Search results for ""Verso Books""
Verso Books A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic
In the mid 1920s Lukács wrote a sustained and passionate response to Stalin's onslaught on his earlier seminal work History and Class Consciousness. Unpublished at the time, Lukács himself thought that the text had been destroyed. However, a group of researchers recently found the manuscript gathering dust in the newly opened archives of the CPSU in Moscow. Now for the first time, this fascinating, polemical and intense text is available in English. It is a crucial part of a hidden intellectual history and will transform interpretations of Lukács's oeuvre.
£16.53
Verso Books From ACT UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization
In March 1987 a radical coalition of queer activists converged on Wall Street ... their target, 'Business, Big Business, Business as Usual!!!' It was ACT UP's first demonstration. In November 1999 a radical coalition of environmental, labor, anarchist, queer, and human rights activists converged in Seattle-their target was similar, a system of global capitalism. Between 1987 and 1999 a new project in activism had emerged unshackled from past ghosts. Through innovative use of civil rights' era non-violent disobedience, guerrilla theatre, and sophisticated media work, ACT UP has helped transform the world of activism.This anthology offers a history of ACT UP for a new generation of activists and students. It is divided into five sections which address the new social movements, the use of street theater to reclaim public space, queer and sexual politics, new media/electronic civil disobedience, and race and community building. Contributions range across a diverse spectrum: The Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, Jubilee 2000, Students for an Undemocratic Society, Fed Up Queers, Gender Identity Center of Colorado, Triangle Foundation, Jacks of Color, National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, Lower East Side Collective, Community Labor Coalition, Church of Stop-Shopping, Indy Media Collective, Black Radical Congress, The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory, Adelante Street Theater; HealthGAP, Housing Works, SexPanic! and, of course, ACT UP itself.
£38.99
Verso Books After Diana: Irreverent Elegies
The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, was met by the deepest mourning of the twentieth century. Two and a half billion people worldwide watched the funeral on television, floral tributes flooded London's royal parks and sprung up, too, in small towns in Texas, conspiracy theories ricocheted around the Internet, commemorative stamps were issued in newly communist Hong Kong.Press coverage of the death was also unprecedented in both its scale and uniformity. Yet, in an enormous welter of schmaltz, very little was said about the meaning of what had occurred-whether Tony Blair's public emoting heralded a new kind of politics; what, if anything, the anguish of so many who never knew Diana in person revealed about modern society; how the intertwining of the ideas of celebrity and victim, physical beauty and moral worth, affected people's responses; what was implied for the future of the royal family.For those perplexed by the events surrounding Diana's death, this book provides some answers. Insisting that all aspects of the affair are open to investigation, that nothing (and especially not royalty) is sacred, it brings together a group of distinguished writers whose primary interest is to analyze the death rather than lament it.Contributors: Mark Augé, Jean Baudrillard, Sarah Benton, Homi K. Bhabha, Mark Cousins, Alexander Cockburn, Richard Coles, Régis Debray, Françoise Gaillard, Peter Ghosh, Christopher Hird, Christopher Hitchens, Linda Holt, Sara Maitland, Ross McKibbin, Mandy Merck, Tom Nairn, Glen Newey, Naomi Segal, Dorothy Thompson, Francis Wheen, Judith Williamson, and Elizabeth Wilson.
£19.15
Verso Books Off The Rails
The train derailment at Hatfield in October 2000, which cost four lives, prompted a national rethink about the state of Britain's railways. The crash has been followed by months of near-paralysis on the system, and has put privatization under the spotlight as never before.Off the Rails looks at the disastrous consequences of private ownership for Britain's railway network and makes the case for the restoration of the system to public control. It traces the history of the privatization process from think-tanks to legislation, and how British Rail came to be sold off in a hurry in one hundred different pieces by the Major government, despite public hostility. It looks at the complex structure of the privately-owned rail industry and identifies the main players, showing how they have failed to work in the public interest. It explains the conflicting roles of the various regulators, and adds up money made for shareholders at the taxpayers' expense in an industry which combines public subsidy with private profit.Written by an author deeply involved in the industry, Off the Rails draws extensively on the testimony of those who work on the railways-the train drivers, maintenance workers, signalers, station staff and passengers' representatives. The Hatfield crash was the final straw for the public reputation of the fragmented railway. The run-up to the disaster and the chaos afterward are examined in detail, as are the limitations of the political response from New Labour. Off the Rails is also a call for change. The book looks at how public ownership could be reintroduced and considers other alternatives for renewing the railways. It also draws on experience in other parts of the world to make the case that only the restoration of the railways as a public service can guarantee the safe and reliable service which passengers expect.
£8.43
Verso Books NHS plc: The Privatisation of Our Health Care
Universal, comprehensive health care, equally available to all and disconnected from income and the ability to pay, was the goal of the founders of the National Health Service. This book, by one of the NHS's most eloquent and passionate defenders, tells the story of how that ideal has been progressively eroded, and how the clock is being turned back to pre-NHS days, when health care was a commodity, fully available only to those with money.How this has come about-to the point where even the shrinking core of free NHS hospital services is being handed over to private providers at the taxpayers' expense-is still not widely understood, hidden behind slogans like "care in the community," "diversity" and "local ownership." Allyson Pollock demystifies these terms, and in doing so presents a clear and powerful analysis of the transition from a comprehensive and universal service to New Labour's "mixed economy of health care," in which hospitals with foundation status, loosely supervised by an independent regulator, will be run on largely market principles.The NHS remains popular, Pollock argues, precisely because it created the "freedom from fear" that its founders promised, and because its integrated, non-commercial character meant low costs and good medical practice. Restoring these values in today's health service has become an urgent necessity, and this book will be a key resource for everyone wishing to to bring this about.
