Search results for ""verso""
Verso Books Foucault's Analysis of Modern Governmentality: A Critique of Political Reason
Tracking the development of Foucault's key conceptsLemke offers the most comprehensive and systematic account of Michel Foucault's work on power and government from 1970 until his death in 1984. He convincingly argues, using material that has only partly been translated into English, that Foucault's concern with ethics and forms of subjectivation is always already integrated into his political concerns and his analytics of power. The book also shows how the concept of government was taken up in different lines of research in France before it gave rise to "governmentality studies" in the Anglophone world.A Critique of Political Reason: Foucault's Analysis of Modern Governmentality provides a clear and well-structured exposition that is theoretically challenging but also accessible for a wider audience. Thus, the book can be read both as an original examination of Foucault's concept of government and as a general introduction to his "genealogy of power."
£70.00
Verso Books The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump
THE MANAGEMENT OF SAVAGERY tells the story of the parallel rise of international jihadism and Western ultra-nationalism. Since Washington's secret funding of the Mujahideen following the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in the 1970s, America has supported extremists with money and hardware, including enemies such as Bin Laden. The Pentagon's willingness to make alliances abroad have seen the war coming home with inevitable consequences: by funding, training, and arming jihadist elements in Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya since the Cold War and waging wars of regime change and interventions that gave birth to the Islamic State. Meanwhile, Trump's dealings In the Middle East are likely only to exacerbate the situation further. Blumenthal excavates the real story behind America's dealing with the world and shows how the extremist forces that now threaten peace across the globe are the inevitable flowering of America's imperial designs of a national security state. And shows how this has ended with the rise of the Trump presidency.
£20.48
Verso Books Life Lessons: The Case for a National Education Service
It is time for a radical shake up of the purposes and practices of our education system. Melissa Benn is one of the most clear sighted and vocal campaigners for improving our schools. She shows here how we need to rethink education for life. As more and more of us live and work longer than ever before, a National Education Service should, like the NHS, be the framework that ensures a life-long entitlement for all, from early years provision to apprenticeships, universities and adult education. Like the NHS, it should be free at the point of delivery. The purpose of learning is not solely to pass exams but to prepare for living in the world; citizens of the future will need to develop their imaginations as well as their intellects, to be at ease with both knowledge and uncertainty.Life Lessons sets out a radical agenda for how we make education for all, and make it relevant to the demands of 21st century. This requires a deep-rooted, long-term vision of the role of learning in our society, one that is ready to take on the challenges of a new century and be part of a wider shift towards greater equality.
£10.45
Verso Books First They Took Rome: How the Populist Right Conquered Italy
It is difficult for Italians to have much faith in the future. The last Labour Minister said it was a good thing if young people emigrated, to stop them 'getting under our feet'; one recent Prime Minister said that young Italians should not invest their hopes in securing a stable job, for that would be 'boring', anyway.Examining Italy's history since the end of the Cold War, Italy is the Future argues that its dismal situation should not be understood in terms of a stereotyped narrative of Italian chaos or backwardness. In a country that could once boast Europe's strongest Left, Italy today epitomises the crisis of democracy in the West.The scandals of Silvio Berlusconi's rule, the pervasive corruption of public life and sky-high youth unemployment are indicators of a particularly sick society. Yet what is also apparent is the difficulty of any new force emerging to renew Italy's institutions, as its atomised citizens lose hope in political change.What has broken apart in Italy is not just its once-mighty Left but the very bases of social solidarity. The parties of the 1990s and 2000s directly express the social demolition wrought by neoliberalism, as isolated and endangered individuals face the consequences of the crisis alone. Not this or that political party, but public life itself, is in full-scale collapse
£16.99
Verso Books Eugene V. Debs: A Graphic Biography
Eugene Victor Debs led the Socialist Party in the early twentieth-century to federal and state office across the country, helped to pioneer a fighting union politics that organized all workers, and became the beloved figurehead of American radicalism. Imprisoned for speaking out against World War I, Debs ran for president from prison, receiving over one million votes. Debs's story is the story of labor battles in industrializing America, of a socialist politics grown directly out of the American Midwest heartland, and of a distinctly American vision of socialism.With the campaign of Bernie Sanders, the rise of mass movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and the Wall Street Crash of 2008, socialism has once again made itself felt in American politics. This graphic biography, published in collaboration with the Democratic Socialists of America-whose growing membership, spurred by Trump's election and Bernie Sanders' campaign, has reached heights not seen among socialist parties since the 1920s-is geared toward a new generation exploring socialist and working-class radicalism in the past and the present.Noah Van Sciver's dynamic illustrations are paired with short, accessible framing essays by Paul Buhle, noted historian of the U.S. left, with Dave Nance and Steve Max.
