Search results for ""Verso Books""

Since the birth of fascism in the 1920s, well before the global renaissance of "white nationalism," the United States has been home to its own distinct fascist movements, some of which decisively influenced the course of US history. Yet long before Antifa became a household word in the United States, they were met, time and again, by an equally deep antifascist current. Many on the left are unaware that the United States has a rich antifascist tradition, because it has rarely been discussed as such, nor has it been accessible in one place. This reader reconstructs the history of US antifascism the twenty-first century, showing how generations of writers, organisers, and fighters spoke to each other over time.

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Karl Marx was not only the great theorist of capitalism, he was also a superb journalist, politician and historian. For the first time ever, this book brings together all of his essential political and historical writings in one volume. These writings allow us to see the depth and range of Marx's mature work from the tumultuous revolutions of 1848 that rocked European society through to the end of his life. Including The Communist Manifesto, The Class Struggles in France and The Critique of the Gotha Programme, this volume shows Marx at his most astute, analysing the forces of global capitalism as they played out in actual events.

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American Breakdown is the brilliant political diary of one of America's leading essayists, David Bromwich, whose work has drawn wide appreciation for its incisive portraits and accurate prognosis. From his analysis of the Cheney-Bush co-presidency, in which foreign policy was reduced to permanent war, and Barack Obama's practice of reconciliation without truth, Bromwich chronicles the emergence of Donald Trump-the demagogue of a culture of corruption from which all traces of political interest and candour have dropped away. An unsparing account of the degradation of American democracy, the book leads off with a new introduction on the prospects for change during the new Democratic Congress.

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According to tradition, Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible. Depicted there in suprising and contradicting ways, and both for and against his people, bringer of the tablets of law which he then breaks.By way of a series of possible portraits-including one of a female Moses-Jean-Christophe Attias follows the metamorphoses of the Hebrew liberator through ages and cultures. Drawing on rabbinical sources as well as the Bible itself, he examines the words of the texts and especially their silences. He discovers here a fragile prophet, teacher of a Judaism of the spirit, of wandering, and of incompleteness. The Judaism of Moses speaks to believers and others-to Jews, of course, but also far beyond them, inviting its hearers to have done with tribal pride, the violence of weapons, and the tyranny of a special place.

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This fierce memoir is both an elegy and an indictment. Marcel Liebman's account of his childhood in Brussels under the Nazi occupation explores the emergence of his class consciousness against a background of resistance and collaboration. He documents the internal class war that has long been hidden from history: how the Nazi persecution exploited class distinctions within the Jewish community, and how certain Jewish notables collaborated in a systematic programme of denunciation and deportation against immigrant Jews who lacked the privileges of wealth and citizenship.

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This is a book of poems by four veteran Chinese revolutionaries. Chen Duxiu led China's early cultural awakening before founding the Communist Party in 1921. Mao led the Party to power in 1949. Zheng Chaolin, Chen Duxiu's disciple and, like him, a convert to Trotskyism, spent 34 years in jail, first under the Nationalists and then under Mao. The guerrilla Chen Yi wrote poems in mountain bivouacs or the heat of battle. All wrote in the classical style, which Mao Zedong officially proscribed, though he and other leaders kept using it. Poetry, especially classical poetry, plays a different role in China, and in Chinese revolution, from in the West - it is collective and collaborative. The four poets were entangled with one another in various ways. Chen Duxiu inspired Mao, though Mao later denounced him. Mao and Zheng joined the leadership under Chen Duxiu in the 1920s, though Mao later gaoled Zheng. The maverick Chen Yi was Zheng's associate in France and Mao's comrade-in-arms in China, but he clashed with the Maoists in the Cultural Revolution. Together, the four poets illustrate the complex relationship between Communist revolution and Chinese cultural tradition.

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Adam Smith and Karl Marx recognized that the best way to understand the economy is to study the most advanced practice of production. Today that practice is no longer conventional manufacturing: it is the radically innovative vanguard known as the knowledge economy. This book explores the hidden nature of the knowledge economy and its possible futures.In every part of the production system, the knowledge economy remains a fringe excluding the vast majority of workers and businesses. This confinement has become a driver of economic stagnation and inequality throughout the world. Traditional mass production has stopped working as a shortcut to economic growth. But the alternative-a deepened and socially inclusive form of the knowledge economy-continues to lie beyond reach in even the richest countries. Unger sets out the route to a knowledge economy for the many: changes not just in economic institutions but also in education, culture, and politics. Just as Smith and Marx did in their time, he uses an understanding of the most advanced practice of production to rethink both economics and the economy as a whole.