£22.66
Verso Books The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity
Challenging both the bureaucratic one-party regime and the Western neoliberal paradigm, China's leading critic shatters the myth of progress and reflects upon the inheritance of a revolutionary past. In this original and wide-ranging study, Wang Hui examines the roots of China's social and political problems, and traces the reforms and struggles that have led to the current state of mass depoliticization. Arguing that China's revolutionary history and its current liberalization are part of the same discourse of modernity, Wang Hui calls for alternatives to both its capitalist trajectory and its authoritarian past.From the May Fourth Movement to Tiananmen Square, The End of the Revolution offers a broad discussion of Chinese intellectual history and society, in the hope of forging a new path for China's future.
£20.04
Verso Books Between Existentialism and Marxism
This book presents a full decade of Sartre's work, from the publication of the Critique of Dialectical Reason in 1960, the basic philosophical turning-point in his postwar development, to the inception of his major study on Flaubert, the first volumes of which appeared in 1971. The essays and interviews collected here form a vivid panorama of the range and unity of Sartre's interests, since his deliberate attempt to wed his original existentialism to a rethought Marxism.A long and brilliant autobiographical interview, given to New Left Review in 1969, constitutes the best single overview of Sartre's whole intellectual evolution. Three analytic texts on the US war in Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the lessons of the May Revolt in France, define his political positions as a revolutionary socialist. Questions of philosophy and aesthetics are explored in essays on Kierkegaard, Mallarme and Tintoretto. Another section of the collection explores Sartre's critical attitude to orthodox psychoanalysis as a therapy, and is accompanied by rejoinders from colleagues on his journal Les Temps Modernes. The volume concludes with a prolonged reflection on the nature and role of intellectuals and writers in advanced capitalism, and their relationship to the struggles of the exploited and oppressed classes. Between Existentialism and Marxism is an impressive demonstration of the breadth and vitality of Sartre's thought, and its capacity to respond to political and cultural changes in the contemporary world.
£20.99
Verso Books Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History
In this groundbreaking book, Franco Moretti argues that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. In place of the traditionally selective literary canon of a few hundred texts, Moretti offers charts, maps and time lines, developing the idea of "distant reading" into a full-blown experiment in literary historiography, in which the canon disappears into the larger literary system. Charting entire genres-the epistolary, the gothic, and the historical novel-as well as the literary output of countries such as Japan, Italy, Spain, and Nigeria, he shows how literary history looks significantly different from what is commonly supposed and how the concept of aesthetic form can be radically redefined.
£13.89
Verso Books The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune
The 1870s in France - Rimbaud's moment, and the subject of this book - is a decade virtually ignored in most standard histories in France. Yet it was the moment of two significant spatial events: France's expansion on a global scale, and, in the spring of 1871, the brief existence on the Paris Commune - the construction of the revolutionary urban space. Arguing that space, as a social fact, is always political and strategic, Kristin Ross has written a book that is at once a history and geography of the Commune's anarchist culture - its political language and social relations, its values, strategies, and stances.Central to her analysis of the Commune as a social space and oppositional culture is a close textual reading of Arthur Rimabaud's poetry. His poems - a common thread running through the book - are one set of documents among many in Ross's recreation of the Communard experience. Rimbaud, Paul Lafargue, and the social geographer Élisée Reclus serve as emblematic figures moving within and on the periphery of the Commune; in their resistance to the logic and economy of the capitalist conception of work, in their challenge to work itself as a term of identity, all three posed a threat to the existing order. Ross looks at these and other emancipatory notions as aspects of Communard life, each with an analogous strategy in Rimbaud's poetry. Applying contemporary theory, to a wealth of little-known archival material, she has written a fresh, persuasive, and original book.
£17.89
Verso Books Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest
In an age of protest, culture and museums have come under fire. Protests of museum funding (for example, the Metropolitan Museum accepting Sackler family money) and boards (for example, the Whitney appointing tear gas manufacturer Warren Kanders)--to say nothing of demonstrations over exhibitions and artworks--have roiled cultural institutions across the world, from the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi to the Akron Art Museum. At the same time, never have there been more calls for museums to work for social change, calls for the emergence of a new role for culture.As director of the Queens Museum, Laura Raicovich helped turn that New York municipal institution into a public commons for art and activism, organizing high-powered exhibitions that were also political protests. Then in January, 2018, she resigned, after a dispute with the Queens Museum board and city officials became a public controversy--she had objected to the Israeli government using the museum for an event featuring vice president Mike Pence.In this book, Raicovich explains some of the key museum flashpoints, and she also provides historical context for the current controversies. She shows how art museums arose as colonial institutions bearing an ideology of neutrality that masks their role in upholding capitalist values. And she suggests how museums can be reinvented to serve better, public ends.