£12.82
Verso Books One Man's Terrorist: A Political History of the IRA
The conflict in Northern Ireland was one of the most devastating in post-war Europe, claiming the lives of 3,500 people and injuring many more. This book is a riveting new history of the radical politics that drove a unique insurgency that emerged from the crucible of 1968. Based on extensive archival research, One Man's Terrorist explores the relationship between the IRA, a clandestine army described as 'one of the most ruthless and capable insurgent forces in modern history', and the political movement that developed alongside it to challenge British rule. From Wilson and Heath to Thatcher and Blair, a generation of British politicians had to face an unprecedented subversive threat whose reach extended from West Belfast to Westminster. Finn shows how Republicans fought a war on several fronts, making use of every weapon available to achieve their goal of a united Ireland, from car bombs to election campaigns, street marches to hunger strikes. Though driven by an uncompromising revolutionary politics that blended militant nationalism with left-wing ideology, their movement was never monolithic, its history punctuated by splits and internal conflicts. The IRA's war ultimately ended in stalemate, with the peace process of the 1990s and the Good Friday Agreement that has maintained an uneasy balance ever since.
£19.29
Verso Books The Day After the Revolution
Lenin's originality and importance as a revolutionary leader is most often associated with the seizure of power in 1917. But, Zizek argues in his new study and collection of original texts, Lenin's true greatness can be better grasped in the very last couple of years of his political life. Russia had survived foreign invasion, embargo and a terrifying civil war, as well as internal revolts such as at Kronstadt in 1921. But the new state was exhausted, isolated and disorientated in the face of the world revolution that seemed to be receding. New paths had to be sought, almost from scratch, for the Soviet state to survive and imagine some alternative route to the future. With his characteristic brio and provocative insight, Zizek suggests that Lenin's courage as a thinker can be found in his willingness to face this reality of retreat lucidly and frontally.
£12.02
Verso Books The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain
This is the first comprehensive historical perspective on the relationship between Black workers and the changing patterns of Britain's labour needs. It places in an historical context the development of a small black presence in sixteenth-century Britain into the disadvantaged black working class of the 1980s.The book deals with the colonial labour institutions (slavery, indentureship and trade unionism) and the ideology underlying them and also considers the previously neglected role of the nineteenth-century Black radicals in British working-class struggles.Finally, the book examines the emergence of a Black radical ideology that has underpinned the twentieth-century struggles against unemployment, racial attacks and workplace grievances, among them employer and trade union racism.
£30.00
Verso Books The Care Crisis: What Caused It and How Can We End It?
Valuing care and care work does not simply mean attributing care work more monetary value. To really achieve change, we must go further. In this groundbreaking book, Emma Dowling charts the multi-faceted nature of care in the modern world, from the mantras of self-care and what they tell us about our anxieties, to the state of the social care system. She examines the relations of power that play profitability and care off in against one another in a myriad of ways, exposing the devastating impact of financialisation and austerity. As the world becomes seemingly more uncaring, the calls for people to be more compassionate and empathetic towards one another - in short, to care more - become ever-more vocal. The Care Crisis challenges the idea that people ever stopped caring, but also that the deep and multi-faceted crises of our time will be solved by a simply (re)instilling the virtues of empathy. There is no easy fix. The Care Crisis enquires into the ways in which the continued off-loading of the cost of care onto the shoulders of underpaid and unpaid realms of society, untangling how this off-loading combines with commodification, marketisation and financialisation to produce the mess we are living in. The Care Crisis charts the current experiments in short-term fixes to the care crisis that are taking place within Britain, with austerity as the backdrop. It maps the economy of abandonment, raising the question: to whom care is afforded? And what would it mean to seriously value care?
