation on the nature of memory.Trade ReviewWith a detachment that makes the telling all the more powerful, Felix Weinberg has given witness to what he saw and experienced through the terror, misery and absurdity of his teenage years. This was, he explains, at first a gift to his family, and this intimacy without sentimentality draws us in to the loss at the heart of the book. It was also a history he had suppressed, and as Weinberg tells it, he explains that it's strange and painful to document it for the first time. He revisits the suddenness of round-ups, random killings, separations, forced labour and marches. This reminded me that the war against the Jews was above all else a war against our physical presence in Europe which this book replies to simply by having been written. Beyond that though, is the reply of a boy who escaped annihilation and found that by staying alive he could think, study, research and eventually teach at the highest level. In the face of genocide on any people, anywhere at any time, the book is the ultimate response: that we exist and have the right to exist. I wasn't only moved by it. I was strengthened by it. -- Michael Rosen, author, poetAn unusually good-natured memoir about life in the Nazi camps and the travails of being a postwar refugee. Weinberg ... has a quick, curious mind...A revelation ... told with both candor and odd innocence. * Kirkus Reviews *All those who care about the proper documenting of this horrendous era must be grateful to Felix Weinberg for giving us this insightful and ultimately uplifting account. -- Suzanne Bardgett, Imperial War MuseumA very witty and highly readable account of life in Nazi camps, with truly original information and an amazing sense of humour. A great lesson in resilience, survival, hope-and genuine modesty. -- Gilbert Achcar * The Arabs and the Holocaust *A sensitive, witty, intelligent-and ultimately, extremely moving-memoir. -- Richard Zimler, author of The Warsaw AnagramsFelix Weinberg's memoir stands out from other Holocaust memoirs in its accomplished style, its powers of exact recollection and depiction and in its dry humour. -- Professor Charmian Brinson, author of The Strange Case of Dora Fabian and Mathilde WurmTold with an honest, contemporary, sometimes wry viewpoint, Weinberg's graphic memories are haunting, as he searches the Web and historical archives to find out now what he did not know then, while it was happening to him: where he was marching, how many died. The dual perspective, then and now, and the blend of family intimacy (including occasional photos) with the gripping, authoritative historical overview make this an essential title for discussion. * Booklist *

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Book SynopsisOur fates lie in our genes and not in the stars, said James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. But Watson could not have predicted the scale of the industry now dedicated to this new frontier. Since the launch of the multibillion-dollar Human Genome Project, the biosciences have promised miraculous cures and radical new ways of understanding who we are. But where is the new world we were promised? Now updated with a new afterword, Genes, Cells and Brains asks why the promised cornucopia of health benefits has failed to emerge and reveals the questionable enterprise that has grown out of bioethics. The authors, feminist sociologist Hilary Rose and neuroscientist Steven Rose, examine the establishment of biobanks, the rivalries between public and private gene sequencers, and the rise of stem cell research. The human body is becoming a commodity, and the unfulfilled promises of the science behind this revolution suggest profound failings in genomics itself.Trade ReviewFascinating, lucid and angry. -- Steven Poole * Guardian *On my must-read list! Genes, Cells, Brains ... the rundown on the hype. -- Margaret AtwoodWhatever else we may need for the public understanding of science, we certainly do need the facts contained in this book. The Roses show how rapidly the ideal of disinterested scientific research has been evaporating since Mammon has been welcomed into the laboratory. Immense and still increasing profits have been made by people who have repeatedly promised various holy grails-discoveries expected to arise from genetic and cerebral research-but comparatively little of real use has emerged from that quarter. In particular, Genes, Cells and Brains shows how the recent expansion of the neurosciences, which was widely hailed as the dawn of a new psychiatry, has actually had little effect. Plainly this research has done little to check the steadily continuing increase in mental illness. Altogether, this is a rather blood-curdling but fascinating book and a much-needed alarm call! -- Mary Midgley, author of Animals and Why They MatterGenes, Cells and Brains is an angry book. It is also an important one ... contains wonderful descriptions of the science behind the new biology. -- W. F. Bynum * Times Literary Supplement *While I generally turn down requests for an endorsement of a book, I must make an exception for the superb analysis of a very important topic by Hilary Rose and Steve Rose. Genes, Cells and Brains refutes with authority the extravagant claims that everything that ails us will be cured by modern molecular and cellular biology. They show that despite the self-serving hype produced by both academic and entrepreneurial science, we still do not understand how the brain works nor can we avoid the thousand shocks that flesh is heir to. -- Richard Lewontin, author of The Triple HelixA scathing account of the failure of recent projects in biology to provide significant new knowledge ... the Roses provide thought-provoking and interesting contrasts to the secular, neoliberal view that predominates at present. * Nature *Rose and Rose provide incisive analyses of the successes of the new biology at improving corporate profits while failing to do much to improve human health. This is a valuable therapy for all of us suffering from the inflated promises and huge costs of the new biology, and a splendid resource for reinvigorating the Radical Science Movement in today's global political economy. -- Sandra Harding, UCLA Professor and author of The Science Question in FeminismGenes, Cells and Brains offers a complex, compelling picture of the social and political challenges emerging around biotechnological investment, promise and hype. -- Maureen McNeil, Professor and Associate Director, Cesagen: ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of GenomicsI have just started Genes, Cells and Brains and I can hardly put it down. What clarity and insights, what history and up to the minute perceptiveness. And what brilliant and unpretentious writing. I think this is an important book. -- Sian Ede, Director of the Gulbenkian FoundationWhat brilliant and energetic warriors Hilary Rose and Steven Rose have been! Reading this book is to visit the innumerable battlefields on which they have fought over half a century. The battle cries have now softened into gentler irony, but the pace of the writing is superb. Anybody who wants an incisive and radical perspective on the excessive claims made for human genome project, sociobiology, neurosciences, or human discrimination against other humans, should read this book. -- Patrick Bateson, author (with Peter Gluckman) of Plasticity, Robustness, Development and Evolution[The Roses] unwind the myriad assumptions about technology as the engine of improvement in our lives and offer a powerful argument against the sociopolitical machinery behind these dream disciplines. -- Michael Thomsen * The Daily Beast *[Hilary Rose and Stephen Rose] unwind the myriad assumptions about technology as the engine of improvement in our lives and offers a powerful argument against the sociopolitical machinery behind these dream disciplines. -- Michael Tomsen * The Daily Beast *The authors (professors emeriti of sociology and neuroscience at, respectively, Bradford U. and the Open U., England) place contemporary developments in the biotechnosciences of genomics, regenerative medicine, and the neurosciences (the 'genes, cells, and brains' of their title) within the context of the global neoliberal economy and culture of the 21st century. * Book News *[Genes, Cells and Brains is] a detailed and acerbic history of 20th-century genetics: its uneasy dance in and out of the arms of eugenics, its stumbles on the envisioned road to decoding and commodifying human nature, and its upstaging-after the Human Genome Project disappointed hopes for disease cures-by neuroscience, which, in turn, has fallen short of its promises to find and fix the psyche in the brain. * The Scientist *