£12.02
Verso Books Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour
In 2021, the Chinese Communist Party celebrated a century of existence. Since the Party's humble beginnings in the Marxist groups of the Republican era to its current global ambitions, one thing has not changed for China's leaders: their claim to represent the vanguard of the Chinese working class. Spanning from the night classes for workers organised by student activists in Beijing in the 1910s to the labour struggles during the 1920s and 1930s; from the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution to the social convulsions of the reform era to China's global push today, this book reconstructs the contentious history of labour in China from the early twentieth century to this day (and beyond). This will be achieved through a series of essays penned by scholars in the field of Chinese society, politics, and culture, each one of which will revolve around a specific historical event, in a mosaic of different voices, perspectives, and interpretations of what constituted the experience of being a worker in China in the past century.Contributors: Corey Byrnes, Craig A. Smith, Xu Guoqi, Zhou Ruixue, Lin Chun, Elizabeth J. Perry, Tony Saich, Wang Kan, Gail Hershatter, Apo Leong, S.A. Smith, Alexander F. Day, Yige Dong, Seung-Joon Lee, Lu Yan, Joshua Howard, Bo Ærenlund Sørensen, Brian DeMare, Emily Honig, Po-chien Chen, Yi-hung Liu, Jake Werner, Malcolm Thompson, Robert Cliver, Mark W. Frazier, John Williams, Christian Sorace, Zhu Ruiyi, Ivan Franceschini, Chen Feng, Ben Kindler, Jane Hayward, Tim Wright, Koji Hirata, Jacob Eyferth, Aminda Smith, Fabio Lanza, Ralph Litzinger, Jonathan Unger, Covell F. Meyskens, Maggie Clinton, Patricia M. Thornton, Ray Yep, Andrea Piazzaroli Longobardi, Joel Andreas, Matt Galway, Michel Bonnin, A.C. Baecker, Mary Ann O'Donnell, Tiantian Zheng, Jeanne L. Wilson, Ming-sho Ho, Yueran Zhang, Anita Chan, Sarah Biddulph, Jude Howell, William Hurst, Dorothy J. Solinger, Ching Kwan Lee, Chloé Froissart, Mary Gallagher, Eric Florence, Junxi Qian, Chris King-chi Chan, Elaine Sio-Ieng Hui, Jenny Chan, Eli Friedman, Aaron Halegua, Wanning Sun, Marc Blecher, Huang Yu, Manfred Elfstrom, Darren Byler, Carlos Rojas, Chen Qiufan.
£35.00
Verso Books The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880-1917
In this landmark study of American labor history, Meredith Tax charts the actions of women in working-class, feminist, and socialist movements between 1880 and 1917 in the USA. Caught between the hostility of male trade unionists, the chauvinism of male socialist organizers, and the assumptions of middle-class feminists, women workers forged their own demands for economic and political justice in the industrializing landscape of North America. In doing so, Tax argues, a unique form of socialist-feminist class consciousness was created, whose remarkable history is chronicled in this work.With a focus on the histories of the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Tax shows how working-class socialist women navigated the terrain between the seemingly oppositional demands for suffrage and labour rights. The Rising of the Women also contains detailed case studies of two germinal moments in American labour history: the uprising of shirtwaist workers in New York City in 1909 - 1910, the real beginning of the International Ladies' Garment Worker Union; and the 1912 IWW strike of immigrant textile workers in Lawrence, Mass., making it an essential text for students of American labor history as well as readers interested in twentieth-century feminism.First published in 1980, the book is reissued by Verso as part of the highly successful Feminist Classics series, where it takes its place alongside texts by Sheila Rowbotham, Kathi Weeks, Stella Dadzie, Lynne Segal and more. The result of years of archival research, Tax blends original source material from the participants of the movements with her own sharp analysis into a rich narrative of women workers' struggle. The Rising of the Women is a classic of feminist labor history whose time has come to find the wide audience it deserves.
£20.91
Verso Books Osip Mandelstam: A Biography
This is the first full-scale biography of Osip Mandelstam to combine an analysis of his poetry with a description of his personal life, from his beginnings as a young intellectual in pre-revolutionary Russia to his final fate as a victim of Stalinism.The myth has grown up that Mandelstam was a gloomy, miserable figure; Dutli deconstructs this, stressing Mandelstam's enjoyment of life. There are several underlying themes here. One is Mandelstam's Jewish background in pre-1914 Russia, which he rejected as a young man, but reaffirmed in later life. Another is the inescapable impact of Russia's political and social transformation.His evolution as a poet naturally occupies a large place in the biography, which quotes many of his most famous poems, including his devastating anti-Stalin epigram. He produced wonderful poetry before the October Revolution, but did not reach his full poetic stature until the 1930s when in exile in Voronezh. He was never an official Soviet poet, and it was only thanks to the intervention of Bukharin that he was brought back from utter impoverishment.The biography gives full weight to his emotional life, beginning with his friendship with two other Russian poets, Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova, followed by love and marriage to Nadezhda Khazina."One of the century's greatest lyric poets." - Elaine Feinstein, Sunday Times"Mandelstam's poems are both bold and delicate. His imagery can seem both profoundly startling yet entirely natural". - Robert Chandler"Mandelstam was a tragic figure. Even while in exile in Voronej, he wrote works of untold beauty and power. And he had no poetic forerunners. In all of world poetry, I know of no other such case. We know the sources of Pushkin and Blok, but who will tell us from where that new, divine harmony, Mandelstam's poetry, came from?" - Anna Akhmatova"Russia's greatest poet in the twentieth century." - Joseph Brodsky
£25.00
Verso Books The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Machine
In the last decades, America has gone to war as supposed defenders of democracy. The War on Terror was waged to protect the west from the dangers of Islamists. US Solders are stationed in over 800 locations across the world to act as the righteous arbiters of the rule of law. In What America Really Wants? Andrew Cockburn brilliantly dissects the intentions behind Washington's martial appetites. The American war machine can only be understood in terms of the "private passions" and "interests" of those who control it - principally a passionate interest in money. Thus, as he witheringly reports, Washington expanded NATO to satisfy an arms manufacturer's urgent financial requirements; the U.S. Navy's Pacific fleet deployments were for years dictated by a corrupt contractor who bribed high-ranking officers with cash and prostitutes; senior marine commanders agreed to a troop surge in Afghanistan in 2017 "because it will do us good at budget time." Based on years of wide-ranging research, Cockburn lays bare the ugly reality of the largest military machine in history: squalid, and at the same time terrifyingly dangerous.