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An urgent challenge to the prevailing moral order from one of the freshest, most compelling voices in radical politics todayBeing Numerous shatters the mainstream consensus on politics and personhood, offering in its place a bracing analysis of a perilous world and how we should live in it. Beginning with an interrogation of what it means to fight fascism, Natasha Lennard explores the limits of individual rights, the criminalization of political dissent, the myths of radical sex, and the ghosts in our lives. At once politically committed and philosophically capacious, Being Numerous is a revaluation of the idea that the personal is political, and situates as the central question of our time - How can we live a non-fascist life?

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Arnovis couldn't stay in El Salvador. If he didn't leave, a local gangster promised that his family would dress in mourning, that he would wake up with flies in his mouth. "It was like a bomb exploded in my life," Arnovis said. The Dispossessed tells the story of a twenty-four-year-old Salvadoran man, Arnovis, whose family's search for safety shows how the United States - in concert with other Western nations - has gutted asylum protections for the world's most vulnerable. Crisscrossing the border and Central America, John Washington traces one man's quest for asylum. Arnovis is separated from his daughter by US Border Patrol agents and struggles to find security after being repeatedly deported to a gang-ruled community in El Salvador, traumatic experiences relayed by Washington with vivid intensity.Adding historical, literary, and current political context to the discussion of migration today, Washington tells the history of asylum law and practice through ages to the present day. Packed with information and reflection, The Dispossessed is more than a human portrait of those who cross borders - it is an urgent and persuasive case for sharing the country we call home.

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Being Numerous shatters the mainstream consensus on politics, personhood, and truth, and offers in its place a bracing analysis of a perilous world and how we might live in it. Beginning with an interrogation of what it means to fight fascism, Natasha Lennard explores the limits of individual rights, the criminalization of political dissent, the myths of radical sex, and why we may choose to leave room in our lives for ghosts. At once politically committed and philosophically capacious, Being Numerous is a revaluation of the idea that "the personal is political," and goes on to ask the central question of our time-how can we live a non-fascist life?

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The extent and irreversibility of US decline is becoming ever more obvious as America loses war after war and as one industry after another loses its technological edge. Lachmann explains why the United States will not be able to sustain its global dominance. He contrasts America's relatively brief period of hegemony with the Netherlands' similarly short primacy and Britain's far longer era of leadership.Decline in all those cases was not inevitable and did not respond to global capitalist cycles. Rather, decline is the product of elites' success in grabbing control of resources and governmental powers. Not only are ordinary people harmed, but also capitalists become increasingly unable to coordinate their interests and adopt policies and make investments necessary to counter economic and geopolitical competitors elsewhere in the world.Conflicts among elites and challenges by non-elites determine the timing and mould the contours of decline. Lachmann traces the transformation of US politics from an era of elite consensus to present-day paralysis combined with neoliberal plunder, explains the paradox of an American military with an unprecedented technological edge unable to subdue even the weakest enemies, and the consequences of finance's cannibalisation of the US economy.

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In this personal portrait of Edward Said written by a close friend, Dominique Eddé offers a fascinating and fresh presentation of his oeuvre from his earliest writings on Joseph Conrad to his most famous texts, Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. Eddé weaves together accounts of the genesis and content of Said's work, his intellectual development, and her own reflections and personal recollections of their friendship, which began in 1979 and lasted until Said's death in 2003. Throughout, she traces the connection between personal history and theoretical options, illuminating the evolution of Said's thought. Both specialists of Said's work and newcomers will find much to learn in this rich portrait of one of the twentieth century's most important intellectuals.

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One day in the spring of 2013, a box appeared outside a fourth-floor apartment door in Brooklyn, New York. The recipient, who didn't know the sender, only knew she was supposed to bring this box to a friend, who would ferry it to another friend. This was Edward Snowden's box-printouts of documents proving that the US government had built a massive surveillance apparatus and used it to spy on its own people-and the friend on the end of this chain was filmmaker Laura Poitras.Thus the biggest national security leak of the digital era was launched via a remarkably analog network, the US Postal Service. This is just one of the odd, ironic details that emerges from the story of how Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge, two experienced journalists but security novices (and the friends who received and ferried the box) got drawn into the Snowden story as behind-the-scenes players. Their initially stumbling, increasingly paranoid, and sometimes comic efforts to help bring Snowden's leaks to light, and ultimately, to understand their significance, unfold in an engrossing narrative that includes emails and diary entries from Poitras. This is an illuminating essay on the status of transparency, privacy, and trust in the age of surveillance.