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Book SynopsisThe sex industry is an endless source of prurient drama for the mainstream media. Recent years have seen a panic over "online red-light districts," which supposedly seduce vulnerable young women into a life of degradation, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof's live tweeting of a Cambodian brothel raid. The current trend for writing about and describing actual experiences of sex work fuels a culture obsessed with the behaviour of sex workers. Rarely do these fearful dispatches come from sex workers themselves, and they never seem to deviate from the position that sex workers must be rescued from their condition, and the industry simply abolished-a position common among feminists and conservatives alike. In Playing the Whore, journalist Melissa Gira Grant turns these pieties on their head, arguing for an overhaul in the way we think about sex work. Based on ten years of writing and reporting on the sex trade, and grounded in her experience as an organizer, advocate, and former sex worker, Playing the Whore dismantles pervasive myths about sex work, criticizes both conditions within the sex industry and its criminalization, and argues that separating sex work from the "legitimate" economy only harms those who perform sexual labor. In Playing the Whore, sex workers' demands, too long relegated to the margins, take center stage: sex work is work, and sex workers' rights are human rights.Trade Review"A persuasive manifesto. Underneath Grant's strategically inclusive argument lurks a harder political critique of the transformation of politics and economics since the 1970s." * London Review of Books *In [Playing the Whore], Grant critiques the policing of sex workers, the conditions of the industry, and the ongoing discussions surrounding how we see the sex industry as well as the sex workers themselves. [She] hits the major points of these huge topics and takes a powerful stance on the rights of sex workers. -- River H. Kero * Book Riot *

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Book SynopsisWhen the French government passed a ban on the veil in 2011, surprisingly few French feminists spoke out against the racist measure. Christine Delphy--the sociologist who Simone de Beauvoir once described as "France's most exciting feminist writer"--was one of the notable few. Castigating humanitarian liberals for demanding cultural assimilation of the women they were purporting to "save," Delphy showed how criminalizing Islam in the name of feminism was fundamentally paradoxical. Dominating Others is Delphy's manifesto against this tendency, and for a fluid understanding of political identity that does not place different political struggles in a false opposition. Dismantling the absurd claim that Afghanistan was invaded to save women, alongside the notion that homosexuals and immigrants alike should reserve their self-expression for private settings, Dominating Others is a call for a true universalism that sacrifices no one at the expense of others.Trade ReviewFrance's most exciting feminist writer. -- Simone de Beauvoir

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Book SynopsisThis is the first collection of essays on Chartism by leading social historian Dorothy Thompson, whose work radically transformed the way in which Chartism is understood. Reclaiming Chartism as a fully-blown working-class movement, Thompson intertwines her penetrating analyses of class with ground-breaking research uncovering the role played by women in the movement.Throughout her essays, Thompson strikes a delicate balance between down-to-the-ground accounts of local uprisings, snappy portraits of high-profile Chartist figures as well as rank-and-file men and women, and more theoretical, polemical interventions.Of particular historical and political significance is the previously unpublished substantial essay co-authored by Dorothy and Edward Thompson, a superb piece of local historical research by two social historians then on the brink of notable careers.Trade Review“Ever alert, Dorothy Thompson probed beneath the outer surface of evidence. The results were innovatory. Her work brought to life the intense and dangerous interior world of working class meetings, conventions and newspapers.” —Sheila Rowbotham, Guardian “Dorothy Thompson is Chartism’s pre-eminent historian. She writes in a careful, passionate, and welcoming style giving pride of place to the voices in hymn, oratory, diary, and newspaper of the men and women who struggled against the child-consuming factory, the complacency of Victorianism, and empire-induced starvations. Those voices arose in the era of Liberalism. They need to be heeded still.” —Peter Linebaugh “These essays convey the distilled political and historical wisdom of a lifetime, and what a life it was. Dorothy Thompson will forever be remembered alongside the great Chartist movement she so brilliantly brought to vital, creative life.” —Marcus Rediker, author of The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom “Dorothy Thompson, who pioneered the writing of labour history from below, emerges as a complex and lucid philosopher of social change in these writings, which also chart the evolution of the post-war British left’s thinking about both its future and its past.” —Paul Mason “Awesome is an over-used word in modern parlance, but Dorothy Thompson’s knowledge of Chartism was just that. She was the pre-eminent historian of the movement.” —Owen Ashton, Labour History Review “Dorothy Thompson brought her extraordinary knowledge of Chartism together with a passionate commitment to democratic change. Her lifetime’s work on the movement remains unsurpassed in its range and historical vision.” —James Epstein, Vanderbilt University “Dorothy Thompson was both a remarkable person and an influential historian of Chartism. This collection of her essays…highlights the approach of one of a formidable pair of fellow historians and left-wing intellectuals.” —Penelope J. Corfield, History Today “This is an extremely valuable volume … Thompson offers a master class in historical research and presentation … This is superb history … Read Dorothy Thompson’s marvellous book.”—Counterfire “A handsome, readable and enjoyable collection.” —The Local Historian (British Association for Local History)