£17.99
Verso Books China in One Village: The Story of One Town and the Changing World
After a decade away from her ancestral family village, during which she became a writer and literary scholar in Beijing, Liang Hong started visiting her rural hometown in landlocked Hebei province. What she found was an extended family torn apart by the seismic changes in Chinese society, and a village hollowed-out by emigration, neglect, and environmental despoliation. Combining family memoir, literary observation, and social commentary, Liang's by turns moving and shocking account became a bestselling book in China and brought her fame. Across China, many saw in Liang's remarkable and vivid interviews with family members and childhood acquaintances a mirror of their own families, and her observations about the way the greatest rural-to-urban migration of modern times has twisted the country resonated deeply. China in One Village tells the story of contemporary China through one clear-eyed observer, one family, and one village.
£16.99
Verso Books This is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain
Since 2016, the UK has been in a crisis of its own making: but this is not the fault of Brexit but of a larger problem of our politics. The status of political parties, the mainstream media, public experts and officials have all been disrupted. Along the way, there have been shocking and exhilarating events: the unforeseen 2017 election result, the horrific details of Grenfell Tower and the Windrush scandal, the sudden rise and fall of the Brexit Party.As the 'mainstream' of politics and media has come under attack, the basic norms of public life have been thrown into question.This Is Not Normal takes stock of a historical moment that no longer recognises itself. Davies tells a story of the apparently chaotic and irrational events, and extracts their underlying logic and long-term causes. What we are seeing is the effects of the 2008 financial crash, the failure of the British neoliberal project, the dying of Empire, and the impact of the changes that technology and communications have had on the idea of the public sphere as well as the power of information. This is an essential book for anyone who wants to make sense of this current moment. .
£11.24
Verso Books Into the Melee
Into the Mèlée probes the mercurial relationship between culture and politics through versatile critical writing on Conrad, Orwell, Sartre, Raymond Williams and Roberto Schwarz, among others. The ‘mèlée’ that Romain Rolland wrote to deplore was the Great War of 1914. The phrase gained general currency as a call to cultural service beyond the pressures of everyday political and social strife, a vocation ‘above the fray’. Francis Mulhern writes in the contrary belief that there is no social location corresponding to this desire, strong and appealing though it may be. Into the Mèlée opens with questions of nationality, from F. R. Leavis’s efforts to assert an English literary subject to Tom Nairn’s political vision of England and Scotland ‘after Britain’. Other essays concern intellectuals and, in one way or another, the politics of revolution and counterrevolution, from Burke to the present. The
£25.00
Verso Books The World and Us
In The World and Us, Roberto Mangabeira Unger sets out to reinvent philosophy. His central theme is our transcendence - everything in our existence points beyond itself - and its relation to our finitude: everything that surrounds us, and we ourselves, are flawed and ephemeral. He asks how we can live so that we die only once, instead of dying many small deaths; how we can breathe new life and new meaning into the revolutionary movement that has aroused humanity for the last three centuries, but that is now weakened and disoriented; and how we can make sense of ourselves without claiming for human beings a miraculous exception to the general regime of nature. For Unger, philosophy must be the mind on fire, insisting on our prerogative to speak to what matters most.From this perspective, he redefines each of the traditional parts of philosophy, from ontology and epistemology to ethics and politics. He turns moral philosophy into an exploration of the contest between the t
£35.00
Verso Books Share the Wealth: How to End Rentier Capitalism
How can we reduce inequalities? How can we make work get better recognition and better pay?Philippe Askenazy in this new book shows that the current share of wealth is far from natural; it results from rising rents and their capture by the actors best endowed in the economic game. In this race for rents, the world of work is the big loser: while many workers feed capital rents by increased productivity and worsened working conditions, they are stigmatized as unproductive and their earnings stagnate. By proposing a new description of the capital-work relationship, calling for a remobilization of the world of work, and particularly poorly paid employees, Askenazy shows that there is a more radical alternative to neoliberalism beyond simply redistribution.
£15.29
Verso Books The Intellectual and His People: Staging the People Volume 2
A classic collection of essay by Jacques Ranciere, that focuses on the ways in which radical philosophers understand the people they profess to speak for. The Intellectual and His People engages in an incisive and original way with current political and cultural issues, including the "discovery" of totalitarianism by the "new philosophers," the relationship of Sartre and Foucault to popular struggles, nostalgia for the ebbing world of the factory, the slippage of the artistic avant-garde into defending corporate privilege, and the ambiguous sociological critique of Pierre Bourdieu. As ever, Rancière challenges all patterns of thought in which one-time radicalism has become empty convention.
£13.89
Verso Books Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism
What is the impact of surveillance capitalism on our right to free speech? The Internet once promised to be a place of extraordinary freedom beyond the control of money or politics, but today corporations and platforms exercise more control over our ability to access information and share knowledge to a greater extent than any state. From the online calls to arms in the thick of the Arab Spring to the contemporary front line of misinformation, Jillian York charts the war over our digital rights. She looks at both how the big corporations have become unaccountable censors, and the devastating impact it has had on those who have been censored. In Silicon Values, leading campaigner Jillian York, looks at how our rights have become increasingly undermined by the major corporations desire to harvest our personal data and turn it into profit. She also looks at how governments have used the same technology to monitor citizens and threatened our ability to communicate. As a result our daily lives, and private thoughts, are being policed in an unprecedented manner. Who decides the difference between political debate and hate speech? How does this impact on our identity, our ability to create communities and to protest? Who regulates the censors? In response to this threat to our democracy, York proposes a user-powered movement against the platforms that demands change and a new form of ownership over our own data.