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In 1946 many Jewish soldiers returned to their homes in England imagining that they had fought and defeated the forces of fascism in Europe. Yet in London they found a revived fascist movement inspired by Sir Oswald Mosley and stirring up agitation against Jews and communists. Many felt that the government, the police and even the Jewish Board of Deputies were ignoring the threat; so they had to take matters into their own hands, by any means necessary.Forty-three Jewish servicemen met together and set up a group that tirelessly organised, infiltrated meetings, and broke up street demonstrations to stop the rebirth of the far right. The group included returned war heroes; women who went undercover; and young Jews, such as hairdresser Vidal Sassoon, seeking adventure. From 1947, the 43 Group grew into a powerful troop that could muster hundreds of fighters turning meetings into mass street brawls at short notice.The history of the 43 Group is not just a gripping story of a forgotten moment in Britain's postwar history; it is also a timely lesson in how to confront fascism, and how to win.

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Big challenges lie ahead for our society: increased automation of work, and the threat of catastrophic climate change. But so, too, are the huge possibilities presented by new technology and better ways of organising our economy in the wake of neoliberalism's failure. With the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, and the extraordinary turnaround in Labour's fortunes in the 2017 election, the possibility has opened up to build an economy in Britain that is radically fairer, radically more democratic, and radically more sustainable. But we need ideas and strategies on how to get there.Economics for the Many, edited and introduced by Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, John McDonnell, features contributions from the participants in McDonnell's New Economics conferences, including Faiza Shaheen, Barry Gardiner, Prem Sikka, Ann Pettifor, Paul Mason, Rebecca Long-Bailey and covers topics from housing, public ownership and fairer international trading systems to industrial policy for the 21st century and how to tackle tax avoidance and regional imbalances. Together, the essays in this volume lay out the vision for a new economics; one that works for the many, not the few.

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In response to the American administration's attempt to isolate Cuba, Fidel Castro delivered a series of speeches designed to radicalize Latin American society. As Latin America experiences more revolutions in Venezuela and Bolivia, and continues to upset America's plans for neo-liberal imperialism, renowned radical writer and activist Tariq Ali provides a searing analysis of the relevance of Castro's message for today.

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A People's History of Scotland looks beyond the kings and queens, the battles and bloody defeats of the past. It captures the history that matters today, stories of freedom fighters, suffragettes, the workers of Red Clydeside, and the hardship and protest of the treacherous Thatcher era. With riveting storytelling, Chris Bambery recounts the struggles for nationhood. He charts the lives of Scots who changed the world, as well as those who fought for the cause of ordinary people at home, from the poets Robbie Burns and Hugh MacDiarmid to campaigners such as John Maclean and Helen Crawfurd. This is a passionate cry for more than just independence but also for a nation based on social justice. Fully updated to include the rise of the SNP post 2014.

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This study of Marx serves not only as an excellent introduction to that most influential of "worldly philosophers" but is also a significant resume of the central issues of Bloch's own profound and wide-ranging thought.Special attention is given to the political maturation of the young Karl Marx and to his studies and intellectual relationship to important thinkers of his time. Bloch concludes with an insightful summons to the West to consider Marx anew as a thinker still vitally relevant to contemporary social issues, and not merely as the father of a sovietized political system.

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The Italian Communist Party was once one of the most powerful and vibrant parties of the West. In this detailed and probing work, Lucio Magri, one of the towering intellectual figures of the Italian left, assesses the causes for its demise. The PCI survived almost a century of Italian history, from its founding in 1921 to the partisan resistance, the turning point of Salerno in 1944 to the de-Stalinization of 1956, the long '68 to the "historic compromise," and to the opportunity - missed forever - of democratic transformation.With rigor and passion, The Tailor of Ulm merges an original and enlightening interpretation of Italian communism with the experience of a militant "heretic" into a riveting read - capable of broadening our insights into contemporary Italy and the twentieth-century communist experience.

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How do we explain the strange survival of the forcesresponsible for the 2008 economic crisis, one of the worst since 1929? How do we explain the fact that neoliberalism has emerged from the crisis strengthened? When it broke, a number of the most prominent economists hastened to announce the 'death' of neoliberalism. They regarded the pursuit of neoliberal policy as the fruit of dogmatism.For Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, neoliberalism is no mere dogma. Supported by powerful oligarchies, it is a veritable politico-institutional system that obeys a logic of self-reinforcement. Far from representing a break, crisis has become a formidably effective mode of government.In showing how this system crystallized and solidified, the book explains that the neoliberal straitjacket has succeeded in preventing any course correction by progressively deactivating democracy. Increasing the disarray and demobilization, the so-called 'governmental' Left has actively helped strengthen this oligarchical logic. The latter could lead to a definitive exit from democracy in favour of expertocratic governance, free of any control.However, nothing has been decided yet. The revival of democratic activity, which we see emerging in the political movements and experiments of recent years, is a sign that the political confrontation with the neoliberal system and the oligarchical bloc has already begun.