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Book SynopsisMagisterial account of the ideas and the figures who have forged the American Empire.Since the birth of the nation, impulses of empire have been close to the heart of the United States. How these urges interact with the way the country understands itself, and the nature of the divergent interests at work in the unfolding of American foreign policy, is a subject much debated and still obscure. In a fresh look at the topic, Anderson charts the intertwined historical development of America’s imperial reach and its role as the general guarantor of capital.The internal tensions that have arisen are traced from the closing stages of the Second World War through the Cold War to the War on Terror. Despite the defeat and elimination of the USSR, the planetary structures for warfare and surveillance have not been retracted but extended. Anderson ends with a survey of the repertoire of US grand strategy, as its leading thinkers—Brzezinski, Mead, Kagan, Fukuyama,

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Book SynopsisA philosopher and activist, eager to live according to ideals forged in study and discussion, Daniel Bensaïd was a man deeply entrenched in both the French and the international left. Raised in a staunchly red neighbourhood of Toulouse, where his family owned a bistro, he grew to be France's leading Marxist public intellectual, much in demand on talk shows and in the press. A lyrical essayist and powerful public speaker, at his best expounding large ideas to crowds of students and workers, he was a founder member of the Ligue Communiste and thrived at the heart of a resurgent far left in the 1960s, which nurtured many of the leading figures of today's French establishment.The path from the joyous explosion of May 1968, through the painful experience of defeat in Latin America and the world-shaking collapse of the USSR, to the neoliberal world of today, dominated as it is by global finance, is narrated in An Impatient Life with Bensaïd's characteristic elegance of phrase and clarity of vision. His memoir relates a life of ideological and practical struggle, a never-resting endeavour to comprehend the workings of capitalism in the pursuit of revolution.Trade Review"France's leading Marxist public intellectual" -- Tariq Ali"Daniel's death is like a wound, not a sadness--a loss which leaves us heavier. His is a message composed, not with words, but with decisions and acts and injuries." -- John Berger"Daniel Bensaïd was my 'distant companion.' With his disappearance, the intellectual, activist, political, and the 'revolutionary' worlds have all changed." -- Alain BadiouPart autobiography, part activist's logbook, and part political treatise, it's the story of how a working-class boy went on to co-found a party that twice participated in French presidential elections, and became a leader of the Fourth International, the global organisation of Trotskyist followers. * Independent *This absorbing, affecting memoir is a beautiful testament to a richly productive and dignified life . this is an energising book, a book that reminds us of the rightness of refusing the inevitability of capitalism and war, of the promise of international solidarity and socialism, of our responsibility to all those who have made sacrifices in this struggle. -- Dougal McNeill * ISO *Bensaïd crafts each chapter with a painter's hand, stroke by stroke, offering us musings, vignettes, and reflections that are intricately argued, sometimes speculative, and always subtly insightful. -- Alan Wald * International Socialist Review *From love to Leninism, journalism to Jewishness, Bensaïd always has something interesting and original to say. * Ken MacLeod *An honest, and often moving, chronicle of a revolutionary life in unrevolutionary times. -- Marc Mulholland * English Historical Review *