£16.99
Verso Books The Walker: On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City
There is no such thing as the wrong step; every time we walk we are going somewhere. Moving around the modern city becomes more than from getting from A to B, but a way of understanding who and where you are. In a series of riveting intellectual rambles, Matthew Beaumont, retraces a history of the walker. From Charles Dicken's insomniac night rambles to wandering through the faceless, windswept monuments of the neoliberal city, the act of walking is one of escape, self-discovery, disappearances and potential revolution. Pacing stride for stride alongside such literary amblers and thinkers as Edgar Allen Poe, Andrew Breton, H G Wells, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys and Ray Bradbury, Matthew Beaumont explores the relationship between the metropolis and its pedestrian life. He asks can you get lost in a crowd? It is polite to stare at people walking past on the street? What differentiates the city of daylight and the nocturnal metropolis? What connects walking, philosophy and the big toe? Can we save the city - or ourselves - by taking the pavement?
£18.99
Verso Books Bigger Than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism
The political ambitions of the movement behind Bernie Sanders have never been limited to winning the White House. Since Bernie first entered the presidential primaries in 2016, his supporters have worked to organize a revolution intended to encourage the active participation of millions of ordinary people in political life. That revolution is already underway, as evidenced by the massive growth of the Democratic Socialists of America, the teachers Bernie motivated to lead strikes across red and blue states, and the rising new generation of radicals in Congress-led by AOC and Ilhan Omar-inspired by his example.In Bigger than Bernie, activist writers Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht give us an intimate map of this emerging movement to remake American politics top to bottom, profiling the grassroots organizers who are building something bigger, and more ambitious, than the career of any one candidate. As participants themselves, Day and Uetricht provide a serious analysis of the prospects for long-term change, offering a strategy for making "political revolution" more than just a campaign slogan. They provide a road map for how to entrench democratic socialism in the halls of power and in our own lives.Bigger than Bernie offers unmatched insights into the people behind the most unique campaign in modern American history and a clear-eyed sense of how the movement can sustain itself for the long haul.
£16.99
Verso Books The Metamorphoses of Kinship
With marriage in decline, divorce on the rise and the demise of the nuclear family, it is clear that the structures of kinship in the modern West are in a state of flux.In The Metamorphoses of Kinship, the world-renowned anthropologist Maurice Godelier contextualises these developments, surveying the accumulated experience of humanity with regard to such phenomena as the organisation of lines of descent, sexuality and sexual prohibitions. In parallel, Godelier studies the evolution of Western conjugal and familial traditions from their roots in the nineteenth century to the present. The conclusion he draws is that it is never the case that a man and a woman are sufficient on their own to raise a child, and nowhere are relations of kinship or the family the keystone of society.
£30.00
Verso Books Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs: Israeli and Palestinian Literature of the Global Contemporary
Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs charts the aesthetic and political formation of neoliberalism and globalization in Israeli and Palestinian literature from the 1940s to the present. By tracking literature's move from making worlds to reading signs, Cohen Lustig proposes a new way to read theorize our global contemporary. Cohen Lustig argues that the period of Israeli statism and its counterpart of Palestinian statelessness produced works that sought to make and create whole worlds and social time - create the new state of Israel, preserve collective visions of Palestinian statehood. During the period of neoliberalism, the period after 1985 in Israel and the 1993 Oslo Accords in Palestine, literature became about the reading of signs, where politics and history are now rearticulated through the private lives of individual subjects. Here characters do not make social time but live within it and inquire after its missing origin. Cohen Lustig argues for new ways to track the subjectivities and aesthetics produced by larger shifts in production. In so doing, he proposes a new model to understand the historical development of Israeli and Palestinian literature as well as world literature in our contemporary moment. With a preface from Fredric Jameson.
£25.00
Verso Books A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Composed in 1790, Mary Wollstonecraft's seminal feminist tract A Vindication of the Rights of Woman broke new ground in its demand for women's education. A Vindication remains one of history's most important and elegant broadsides against sexual oppression. In her introduction, renowned socialist feminist Sheila Rowbotham casts Wollstonecraft's life and work in a new light.
£12.82
Verso Books The Adventure of French Philosophy
The Adventure of French Philosophy is essential reading for anyone interested in what Badiou calls the "French moment" in contemporary thought.Badiou explores the exceptionally rich and varied world of French philosophy in a number of groundbreaking essays, published here for the first time in English or in a revised translation. Included are the often-quoted review of Louis Althusser's canonical works For Marx and Reading Capital and the scathing critique of "potato fascism" in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. There are also talks on Michel Foucault and Jean-Luc Nancy, and reviews of the work of Jean-François Lyotard and Barbara Cassin, notable points of interest on an expansive tour of modern French thought.Guided by a small set of fundamental questions concerning the nature of being, the event, the subject, and truth, Badiou pushes to an extreme the polemical force of his thinking. Against the formless continuum of life, he posits the need for radical discontinuity; against the false modesty of finitude, he pleads for the mathematical infinity of everyday situations; against the various returns to Kant, he argues for the persistence of the Hegelian dialectic; and against the lure of ultraleftism, his texts from the 1970s vindicate the role of Maoism as a driving force behind the communist Idea.