£16.99
Verso Books Futures of Black Radicalism
Black rebellion has returned, with dramatic protests in scores of cities and campuses, bringing with it a renewed engagement with the history of Black radical movements and thought. Here, key scholarly voices from a wide array of disciplines recalls the powerful tradition of Black radicalism as it developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries while defining new directions for Black radical thought.In a time when activists in Ferguson, Palestine, Baltimore, and Hong Kong immediately make connections between their movements, this book makes clear that new Black radical politics are thoroughly internationalist and redraws the links between Black resistance and anti-capitalism. Featuring the key voices in the new intellectual wave of Black radical thinking, this collection outlines one of the most vibrant areas of thought today.With contributions from Cedric Robinson, Elizabeth Robinson, Steven Osuna, Nikhil Pal Singh, Damien Sojoyner, Françoise Vergès, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, Jordan T. Camp, Christina Heatherton, George Lipsitz, Greg Burris, Paul Ortiz, Darryl C. Thomas, Avery Gordon, Shana L. Redmond, Kwame M. Phillips, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, and Robin D. G. Kelley.
£19.99
Verso Books Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration in Europe and America
In 1933 thousands of intellectuals, artists, writers, militants and other opponents of the Nazi regime fled Germany. They were, in the words of Heinrich Mann, "the best of Germany," refusing to remain citizens in this new state that legalized terror and brutality.Exiled across the world, they continued the fight against Nazism in prose, poetry, painting, architecture, film and theater. Weimar in Exile follows these lives, from the rise of national socialism to their return to a ruined homeland, retracing their stories, struggles, setbacks and rare victories.The dignity in exile of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, Hanns Eisler, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Anna Seghers, Ernst Toller, Stefan Zweig and many others provides a counterpoint to the story of Germany under the Nazis.
£26.21
Verso Books Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World
Selected as one of LitHub's 38 Favorite Books of 2022Finalist for the 2022 Big Other Book Award for NonfictionIn this uncompromising essay, Jonathan Crary presents the obvious but unsayable reality: our 'digital age' is synonymous with the disastrous terminal stage of global capitalism and its financialization of social existence, mass impoverishment, ecocide, and military terror. Scorched Earth surveys the wrecking of a living world by the internet complex and its devastation of communities and their capacities for mutual support. This polemic by the author of 24/7 dismantles the presumption that social media could be instruments of radical change and contends that the networks and platforms of transnational corporations are intrinsically incompatible with a habitable earth or with the human interdependence needed to build egalitarian post-capitalist forms of life.
£12.02
Verso Books The Dialectics of Liberation
The now legendary Dialectics of Liberation congress, held in London in 1967, was a unique expression of the politics of dissent. Existential psychiatrists, Marxist intellectuals, anarchists, and political leaders met to discuss key social issues. Edited by David Cooper, The Dialectics of Liberation compiles interventions from congress contributors Stokely Carmichael, Herbert Marcuse, R. D. Laing, Paul Sweezy, and others, to explore the roots of social violence.Against a backdrop of rising student frustration, racism, class inequality, and environmental degradation-a setting familiar to readers today-the conference aimed to create genuine revolutionary momentum by fusing ideology and action on the levels of the individual and of mass society. The Dialectics of Liberation captures the rise of a forceful style of political activity that came to characterize the following years.