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Book SynopsisHistories of the US sixties invariably focus on New York City, but Los Angeles was an epicenter of that decade's political and social earthquake. L.A. was a launchpad for Black Power-where Malcolm X and Angela Davis first came to prominence and the Watts uprising shook the nation-and home to the Chicano walkouts and Moratorium, as well as birthplace of 'Asian America' as a political identity, base of the antiwar movement, and of course, centre of California counterculture.Mike Davis and Jon Wiener provide the first comprehensive movement history of L.A. in the sixties, drawing on extensive archival research, scores of interviews with principal figures of the 1960s movements, and personal histories (both Davis and Wiener are native Los Angelenos). Following on from Davis's award-winning L.A. history, City of Quartz, Set the Night on Fire is a fascinating historical corrective, delivered in scintillating and fiercely elegant prose.Trade ReviewThis huge and exhilarating work of history aims to restore some depth and accuracy to how we talk about Los Angeles in the 1960s ... Davis and Wiener have created an important book to read in a time where LA needs more than ever to be mobilized. -- John Freeman * Lit Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2020 *The familiar, monochromatic picture of Los Angeles in the sixties - all Hollywood pop and Didion ennui - required a million people of African, Asian, and Mexican ancestry to be 'edited out of utopia,' as Mike Davis and Jon Wiener put it. What those people actually did, alongside antiwar feminists, high school students, and others, is the heart of this book, and it's a big heart. No one could tell these intersecting stories better than Davis and Wiener, and their book gives us back a great city's greatness in its movements, edges, and other centers, so many of them forgotten. -- Rebecca Solnit, author of Recollections of My NonexistenceFrom the Ash Grove to Aztlán, from the Valley to Vietnam, it's all here. In showing how struggles for free health care, adequate housing, functional schools, racial and sexual liberation, new forms of creativity, and the human right of freedom from brutal police violence came together into a mighty torrent, Wiener and Davis have written a revolutionary history for an age of continuing contradictions. -- Daniel Widener, author of Black Arts WestThe great task of Set the Night on Fire is to remedy the erasures of the black, brown, and queer activists who put their bodies on the line. Revolutionary artist-nuns, educator-organizers, and free-jazz radicals are just a few of a vast cast that together paint a stirring portrait of a visionary city ever emerging from the shadows of the old order. Viva Los Angeles Libre! -- Rubén Martínez, author of Desert AmericaThis is not the theme park of mansions, beaches, and glitzed-up noir, but the undercity of outsiders struggling to get out from under the savage police to stake out a place in the sun. A rare and necessary saga of unsung heroes, vicious authorities, and unpunished crimes. -- Todd Gitlin, author of The SixtiesThis is history from below, in the very best sense. A magnificent mural of the local sixties, written with verve and passion by two of my favorite locals. -- Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Natural CausesA richly detailed portrait of a city that seethed with rebellious energy. * Kirkus Reviews *Set the Night on Fire fixes on one mission - collate the stories of emancipation struggle in '60s LA - and runs with it, using document research to complete the job. This is the approach Davis has been using in the twenty-first century, and it works. -- Sasha Frere-Jones * Bookforum *An indispensable portrait of an unexplored chapter in the history of American progressivism. * Publishers Weekly *Insightful and innovative...Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties is both a fierce political and cultural history and a geographic corrective. -- William Deverell * Alta *Authoritative and impressive...Set the Night on Fire is an essential reference to L.A.'s rich history of civil unrest, with a hopeful undercurrent. Movements can and often do force change. -- Erik Himmelsbach-Weinstein * Los Angeles Times *A monumental history of rebellion and resistance. * Los Angeles Review of Books *Combining comprehensive, mineshaft-deep research with unique firsthand knowledge, [Davis and Wiener's] recounting of the radical '60s in Los Angeles will likely not be surpassed. -- Jerald Podair * Los Angeles Review of Books *Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties is a book as vast as the city itself. -- Ron Jacobs * CounterPunch *Monumental...For new generations growing up in a city whose very history is rarely acknowledged to exist, Set the Night on Fire is a vital primer in resistance, a gift to the future from the past. -- Ben Ehrenreich * Guardian *These are war stories, the intended audience of which is the young organizers of today, many of them the children and grandchildren of his friends and heroes in the sixties. -- Dana Goodyear * New Yorker *Anyone familiar with Mike Davis's magisterial social history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz, will know what to expect in terms of the epic sweep and questioning tone of Set the Night on Fire. This time, the focus is firmly on race and rebellion, but he and Wiener also map out the myriad protest movements, countercultural voices and campaigns that made 1960s Los Angeles an altogether more edgy and volatile city than the state's hippy capital, San Francisco. -- Sean O'Hagan * Guardian *Davis and Wiener have crafted a book that is both encyclopedic and prophetic, scholarly and polemical...Readers would be hard-pressed to find better guides for a tour of leftist Los Angeles. -- Sean Dempsey, S.J. * America magazine *This very readable but meticulously detailed year-by-year account has relevance far beyond its time and place. The sixties were a decade that shaped politics for half a century and the authors show how different struggles were interlinked across the US. -- Glyn Robbins * Morning Star *An essential rescued history * New York Journal of Books *Mike Davis and Jon Wiener tell the story of a decade of explosions. -- Meagan Day * Jacobin *In Set the Night on Fire, Mike Davis and Jon Wiener provide an extensive history of L.A. that includes interviews with key players from these movements and their own personal recollections. -- Danielle Bauter * Los Angeles Daily News *Highly readable...Davis and Wiener succeed in giving renewed attention to the neglected voices of subjugated minorities central to the reconstruction of society. * LSE Review of Books *An astonishing book that proves that people really do have the power to force change for the better. * Buzz Magazine *A remarkably well-researched volume, which chronologically itemises each and every twist and turn in the muddled patchwork of American history -- KCW LondonAn exhaustive and in-depth presentation of the wide-ranging big and small resistance movements of [the sixties] with a sober and insightful account of their strengths and weaknesses, including the role that the political left played in them. Its publication in 2020 could not be more timely in these days when tens of thousands have been demonstrating in Los Angeles and across the country and world against police brutality and racism. -- Samuel Farber * Jacobin *A history of the social and political struggles of the 1960s unlike most others. * The VVA Veteran *Monumental...Set the Night on Fire is, above all, a historical account of how a rainbow of insurgent social movements tried to peel back the glitter, dismantle the police state, and replace elite white rule and its regimes of segregation, militarism, patriarchy, and conformity with a society oriented toward "serving the people." -- Robin D. G. Kelley * Boston Review *Two veteran authors allow themselves vast detail to tell us about the cradle of counterculture, in all the far-flung rebellious meanings of the term. It is also the story of L.A.'s contested racial space, with contradictions ranging from radicalized white youngsters in the suburban sprawl to Chicano Teamsters breaking strikes. -- Paul Buhle * Rain Taxi *Set the Night on Fire is a sort of bequeathal from one generation of activists to another. * Mother Jones *Timely...We can do more than repeat the past; we can also learn from it. That gives reason for hope and as Set the Night on Fire makes clear, hope has always been Leviathan's great antagonist. * Times Literary Supplement *An invigorating and inspiring read * Morning Star *Set the Night on Fire is a revelatory history of Los Angeles in the 1960s, undermining pervasive media myths of the era. -- Alex Ross * Wall Street Journal *A page-turning survey of social movement activism in 1960s Los Angeles...Set the Night on Fire is a serious, informative book that is also a pleasurable, fun, and inspiring read. -- Andrew S. Baer * Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books *Essential and long overdue. -- David Ulin * Los Angeles Times ("Best California books of 2020") *An invigorating and inspiring read * Morning Star *Set the Night on Fire aims to dislodge the popular conception of sixties radicalism as the terrain of white Berkeley hippies and New Left agitators. Instead, Blacks, Latinos, high-school students, and unreconstructed communists were at the center of the city's struggles against segregation and police impunity. -- John Thomason * Commonweal Magazine *