£16.99
Verso Books Revolution and Counterrevolution in China: The Paradoxes of Chinese Struggle
Over recent decades China has experienced massive change and development. China is the world's fastest growing economy, and has become a global superpower once again. But this development has thrown up a number of seemingly intractable contradictions, both political and economic. In this panoramic study of Chinese history in the twentieth century and its place in the development of global capitalism, Lin Chun argues that the paradoxes of contemporary Chinese society are not simply the product of the development of capitalism or modernity in the country. They are instead the product of the contradictions of its long revolutionary history, as well as the social and political consequences of its post-socialist transition. Published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, Revolution and Counterrevolution in China charts China's epic revolutionary trajectory in search of a socialist alternative to the global system, and asks whether market reform must repudiate and overturn the revolution and its legacy.
£25.00
Verso Books The Black Romantic Revolution: Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery
During the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers - enslaved and free - allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for emancipation and to envision the end of slavery as a world-historical moment of possibility.These Black writers borrowed from the European tradition of Romanticism - lyric poetry, prophetic visions - to write, speak, and sing their hopes for what freedom might mean. At the same time, they voiced anxieties about the expansion of global capital and U.S. imperial power in the aftermath of slavery. They also focused on the ramifications of slavery's sexual violence. Authors like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, George Moses Horton, Albery Allson Whitman, and Joshua McCarter Simpson conceived the Civil War as a revolutionary upheaval on par with Europe's stormy Age of Revolutions. The Black Romantic Revolution proposes that the Black Romantics' cultural innovations have shaped Black radical culture to this day, from the blues and hip hop to Black nationalism and Black feminism. Their expressions of love and rage, grief and determination, dreams and nightmares, still echo into our present.
£70.00
Verso Books The People Are Not an Image: Vernacular Video After the Arab Spring
The wave of uprisings and revolutions that swept the Middle East and North Africa between 2010 and 2012 were most vividly transmitted throughout the world not by television or even social media, but in short videos produced by the participants themselves and circulated anonymously on the internet.In The People Are Not An Image, Snowdon explores this radical shift in revolutionary self-representation, showing that the political consequences of these videos cannot be located without reference to their aesthetic form. Looking at videos from Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria, Libya, and Egypt, Snowdon attends closely to the circumstances of both their production and circulation, drawing on a wide range of historical and theoretical material, to discover what they can tell us about the potential for revolution in our time and the possibilities of video as a genuinely decentralized and vernacular medium.
£25.00
Verso Books Dark Matter: A Guide to Alexander Kluge & Oskar Negt
Collaborators for more than four decades, lawyer, author, filmmaker, and multimedia artist Alexander Kluge and social philosopher Oskar Negt are an exceptional duo in the history of Critical Theory precisely because their respective disciplines operate so differently. Dark Matter argues that what makes their contributions to the Frankfurt School so remarkable is how they think together in spite of these differences. Kluge and Negt's "gravitational thinking" balances not only the abstractions of theory with the concreteness of the aesthetic, but also their allegiances to Frankfurt School mentors with their fascination for other German, French, and Anglo-American thinkers distinctly outside the Frankfurt tradition.At the core of all their adventures in gravitational thinking is a profound sense that the catastrophic conditions of modern life are not humankind's unalterable fate. In opposition to modernity's disastrous state of affairs, Kluge and Negt regard the huge mass of dark matter throughout the universe as the lodestar for thinking together with others, for dark matter is that absolute guarantee that happier alternatives to our calamitous world are possible. As illustrated throughout Langston's study, dark matter's promise-its critical orientation out of catastrophic modernity-finds its expression, above all, in Kluge's multimedia aesthetic.
£63.00
Verso Books The Great Adaptation: Climate, Capitalism and Catastrophe
The Great Adaptation tells the story of how scientists, governments and corporations have tried to deal with the challenge that climate change poses to capitalism by promoting adaptation to the consequences of climate change, rather than combating its causes. From the 1970s neoliberal economists and ideologues have used climate change as an argument for creating more "flexibility" in society, that is for promoting more market-based solutions to environmental and social questions. The book unveils the political economy of this potent movement, whereby some powerful actors are thriving in the face of dangerous climate change and may even make a profit out of it
£15.17
Verso Books Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility
Originally published in 1974, Kojin Karatani's Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility has been among his most enduring and pioneering works in critical theory. Written at a time when the political sequences of the New Left had collapsed into crisis and violence, with widespread political exhaustion for the competing sectarian visions of Marxism from 1968, Karatani's Marx laid the groundwork for a new reading, unfamiliar to the existing Marxist discourse in Japan at the time.Karatani's Marx takes on insights from semiotics, deconstruction, and the reading of Marx as a literary thinker, treating Capital as an intervention in philosophy that could be read as itself a theory of signs. Marx is unique in this sense, not only because of its importance in post-'68 Japanese thought, but also because the heterodox reading of Marx that Karatani debuts in this text, centred on his theory of the value-form, will go on to form the basis of his globally influential work.Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Gavin Walker.
£20.91
Verso Books Levers of Power: How the 1% Rules and What the 99% Can Do About It
It's no secret that the 1%-the business elite that commands the largest corporations and the connected network of public and private institutions-exercise enormous control over the US government. While this control is usually attributed to campaign donations and lobbying, Levers of Power argues that corporate power derives from control over the economic resources on which daily life depends. Government officials must constantly strive to keep capitalists happy, lest they go on "capital strike"-that is, refuse to invest in particular industries or locations, or move their holdings to other countries-and therefore impose material hardship on specific groups or the economy as a whole. For this reason, even politicians who are not dependent on corporations for their electoral success must fend off the interruption of corporate investment. Levers of Power documents the pervasive power of corporations and other institutions with decision-making control over large pools of capital, particularly the Pentagon. It also shows that the most successful reform movements in recent US history-for workers' rights, for civil rights, and against imperialist wars-succeeded by directly targeting the corporations and other institutional adversaries that initiated and benefitted from oppressive policies. Though most of today's social movements focus on elections and politicians, movements of the 99% are most effective when they inflict direct costs on corporations and their allied institutions. This strategy is also more conducive to building a revolutionary mass movement that can replace current institutions with democratic alternatives.