£22.01
Verso Books Crowds and Party
Crowds and Party channels the energies of the riotous crowds who took to the streets in the past five years into an argument for the political party. Rejecting the emphasis on individuals and multitudes, Jodi Dean argues that we need to rethink the collective subject of politics. When crowds appear in spaces unauthorized by capital and the state-such as in the Occupy movement in New York, London and across the world-they create a gap of possibility. But too many on the Left remain stuck in this beautiful moment of promise-they argue for more of the same, further fragmenting issues and identities, rehearsing the last thirty years of left-wing defeat. In Crowds and Party, Dean argues that previous discussions of the party have missed its affective dimensions, the way it operates as a knot of unconscious processes and binds people together. Dean shows how we can see the party as an organization that can reinvigorate political practice.
£13.92
Verso Books Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity
The Chicago Teachers Union strike was the most important domestic labor struggle so far this century-and perhaps for the last forty years-and the strongest challenge to the conservative agenda for restructuring education, which advocates for more charter schools and tying teacher salaries to standardized testing, among other changes.The teachers took on the bipartisan, free market school reform agenda that is currently exacerbating inequality in education and waging war on teachers' livelihoods. In the age of austerity, when the public sector is under attack, Chicago teachers fought back-and won. The strike was years in the making. Chicago teachers spent a long time building a grassroots movement to educate and organize the entire union membership. They stood up against hostile mayors, billionaire-backed reformers out to destroy unions, and even their own intransigent union leadership, to take militant action. The Chicago protest has become a model for how reforms to the school system can be led by teachers and communities. It offers inspiration for workers looking to create democratic, fighting unions. Strike for America is the story of this movement and how it triumphed in the defining struggle for workers today.
£14.78
Verso Books Raiding the Icebox
Provides a kaleidoscopic review of the avant-garde and radical subcultures of the twentieth century, and explains how artistic statements of the era redrew the line between high and low art.
£77.43
Verso Books Future of Denial
The age of denial is over, we are told. Yet emissions continue to rise while gimmicks, graft, and green- washing distract the public from the climate violence suffered by the vulnerable. This timely, interdisciplinary contribution to the environmental humanities draws on the latest climatology, the first shoots of an energy transition, critical theory, Earth’s paleoclimate history, and trends in border violence to answer the most pressing question of our age: Why do we continue to squander the short time we have left?The symptoms suggest society’s inability to adjust is profound. Near Portland, militias incapable of accepting that the world is warming respond to a wildfire by hunting for imaginary left-wing arsonists. Europe erects nets in the Aegean Sea to capture migrants fleeing drought and war. An airline claims to be carbon neutral thanks to bogus cheap offsets. Drone strikes hit people living along the aridity line. Yes, Exxon knew as early as the 1970s, but t
£20.00
Verso Books Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge
Paul Feyerabend's globally acclaimed work, which sparked and continues to stimulate fierce debate, examines the deficiencies of many widespread ideas about scientific progress and the nature of knowledge. Feyerabend argues that scientific advances can only be understood in a historical context. He looks at the way the philosophy of science has consistently overemphasized practice over method, and considers the possibility that anarchism could replace rationalism in the theory of knowledge.This updated edition of the classic text includes a new introduction by Ian Hacking, one of the most important contemporary philosophers of science. Hacking reflects on both Feyerabend's life and personality as well as the broader significance of the book for current discussions.
£19.79
Verso Books Philosophy of Care
Our current culture is dominated by the ideology of creativity. One is supposed to create the new and not to care about the things as they are. This ideology legitimises the domination of the "creative class" over the rest of the population that is predominantly occupied by forms of care - medical care, child care, agriculture, industrial maintenance and so on. We have a responsibility to care for our own bodies, but here again our culture tends to thematize the bodies of desire and to ignore the bodies of care - ill bodies in need of self-care and social care. But the discussion of care has a long philosophical tradition. The book retraces some episodes of this tradition - beginning with Plato and ending with Alexander Bogdanov through Hegel, Heidegger, Bataille and many others. The central question discussed is: who should be the subject of care? Should I care for myself or trust the others, the system, the institutions? Here, the concept of the self-care becomes a revolutionary principle that confronts the individual with the dominating mechanisms of control.