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Book SynopsisA “keenly observed and timely investigation” of how capitalism makes a fortune from disaster, poverty and catastrophe—“a potent weapon for shock resistors around the world” (Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine)Disaster has become big business. Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein travels across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Britain, Greece, and Australia to witness the reality of disaster capitalism. He discovers how companies cash in on organized misery in a hidden world of privatized detention centers, militarized private security, aid profiteering, and destructive mining.What emerges through Loewenstein’s re­porting is a dark history of multinational corporations that, with the aid of media and political elites, have grown more powerful than national governments. In the twenty-first century, the vulnerable have become the world’s most valuable commodity.

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Book SynopsisTransformations in Cuban art, literature and culture in the post-Fidel eraCuba has been in a state of massive transformation over the past decade, with its historic resumption of diplomatic relations with the United States only the latest development. While the political leadership has changed direction, other forces have taken hold. The environment is under threat, and the culture feels the strain of new forms of consumption.Planet/Cuba examines how art and literature have responded to a new moment, one both more globalized and less exceptional; more concerned with local quotidian worries than international alliances; more threatened by the depredations of planetary capitalism and climate change than by the vagaries of the nation's government. Rachel Price examines a fascinating array of artists and writers who are tracing a new socio-cultural map of the island.Trade ReviewA rich revelation of Cuban art today; it will amaze, fascinate and instruct. -- Fredric JamesonThis brilliant book charts the cultural life in Cuba from the coming to power of Raúl Castro to the 'normalization' of relations with the US. What could be more timely than a cognitive map of this already heterogeneous island, once a trigger point in the Cold War, as it is vectored by new forces that are planetary in reach-neoliberalism, climate change, and pervasive surveillance? -- Hal Foster, author of Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, EmergencyPrice's insights into this complicated and conflictive landscape make for cultural criticism at its best-ample in range, acute in its eye for the telling detail. Contemporary Cuba is a moving target and this book gets that, following along with clarity, grace and flashes of illumination. -- Rachel Weiss, author of To and From Utopia in the New Cuban ArtA superbly crafted book that takes scholarship on Cuban art and literature in a fresh, entirely new direction. Planet/Cuba is both uniquely timely and full of foresight: it will shape discussion of contemporary Cuba for years to come. -- Esther Whitfield, Brown UniversityPrice shrewdly surveys art in Cuba over the period since Fidel Castro ceded control of the government to his brother Raúl . [An] excellent and welcome study. * Choice *This meticulously detailed text is a productive exploration of globalized Cuban art and culture. * Publisher’s Weekly *

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Book SynopsisThe collision of activism and contemporary art, from the Seattle protests to Occupy and beyond The collision of activism and contemporary art, from the Seattle protests to Occupy and beyond What is the relation of art to the practice of radical politics today? Strike Art explores this question through the historical lens of Occupy, an event that had artists at its core. Precarious, indebted, and radicalized, artists redirected their creativity from servicing the artworld into an expanded field of organizing in order to construct of a new—if internally fraught—political imaginary set off against the common enemy of the 1%. In the process, they called the bluff of a contemporary art system torn between ideals of radical critique, on the one hand, and an increasing proximity to Wall Street on the other—oftentimes directly targeting major art institutions themselves as sites of action. Tracking the work of groups including MTL, Not an Alternative, t

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Book SynopsisRaymond Chandler, a dazzling stylist and portrayer of American life, holds a unique place in literary history, straddling both pulp fiction and modernism. With The Big Sleep, published in 1939, he left an indelible imprint on the detective novel. Fredric Jameson offers an interpretation of Chandler's work that reconstructs both the context in which it was written and the social world or totality it projects. Chandler's invariable setting, Los Angeles, appears both as a microcosm of the United States and a prefiguration of its future: a megalopolis uniquely distributed by an unpromising nature into a variety of distinct neighborhoods and private worlds. But this essentially urban and spatial work seems also to be drawn towards a vacuum, an absence that is nothing other than death. With Chandler, the thriller genre becomes metaphysical.Trade ReviewFredric Jameson is America's leading Marxist critic. A prodigiously energetic thinker whose writings sweep majestically from Sophocles to science fiction. -- Terry EagletonNot often in American writing since Henry James can there have been a mind displaying at once such tentativeness and force. The best of Jameson's work has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms: here before you is the world you'd always known you were living in, but apprehended as if for the first time in the freshness of its beauty and horror. -- Benjamin Kunkel * London Review of Books *Probably the most important cultural critic writing in English today . it can truly be said that nothing cultural is alien to him. -- Colin MacCabeThe most muscular of writers. * Times Literary Supplement *Even the most anti-Marxian among us, [will] find ourselves compelled, if not to accept the book's intricate hypotheses, at least to accord them an ungrudged admiration for the brilliance of their formulation and the serene and quietly convinced tone in which they are advanced. -- John Banville * New York Review of Books *The small length of Jameson's book adds a tightness to its arguments and the style is often Chandler-esque: words are not wasted, literary observations are pin-sharp and there are some wry aperçu. Winningly, Jameson occasionally employs the genre's rhetoric, so his theorising becomes the pursuing of "lines of enquiry", a "procedure", etc. It's touches like this that make Jameson such a joy to read -- Cornelius Fitz * 3AM Magazine *