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Revolution in the Air is the definitive study of how radicals from the sixties movements embraced twentieth-century Marxism, and what movements of dissent today can learn from the legacies of Lenin, Mao and Che.

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For many progressives, racial identities are the engine of American history, and by extension, contemporary politics. They, in short, want to separate race from class. While policymakers and pundits find an almost metaphysical racism, or the survival of an ancient and primordial tribalism at the heart of American life, these inequities are better understood when traced to more comprehensible forces: to the contradictions in access to New Deal era welfare programs, to the blinders imposed by the Cold War, to Ronald Reagan's neoliberal assault on the half-century long Keynesian consensus. As Touré Reed argues in this rigorously constructed book, the road to a more just society for African Americans and everyone else, the fate of poor and working-class African Americans is inextricably linked to that of other poor and working-class Americans.

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Today, our lives are dominated by an ideology of extreme competition and individualism. It misrepresents human nature, destroying hope and common purpose. But we cannot replace it without a positive vision, one that reengages people in politics and lights a path to a better world. Urgent and passionate, George Monbiot shows how new findings in psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology cast humans in a radically different light: as the supreme altruists and cooperators. He shows how both democracy and economic life can be radically reorganised from the bottom up, enabling us to take back control and overthrow the forces that have thwarted our ambitions for a better society. Out of the Wreckage explains just how communities can be rebuilt with the help of a new "politics of belonging".

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Robespierre's defense of the French Revolution remains one of the most powerful and unnerving justifications for political violence ever written, and has extraordinary resonance in a world obsessed with terrorism and appalled by the language of its proponents. Yet today, the French Revolution is celebrated as the event which gave birth to a nation built on the principles of Enlightenment. So how should a contemporary audience approach Robespierre's vindication of revolutionary terror? Zizek takes a helter-skelter route through these contradictions, marshaling all the breadth of analogy for which he is famous.

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Five hundred years since its first publication, Thomas More's Utopia remains astonishingly radical and provocative. More imagines an island nation where thousands live in peace and harmony, men and women are both educated, and property is communal. In a text hovering between fantasy, satire, blueprint and game, More explores the theories and realities behind war, political conflicts, social tensions and redistribution, and imagines the day-to-day lives of a citizenry living free from fear, oppression, violence and suffering.But there has always been a shadow at the heart of Utopia. If this is a depiction of the perfect state, why, as well as wonder, does it provoke a growing unease?In this quincentenary edition, published in conjunction with Somerset House, More's text is introduced by multi-award-winning author China Miéville and accompanied by four essays from Ursula K. Le Guin, today's most distinguished utopian writer and thinker.

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Sixty years ago, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, an exiled Jew deprived of her German citizenship, observed that before people can enjoy any of the "inalienable" Rights of Man-before there can be any specific rights to education, work, voting, and so on-there must first be such a thing as "the right to have rights". The concept received little attention at the time, but in our age of mass deportations, Muslim bans, refugee crises, and extra-state war, the phrase has become the centre of a crucial and lively debate. Here five leading thinkers from varied disciplines-including history, law, politics, and literary studies-discuss the critical basis of rights and the meaning of radical democratic politics today.

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Pocket Pantheon is an invitation to engage with the greats of postwar Western thought, such as Lacan, Sartre and Foucault, in the company of one of today's leading political and philosophical minds. Alain Badiou draws on his encounters with this pantheon-his teachers, opponents and allies-to offer unique insights into both the authors and their work. These studies form an accessible, authoritative distillation of continental theory and a capsule history of a period in Western thought.

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The Beautiful Struggle is an extraordinary memoir from the most important new voice in the US race debate and the author of New York Times bestseller list no. 1 Between the World and Me, hailed by Toni Morrison as "required reading."This small and perfectly formed epic follows the lives of boys on the journey to manhood in black America and beyond in 1980s Baltimore, a city on the verge of chaos. These youngsters needed to learn fast, and Ta-Nehisi's father, Paul, was a fine teacher: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian, and an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement. The Beautiful Struggle is a moving father-and-son story about the reality that tests us, and the love that saves us.