£11.24
Verso Books Portraits: John Berger on Artists
John Berger, one of the world's most celebrated storytellers and writers on art, tells a personal history of art from the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet caves to 21st century conceptual artists. Berger presents entirely new ways of thinking about artists both canonized and obscure, from Rembrandt to Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock to Picasso. Throughout, Berger maintains the essential connection between politics, art and the wider study of culture. The result is an illuminating walk through many centuries of visual culture, from one of the contemporary world's most incisive critical voices.
£11.48
Verso Books Forbidden Fruit: An Anthropologist Looks at Incest
What is incest? Is it universally prohibited? Does this prohibition concern only "biological" kinships or does it extend to various "social" kinships, such as those that are formed today in so-called blended families but which also exist in many other societies?This prohibition plays a fundamental role in the functioning of the multiple kinship systems studied throughout the world. But where does it come from? Can we think, with Claude Lévi-Strauss, that the prohibition of incest alone marks the passage from nature to culture? And how can we understand, then, the persistent tension between the proclaimed, institutionalized prohibition and the incestuous practice which, everywhere, remains?World-renowned anthropologist Maurice Godelier highlights an essential fact, the spontaneously asocial and undifferentiated character of human sexuality and the need for a social regulation of this spontaneity. It thus brings to light the main teachings of anthropology on the question of incest, a major social fact of burning relevance today.
£11.24
Verso Books The Price is Wrong
What if our understanding of capitalism and climate is back to front? What if the problem is not that transitioning to renewables is too expensive, but that saving the planet is not sufficiently profitable?This is Brett Christophers' claim. The global economy is moving too slowly toward sustainability because the return on green investment is too low.Today's consensus is that the key to curbing climate change is to produce green electricity and electrify everything possible. The main economic barrier in that project has seemingly been removed. But while prices of solar and wind power have tumbled, the golden era of renewables has yet to materialize.The problem is that investment is driven by profit, not price, and operating solar and wind farms remains a marginal business, dependent everywhere on the state's financial support.We cannot expect markets and the private sector to solve the climate crisis while the profits that are their lifeblood
£22.00
Verso Books Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It
Shortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize 2023Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life-guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In this tightly argued and urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work. These crisis points all come to a head in Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the resistance we need to end the feeding frenzy. What we need, she argues, is a wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognize the rapaciousness of capital - and starve it to death.
£10.67
Verso Books How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century
Capitalism has transformed the world and increased our productivity, but at the cost of enormous human suffering. Our shared values equality and fairness, democracy and freedom, community and solidarity can both provide the basis for a critique of capitalism, and help to guide us towards a socialist and democratic society. In this elegant book, Erik Olin Wright has distilled decades of work into a concise and tightly argued manifesto analyzing the varieties of anti-capitalism, assessing different strategic approaches, and laying the foundations for a society dedicated to human flourishing. How to Be an Anticapitalist is an urgent and powerful argument for socialism, and a unparalleled guide to help us get there. Another world is possible.
£14.44
Verso Books Girls Against God
Welcome to 1990s Norway. White picket fences run in neat rows and Christian conservatism runs deep. But as the Artist considers her past, her practice and her hatred, things start stirring themselves up around her. In a corner of Oslo a coven of witches begin cooking up some curses. A time-travelling Edvard Munch arrives in town to join a death metal band, closely pursued by the teenaged subject of his painting Puberty, who has murder on her mind. Meanwhile, out deep in the forest, a group of school girls get very lost and things get very strange. And awful things happen in aspic.Jenny Hval's latest novel is a radical fusion of feminist theory and experimental horror, and a unique treatise on magic, writing and art.
£11.91
Verso Books The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind
Judith Butler's new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilised in the service of ratifying the state's monopoly on violence.Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how 'racial phantasms' inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.