£20.91
Verso Books Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History
Skillfully deploying a large cast of characters, Sheehan retraces the development of Marxist philosophy of science through detailed and highly readable accounts of the debates that have characterized it. Approaching Marxism from the perspective of the philosophy of science, Sheehan shows how Marx's and Engel's ideas on the development and structure of natural science had a crucial impact on the work of early twentieth-century natural philosophers, historians of science, and natural scientists.From the ideas of Marx and Engels, those of the Marxist theoreticians of the Second International to the debates within Russian Marxism up to World War II, Sheehan masterfully surveys the history of marxist philosophy of science, concluding with a close analysis of the development of the debate among non-Soviet Marxists, placing particular emphasis on the contributions of leading British Marxists in the 1930s.
£27.99
Verso Books Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England
In order to understand the English Revolution and Civil War we need to understand Puritanism. In this classic work of social history, Professor Hill shows Puritanism as a living faith, one that responded to social as well as religious needs. It was a set of beliefs that answered the hopes and fears of yeomen and gentlemen, merchants and artisans in the tribulations of early modern Britain, a time of extraordinary turbulence. Over this period, Puritanism, he shows, was interwoven into daily life. He looks at how rituals such as oath-taking, the Sabbath, bawdy courts and poor relief, became ways to order the social upheaval. He even offers an explanation for the emergence of the seemingly paradoxical - the Puritan revolutionaries.
£19.99
Verso Books Che: A Graphic Biography
Since his murder 50 years ago in Bolivia, Ernesto "Che" Guevara has become a universally known revolutionary icon and political figure whose image is among the most recognizable in the world. This dramatic and extensively researched book breathes new life into his story, portraying his struggle through the medium of the underground political comic - one of the most prominent countercultural art forms since the 1960s. Spain Rodriguez's powerful artwork illuminates Che's life and the experiences that shaped him, from his motorcycle journey through Latin America, his rise to prominence as a leader in Fidel Castro's revolutionary movement, his travels in Africa, his involvement in the insurgency that led to his death in Bolivia, and his extraordinary legacy.
£11.24
Verso Books Deport, Deprive, Extradite: Twenty-First-Century State Extremism
When Minh Pham was extradited from Britain to the US to face terrorism related charges, his appeal against the deprivation of his British citizenship was still pending. Soon after he arrived his appeal was lost and he was effectively made stateless. Pham's story is one of the many in Deport, Deprive, Extradite, illustrating the perpetual enhancement of state power and its capabilities to expel.In looking at these stories of Muslim men accused of terrorism-related offences, Nisha Kapoor exposes how these racialised subjects are dehumanized, made non-human, both in terms of how they are represented and via the disciplinary techniques used to expel them. She explores how the establishment of these non-humans enables the expansion of inhumanity more broadly, targeting Muslims, people of colour, immigrants and refugees. In asking what such cases illuminate and legitimate about precariousness and dispossession, she offers a radical analysis of the contemporary security state.
£16.99
Verso Books Hegemony Now: How Big Tech and Wall Street Won the World (And How We Win it Back)
Today power is in the hands of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. How do we understand this transformation in power? And what can we do about it?We cannot change anything until we have a better understanding of how power works, who holds it, and why that matters. Through upgrading the concept of hegemony-understanding the importance of passive consent; the complexity of political interests; and the structural force of technology-Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams offer us an updated theory of power for the twenty-first century.Hegemony Now explores how these forces came to control our world. The authors show how they have shaped the direction of politics and government as well as the neoliberal economy to benefit their own interests. However, this dominance is under threat. Following the 2008 financial crisis, a new order emerged in which the digital platform is the central new technology of both production and power. This offers new opportunities for counter hegemonic strategies to win back power. Hegemony Now outlines a dynamic socialist strategy for the twenty-first century.
£16.99
Verso Books Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature
Order Out of Chaos is a sweeping critique of the discordant landscape of modern scientific knowledge. In this landmark book, Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine and acclaimed philosopher Isabelle Stengers offer an exciting and accessible account of the philosophical implications of thermodynamics. Prigogine and Stengers bring contradictory philosophies of time and chance into a novel and ambitious synthesis. Since its first publication in France in 1978, this book has sparked debate among physicists, philosophers, literary critics and historians.
£24.41
Verso Books The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love
Modern life is being destroyed by experts and professionals. We have lost our amateur spirit and need to rediscover the radical and liberating pleasure of doing things we love.In The Amateur, thinker Andy Merrifield shows us how the many spheres of our lives-work, knowledge, cities, politics-have fallen into the hands of box tickers, bean counters and rule followers. In response, he corrals a team of independent thinkers, wayward poets, dabblers and square pegs who challenge the accepted wisdom. Such figures as Charles Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Edward Said, Guy Debord, Hannah Arendt and Jane Jacobs show us the way. As we will see the amateur takes risks, thinks the unthinkable and seeks independence-and changes the world.