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The BBC is one of the most important institutions in Britain; it is also one of the most misunderstood. Despite its claim to be independent and impartial, and the constant accusations of a liberal bias, from its Reithian origins to its coverage of the 2019 General Election: the BBC has always sided with the elite. As Tom Mills demonstrates, we are only getting the news that the Establishment wants aired in public. And yet in the current age of multi-platform news, this bias is increasingly exposed. Mills asks if the institution is fit for purpose? And can it even be reformed? The BBC is an important and timely examination of a crucial public institution that may threaten the very thing it was meant to uphold: democracy.

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Althusser delivered these lectures on Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality at the École normale supérieure in Paris in 1972. They are fascinating for two reasons. First, they gave rise to a new generation of Rousseau scholars, attentive not just to Rousseau's ideas, but also to those of his concepts that were buried beneath metaphors or fictional situations and characters. Second, we are now discovering that the "late Althusser's" theses about aleatory materialism and the need to break with the strict determinism of theories of history in order to devise a new philosophy "for Marx" were being worked out well before 1985 in this reading of Rousseau dating from twelve years earlier, which introduces into Rousseau's text the ideas of the void, the accident, the take, and the necessity of contingency.

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In Praise of Disobedience draw on works from a single miraculous year in which Oscar Wilde published the larger part of his greatest prose - the year he came into maturity as an artist. Before the end of 1891, he had written the first of his phenomenally successful plays and met the young man who would win his heart, beginning the love affair that would lead to imprisonment and public infamy. In a witty introduction, playwright, novelist and Wilde scholar Neil Bartlett explains what made this point in the writer's life central to his genius and why Wilde remains a provocative and radical figure to this day.Included here are the entirety of Wilde's foray into political philosophy, The Soul of Man Under Socialism; the complete essay collection Intentions; selections from The Portrait of Dorian Gray as well as its paradoxical and scandalous preface; and some of Wilde's greatest fictions for children. Each selection is accompanied by stimulating and enlightening annotations. A delight for fans of Oscar Wilde, In Praise of Disobedience will restore and revitalize an often misunderstood legacy.

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B.R. Ambedkar's Annihilation of Caste is one of the most important, yet neglected, works of political writing from India. Written in 1936, it is an audacious denunciation of Hinduism and its caste system. It offers a scholarly critique of Hindu scriptures, scriptures that sanction a rigidly hierarchical and iniquitous social system. Arundhati Roy introduces this extensively annotated edition in "The Doctor and the Saint," examining the persistence of caste in modern India, and how the conflict between Ambedkar and Gandhi continues to resonate. Roy breathes new life into Ambedkar's anti-caste utopia, and says that without a Dalit revolution, India will continue to be hobbled by systemic inequality.

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One hundred years ago, French troops fired tear gas grenades into German trenches. Designed to force people out from behind barricades and trenches, tear gas causes burning of the eyes and skin, tearing, and gagging. Chemical weapons are now banned from war zones. But today, tear gas has become the most commonly used form of "less-lethal" police force. In 2011, the year that protests exploded from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, tear gas sales tripled. Most tear gas is produced in the United States, and many images of protestors in Tahrir Square showed tear gas canisters with "Made in USA" printed on them, while Britain continues to sell tear gas to countries on its own human-rights blacklist.An engrossing century-spanning narrative, Tear Gas is the first history of this weapon, and takes us from military labs and chemical weapons expos to union assemblies and protest camps, drawing on declassified reports and witness testimonies to show how policing with poison came to be.

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When, in 2013, the Daily Mail labeled Ralph Miliband "The Man Who Hated Britain," a diverse host rallied to his defense. Those who had worked with him - from both left and right - praised his work and character. He was lauded as "one of the best-known academic Marxists of his generation" and a leading figure of the New Left. Class War Conservatism collects together his most significant political essays and shows the scope and brilliance of his thinking. Ranging from the critical anatomy of capitalism to a clear-eyed analysis of the future of socialism in Britain, this selection shows Miliband as an independent and prescient thinker of great insight. Throughout, his writing is a passionate and forcefully argued demand for social justice and a better future.

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Here is one of the first books to assert that mass protest movements in disparate places such as Greece, Argentina, and the United States share an agenda-to raise the question of what democracy should mean. These horizontalist movements, including Occupy, exercise and claim participatory democracy as the ground of revolutionary social change today.Written by two international activist intellectuals and based on extensive interviews with movement participants in Spain, Venezuela, Japan, across the United States, and elsewhere, this book is both one of the most expansive portraits of the assemblies, direct democracy forums, and organizational forms championed by the new movements, and an analytical history of direct and participatory democracy from ancient Athens to Athens today. The new movements put forward the idea that liberal democracy is not democratic, nor was it ever.

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