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Book Synopsis"Latinx" (pronounced 'La-teen-ex) is the gender-neutral term that covers the largest racial minority in the United States, 17 percent of the country. This is the fastest-growing sector of American society, containing the most immigrants. It is the poorest ethnic group in the country, whose political empowerment is altering the balance of forces in a growing number of states. And yet, Latin barely figure in America's racial conversation-the US census does not even have a category for "Latino." In this groundbreaking discussion, Ed Morales explains how Latin political identities are tied to a long Latin American history of mestizaje, translatable as "mixedness" or "hybridity", and that this border thinking is both a key to understanding bilingual, bicultural Latin cultures and politics and a challenge to America's infamously black/white racial regime. This searching and long-overdue exploration of a crucial development in American life updates Cornel West's bestselling Race Matters with a Latin inflection.Trade ReviewAn important contribution. * Morning Star *The book's deep dive into the crosscurrents of Latinx identity is a powerful reminder that, as Americans wrestle with questions about who is and who is not 'American' - and, indeed, questions about what it means to be an American in the 21st century - the nation can benefit immensely from the robust inclusion and understanding of a community that has spent generations grappling with nearly every facet of its own identity. -- Julian Castro * The New York Times *The term Latinx is here to stay, and according to journalist and author Ed Morales, it's reflective of the mixed-race and multicultural history of Latinos - and our country's future.Ed Morales examines how Latinx people figure into America's conversations about race and ethnicity, while exploring the contradictions surrounding Latino American identity. -- Raul A. Reyes * NBC News *A sprawling study of Hispanic identity in the United States.Ed Morales stresses the "in-between space" that Latinos inhabit, crossing racial, national, cultural and gender identities and sometimes falling into the cracks. -- Carlos Lozada * Washington Post *

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Book SynopsisBernie Sanders's campaign for the presidency of the United States has galvanized people all over the country, putting economic, racial, and social justice into the spotlight, and raising hopes that Americans can take their country back from the billionaires and change the course of history. In this book, Sanders tells the story of a passionate and principled political life. He describes how, after cutting his teeth in the Civil Rights movement, he helped build a grassroots political movement in Vermont, making it possible for him to become the first independent elected to the US House of Representatives in forty years. The story continues into the US Senate and through the dramatic launch of his presidential campaign.Trade ReviewI endorse Brother Bernie Sanders because he is a long-distance runner with integrity in the struggle for justice for over fifty years. Now is the time for his prophetic voice to be heard across our crisisridden country. -- Cornel West, author of Race MattersBernie's been in the forefront of all the crucial environmental fights of recent years. -- Bill McKibben, cofounder of 350.orgBernie is the real thing. He's not about reading the polls and finding out what he needs to say in order to get elected. He's about an unwavering commitment to basic justice, equality and sound financial sense. -- Ben Cohen, cofounder of Ben & Jerry’s and founder of Stampede: Stamp Money out of PoliticsI feel weird using words like 'values' and 'morals' because those are words that have been co-opted to justify terrible things like bigotry and greed. I'd like to take those words back and use them to describe Bernie Sanders because his moral compass and sense of values inspire me. -- Sarah Silverman, comedian and social commentatorA road map for how progressives can win elections and not be a part of the two party duopoly. -- Ralph Nader (in praise of Outsider in the House)Outsider in the House is a rare achievement: a concise, compelling book that both tells an interesting story and provides a readable, down-to-earth blueprint for political change. * The Onion (in praise of Outsider in the House) *A clear, compelling and comprehensive vision for reinvigorating democracy, reducing poverty, rebuilding the middle class and restructuring our health care and education systems. Sanders gives us a vision of the day when 'we will no longer be outsiders in the House.' * In These Times (in praise of Outsider in the House) *A grass-roots 'how-to' guide, especially helpful and inspirational for prospective independent candidates-a firsthand description of the career of the most successful American socialist politician in modern times.. * The Hill (in praise of Outsider in the House) *