£11.24
Verso Books The Security Principle: From Serenity to Regulation
In The Security Principle, French philosopher Frédéric Gros takes a historical approach to the concept of "security", looking at its evolution from the Stoics to the social network. With lucidity and rigour, Gros's approach is fourfold, looking at security as a mental state, as developed by the Greeks; as an objective situation and absence of all danger, as prevailed in the Middle Ages; as guaranteed by the nation state and its trio of judiciary, police and military; and finally "biosecurity", control, regulation and protection in the flux of contemporary society. In this deeply thought-provoking account, Gros's exploration of security shines a light both on its past meanings as well as its present uses, exposing the contemporary abuses of security and the pervasiveness of it in everyday life in the Global North.
£20.91
Verso Books The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror
The new front in the War on Terror is the "homegrown enemy," domestic terrorists who have become the focus of sprawling counterterrorism structures of policing and surveillance in the United States and across Europe. Domestic surveillance has mushroomed - at least 100,000 Muslims in America have been secretly under scrutiny. British police compiled a secret suspect list of more than 8,000 al-Qaeda "sympathizers," and in another operation included almost 300 children fifteen and under among the potential extremists investigated. MI5 doubled in size in just five years.Based on several years of research and reportage, in locations as disperate as Texas, New York and Yorkshire, and written in engrossing, precise prose, this is the first comprehensive critique of counterradicalization strategies. The new policy and policing campaigns have been backed by an industry of freshly minted experts and liberal commentators. The Muslims Are Coming! looks at the way these debates have been transformed by the embrace of a narrowly configured and ill-conceived antiextremism.
£22.66
Verso Books The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology
The return to religion has perhaps become the dominant cliché of contemporary theory, which rarely offers anything more than an exaggerated echo of a political reality dominated by religious war. Somehow, the secular age seems to have been replaced by a new era, where political action flows directly from metaphysical conflict. The Faith of the Faithless asks how we might respond. Following Critchley's Infinitely Demanding, this new book builds on its philosophical and political framework, also venturing into the questions of faith, love, religion and violence. Should we defend a version of secularism and quietly accept the slide into a form of theism-or is there another way?From Rousseau's politics and religion to the return to St. Paul in Taubes, Agamben and Badiou, via explorations of politics and original sin in the work of Schmitt and John Gray, Critchley examines whether there can be a faith of the faithless, a belief for unbelievers. Expanding on his debate with Slavoj Zizek, Critchley concludes with a meditation on the question of violence, and the limits of non-violence.
£11.24
Verso Books The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South
In The Darker Nations, Vijay Prashad provided an intellectual history of the Third World and traced the rise and fall of the Non-Aligned Movement. With The Poorer Nations, Prashad takes up the story where he left off.Since the '70s, the countries of the Global South have struggled to build political movements. Prashad analyzes the failures of neoliberalism, as well as the rise of the BRICS countries, the World Social Forum, issue-based movements like Via Campesina, the Latin American revolutionary revival-in short, efforts to create alternatives to the neoliberal project advanced militarily by the US and its allies and economically by the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, and other instruments of the powerful. Just as The Darker Nations asserted that the Third World was a project, not a place, The Poorer Nations sees the Global South as a term that properly refers not to geographical space but to a concatenation of protests against neoliberalism.In his foreword to the book, former Secretary-General of the United Nations Boutros Boutros-Ghali writes that Prashad "has helped open the vista on complex events that preceded today's global situation and standoff." The Poorer Nations looks to the future while revising our sense of the past.
£20.91
Verso Books Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
Ethical questions dominate current political and academic agendas. While government think-tanks ponder the dilemmas of bio-ethics, medical ethics and professional ethics, respect for human rights and reverence for the Other have become matters of broad consensus.Alain Badiou, one of the most powerful voices in contemporary French philosophy, explodes the facile assumptions behind this recent ethical turn. He shows how our prevailing ethical principles serve ultimately to reinforce an ideology of the status quo, and fail to provide a framework for an effective understanding of the concept of evil.In contrast, Badiou summons up an "ethic of truths" which is designed both to sustain and inspire a disciplined, subjective adherence to a militant cause (be it political or scientific, artistic or romantic), and to discern a finely demarcated zone of application for the concept of evil. He defends an effectively super-human integrity over the respect for merely human rights, asserts a partisan universality over the negotiation of merely particular interests, and appeals to an "immortal" value beyond the protection of mortal privileges.
£12.82
Verso Books Politics in Britain
Politics in Britain is an original and powerful work of synthesis that is essential reading for students of the political scene in the UK today. Controversial when it was first published, the book's analysis of the changing face of British politics has been confirmed by events of the 1980s. This new edition, revised throughout, is brought up to date with substantial new material on the Thatcherite era.Leys provides a solid body of information on the central topics of British politics - not only on the nature of political parties and the evolution of the state, but also on the organisation of capital and labour, the role of social class in British politics, the transformation of local democracy, law and order, and other areas seldom discussed in more orthodox texts. The book also includes new accounts of Thatcher's programme of de-nationalisation, and of the changes to the Welfare State. Now more relevant than ever. Politics in Britain has yet to be surpassed as an introduction to its subject.
£24.41
Verso Books Salvage 11
Winter 2021 issue of Salvage, featuring China Miéville, Sarah Jaffe, Tad DeLay, and Jules Joanne GleesonAlready, Not Yet includes an essay on communism by China Miéville, Richard Seymour in praise of nature writing, Kevin Ochieng Okoth making sense of the German elections, Sarah Jaffe on how to grieve in an era of mass death and climate catastrophe, Barnaby Raine on Stalinism 2.0, Luísa Calvete Portela Barbosa on Lula, Bolsonaro and the future of Brazilian politics, and Jules Joanne Gleeson on two approaches to queer history.The artist of this issue is Patty Paine, and the volume concludes with a short story from Heba Hayek.
£16.23