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Book SynopsisA vibrant, groundbreaking history of American radicalism since the SixtiesWhat happened to the American left after the Sixties? This engrossing account traces the evolution of disruptive protest over the last 40 years to tell a larger story about the reshaping of American radicalism, showing how the direct-action blockades, occupations, and campaigns of recent activist movements have functioned as laboratories for political experimentation and renewal.Propelled by more than 100 candid interviews conducted over a span of decades, this elegant and lively history showcases the voices of key players in an array of movements - environmentalist, anti-nuclear, anti-apartheid, feminist, LGBTQ, anti-globalization, racial-justice, anti-war, and more - across an era when American politics shifted to the right, and issue- and identity-based organizing eclipsed the traditional ideologies of the left. As Kauffman, a longtime movement insider, examines how groups from ACT UP to Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter have used direct action to catalyze change against long odds, she details the profound influence of feminism and queerness on radical political practice and how enduring divisions of race have shaped the landscape of activism. Written with nuance and humor, and revealing deep connections between movements usually viewed in isolation, Direct Action is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how protest movements erupt -- and how they can succeed.Trade ReviewIt is impossible to overstate the importance of this book. Chances are that even if you know something about the recent history of the left in America, you probably only know a few isolated parts. L.A. Kauffman has connected a vast field of dots to create an overview, and she has done so with dispatch, clarity, and elegance. Her book is essential reading for today, and will be for tomorrow. -- Luc Sante, author of The Other ParisAs the new political reality settles in, resisters are asking a follow-up question: What else can I do? L.A. Kauffman's new book Direct Action provides some answers. * Vogue *L.A. Kauffman may have the best-timed book release in years. * The Atlantic *L.A. Kauffman's Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism is the best overview of how protest works - when it does - and what it's achieved over the past 50 years. -- Rebecca Solnit * New York Times *A movement tour de force. A must-read for those who have committed themselves to the life of the mind and of struggle. -- Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, theologian and organizerYou could not ask for a better guide through recent social movement history than L.A. Kauffman. A champion of radical causes with decades of experience on the front lines of civil disobedience, she chronicles the fascinating evolution of a set of protest tactics today's activists take for granted. Kauffman has done a tremendous public service: by helping us better understand the past, in all its glory and folly, we can be more effective dissidents and rabble-rousers tomorrow. This startling, inspiring book is for anyone who has ever felt the urge to put their body on the line and shut things down for something they believe in. -- Astra Taylor, author of The People’s Platform and co-founder of the Debt CollectiveThe lurid circus sideshow has seized center ring in Washington, making direct action by progressive agitators all across the country more essential than ever. Don't agonize, organize! How to do it? Kauffman's powerful book, drawing on our people's recent history, shows the way to create true justice for all. -- Jim Hightower, author and activistIf direct action is 'a laboratory for political experimentation and innovation,' as Kauffman argues in the introduction, then this is the lab report. -- Philip Eis * Vice *Kauffman, an important and experienced organizer, senses in Occupy, Black Lives Matter and perhaps even the Bernie Sanders campaign new political oxygen, locally-based movements that cannot be effectively controlled or easily squashed. -- Paul Buhle * Socialism and Democracy *In Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism, L. A. Kauffman assesses movements of the past half century not as scattered uprisings but as phases of an overarching project ... Our current radical-action culture, she thinks, really started in the early seventies, when a new generation of green shoots rose up from the ash. -- Nathan Heller * New Yorker *In a genuinely invigorating book for these times, L. A. Kauffman positively reassesses the efficacy of leftist protest movements since the '60s, beginning with a re-examination of the '60s itself. This book is a must-read for anyone looking for a way forward. -- Dana Snitzky * Longreads *This intricate book deserves careful reading. Far from being just a catalogue of actions, it traces the ways in which radical movements, linked by their use of civil disobedience, have adapted to contemporary demands. * Peace News *L.A. Kauffman's valuable book, Direct Action, is both a thematic history of a period and a dramatic exploration of the chaning repertoire of protest tactics used by the American movements of the radical left. Beginning with the May 3, 1971 "Mayday" anto-Viet-Nam War demonstration in Washington, DC, the book concludes with Black Lives Matter and the use of direct action in the 2014 resistance to racist police practices in Ferguson, Missouri. Consideration of times and techniques is integrated into four roughly chronological chapters which answer the book's essential question: "What happened to the American left after the sixties?" -- Matthew Schultz * Socialism and Democracy *At a time when socialism has reentered the political vocabulary, it is wonderful to have this engaging book, introducing old-timers and a new generation to the greatest American socialist, Eugene V. Debs. A beloved labor leader, tireless battler against economic inequality, and defender of free speech, Debs's radicalism and commitment to social justice are more needed today than at any time since his death. -- Eric Foner

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Book SynopsisAt the beginning of the twenty-first century, leading intellectuals are claiming "There is a problem with Islam in France," thus legitimising the discourse of the racist National Front. Such claims have been strengthened by the backlash since the terrorist attacks in Paris in January and November 2015, coming to represent a new 'common sense' in the political landscape, and we have seen a similar logic play out in the United States and Europe.Edwy Plenel, former editorial director of Le Monde, essayist and founder of the investigative journalism website Mediapart tackles these claims head-on, taking the side of his compatriots of Muslim origin, culture or belief, against those who make them into scapegoats. He demonstrates how a form of "Republican and secularist fundamentalism" has become a mask to hide a new form of virulent Islamophobia. At stake for Plenel is not just solidarity but fidelity to the memory and heritage of emancipatory struggles and he writes in defence of the Muslims, just as Zola wrote in defence of the Jews and Sartre wrote in defence of the blacks. For if we are to be for the oppressed then we must be for the Muslims.Trade ReviewThank goodness for this humane, civilized and morally brave book. It speaks important truths which these days are much too rarely heard. -- Peter OborneA powerful call to address the empathy deficit and intellectual poverty which underlies the 'obsessive Islamophobia' of much French public discourse. Noting that Islamophobia now performs the cultural function once assigned to anti-Semitism,For the Muslims is a polemic against indifference. Plenel resurrects France's heritage of critical thought to call on his fellow citizens and others to develop a competing imaginary to the one established by rampant xenophobia. -- Priyamvada GopalAn important book about one of the most pressing issues facing modern Europe. Insightful, historically grounded and detailed, it's required reading. -- Murtaza HussainAn urgent and necessary warning cry against hatred and the politics of fear and indifference that fuels it. From the Dreyfus affair to the aftermath of the Paris attacks of 2015, Plenel shows how the normalization of a far-right narrative of rejection, exclusion and otherness will have consequences for us all. -- Simon Hooper

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Book SynopsisThe European Union is a besieged institution. It is struggling in vain to overcome the eurozone crisis and faces an influx of refugees not seen since World War II. The Schengen Agreement is a dead letter, and Britain stands on the brink of leaving altogether. The EU is unfit for the challenges of the coming age of increased global competition and high tech. In sum, the drive for an "ever-closer union" has set Europe on the wrong course: plunged it into depression, fuelled national antagonisms, debilitated democracy, and accelerated decline. In this pithy, rigorously argued book, leading historian John Gillingham examines a once great notion that soured long ago.From its postwar origins, through the Single Market, to the troubles of the present, Gillingham explains how Europe's would-be government became a force for anti-democratic centralization and inept policy-making. Brussels has inspired a world of illusion that now threatens to undo the undoubted achievements of integration. The EU: An Obituary is an urgent call to the political Left, Right, and Centre to act before it is too late.Trade ReviewJohn Gillingham has established himself as one of those very rare commentators who can read European history in three dimensions. -- Norman Stone, Oxford UniversityAn excellent, up-to-date history of the EU which overturns many preconceived ideas and challenges the views of Eurofanatics and Eurosceptics alike. -- lan Sked, London School of EconomicsJohn Gillingham is the pre-eminent American historian of the European Union. -- Charles S. Maier, Harvard UniversityAt a time when clear thinking about Europe's political and economic future is urgently needed, John Gillingham has provided a convincing diagnosis of the EU's present malaise and a challenging set of prescriptions which deserve to be taken seriously by Euro-philes as much as by Euro-sceptics. -- Sir Geoffrey Owen, London School of EconomicsAs a means to take corrective actions and ultimately save the EU, Gillingham pursues a historically driven reassessment of the EU's past aimed at examining missteps, discovering subsequent solutions, and offering a glimpse into a potential future. In light of the its uneven course during its years of formation, expansion, and consolidation while currently faced with systemic threats, the EU requires fundamental reforms to remain relevant in an increasingly globalized international system. * Choice *

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Book SynopsisThe twenty-first century has witnessed the rapid hardening of international borders. Security, surveillance, and militarization are widening the chasm between those who travel where they please and those whose movements are restricted. but that is only part of the story. As journalist Todd Miller reveals in Empire of Borders, the nature of U.S. borders has changed. These boundaries have effectively expanded thousands of miles outside of U.S. territory to encircle not simply American land but Washington's interests. Resources, training, and agents from the United States infiltrate the Caribbean and Central America; they reach across the Canadian border; and they go even farther afield, enforcing the division between the Global South and North. The highly publicized focus on a wall between the United States and Mexico misses the bigger picture of strengthening border enforcement around the world. Empire of Borders is a tremendous work of narrative investigative journalism that traces the rise of this border regime. It delves into the practices of "extreme vetting," which raise the possibility of "ideological" tests and cyber-policing for migrants and visitors, a level of scrutiny that threatens fundamental freedoms and allows, once again, for America's security concerns to infringe upon the sovereign rights of other nations. In Syria, Guatemala, Kenya, Palestine, Mexico, the Philippines, and elsewhere, Miller finds that borders aren't making the world safe-especially not in the midst of an ever-worsening climate crisis. They are, undoubtedly, the frontline in a global war against the poor.Trade ReviewEmpire of Borders reveals how the United States has effectively extended its borders throughout the globe, giving rise to a worldwide enforcement network that is highly militarized and profoundly dehumanizing. At a time when more people than ever before find their lives thrust against violent lines of separation, Todd Miller helps us understand the omnipresence of borders as an imminent threat to our shared humanity - a collective sickness that must be reckoned with before it forever reshapes our world. -- Fransisco Cantu, author of The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the BorderJoining meticulous documentation and vivid on-the-ground research in multiple border hot spots around the planet, Todd Miller pulls the veil off the layers of borders and their policing that shape our world, revealing a stunning and terrifying reality. The artificiality of borders, and the commitment of the world's wealthy and powerful to preserve their wealth and power through them, have never been so clearly laid out. -- Aviva Chomsky, author of Undocumented: How Immigration Became IllegalTodd Miller's Empire of Borders is an indispensable guide to our bunkered, barb-wired world.For more than a decade, well before Donald Trump landed in the White House, Miller'sreporting has revealed the conceits of globalization, documenting the slow, steady garrisoningof U.S. politics behind ever more brutal border policies. Now, with Empire of Borders, he looksoutward, to a world overrun with so many border walls it looks more like a maze than a sharedplanet. If there's a way out, Miller will find it. -- Greg Grandin, author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of AmericaTodd Miller takes the reader on a global journey following the ever expanding and violent border enforcement regime. Empire of Borders is an erudite and engaging exposé of the global war against the poor that is increasingly carried out through restrictions on the right to move. Highly recommended. -- Reece Jones, author of Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to MoveTodd Miller's Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World couldn't have come at a better time. -- Belén Fernandez * Jacobin *While exploring the deep historical roots of the oppression wrought by the borders of modern nation-states, Miller's book is also forward facing. In a world where more people than ever are on the move, this is an urgent, crucial proposal that demands a change not only in policies, but in systems and the oppressive structures that drive them. -- Los Angeles Review of Books * Laura Weiss *

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