£10.71
Verso Books The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right
What does Fascism mean at the beginning of the twenty-first century? When we pronounce this word, our memory goes back to the years between the two world wars and envisions a dark landscape of violence, dictatorships, and genocide. These images spontaneously surface in the face of the rise of radical right, racism, xenophobia, islamophobia and terrorism, the last of which is often depicted as a form of "Islamic fascism." Beyond some superficial analogies, however, all these contemporary tendencies reveal many differences from historical fascism, probably greater than their affinities. Paradoxically, the fear of terrorism nourishes the populist and racist rights, with Marine Le Pen in France or Donald Trump in the US claiming to be the most effective ramparts against "Jihadist fascism". But since fascism was a product of imperialism, can we define as fascist a terrorist movement whose main target is Western domination? Disentangling these contradictory threads, Enzo Traverso's historical gaze helps to decipher the enigmas of the present. He suggests the concept of post-fascism-a hybrid phenomenon, neither the reproduction of old fascism nor something completely different-to define a set of heterogeneous and transitional movements, suspended between an accomplished past still haunting our memories and an unknown future.
£17.92
Verso Books Homo Juridicus: On the Anthropological Function of the Law
In this groundbreaking work, French legal scholar Alain Supiot examines the relationship of society to legal discourse. He argues that the law is how justice is implemented in secular society, but it is not simply a technique to be manipulated at will: it is also an expression of the core beliefs of the West. We must recognize its universalizing, dogmatic nature and become receptive to other interpretations from non-Western cultures to help us avoid the clash of civilizations. In Homo Juridicus, Supiot deconstructs the illusion of a world that has become 'flat' and undifferentiated, regulated only by supposed 'laws' of science and the economy, and peopled by contract-makers driven by only the calculation of their individual interests.
£15.18
Verso Books The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society
Exploring 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 use it as a model for governments. Only once this is grasped will its opponents be able to meet the unprecedented political and intellectual challenge it poses.
£13.92
Verso Books Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.
£13.92
Verso Books Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City
What does it feel like to find the city's edge, to explore its forgotten tunnels and scale unfinished skyscrapers high above the metropolis? Explore Everything reclaims the city, recasting it as a place for endless adventure.Plotting expeditions from London, Paris, Berlin, Detroit, Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, Bradley L. Garrett has tested the boundaries of urban security in order to experience the city in ways beyond the everyday. He calls it "place hacking": the recoding of closed, secret, hidden and forgotten urban spaces to make them realms of opportunity. The book is also a manifesto, combining philosophy, politics and adventure, on our rights to the city and how to understand the twenty-first-century metropolis.
£20.99
Verso Books Critique of Everyday Life: The One-Volume Edition
The three-volume text by Henri Lefebvre is perhaps the richest, most prescient work about modern capitalism to emerge from one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and is now available for the first time in one complete volume. Written at the birth of post-war consumerism, Critique was an inspiration for the 1968 student revolution in France. It is a founding text of cultural studies and a major influence on the fields of contemporary philosophy, geography, sociology, architecture, political theory and urbanism. Lefebvre takes as his starting point and guide the "trivial" details of quotidian experience: an experience colonized by the commodity, shadowed by inauthenticity, yet remaining the only source of resistance and change. This is an enduringly radical text, untimely today only in its intransigence and optimism.
£25.00
Verso Books Napoleon's Cursed War: Spanish Popular Resistance in the Peninsular War, 1808–14
In this definitive account of the Peninsular War (1808-14), Napoleon's six-year war against Spain, Ronald Fraser examines what led to the emperor's devastating defeat against the popular opposition - the guerrillas - and their British and Portuguese allies. As well as relating the histories of the great political and military figures of the war, Fraser brings to life the anonymous masses - the artisans, peasants and women who fought, suffered and died - and restores their role in this barbaric war to its rightful place while overturning the view that this was a straightforward military campaign. This vivid, meticulously researched book offers a distinct and profound vision of "Napoleon's Vietnam" and shows the reality of the disasters of war: the suffering, discontents and social upheaval that accompanied the fighting.With a new Introduction by Perry Anderson.
£25.00
Verso Books Police: A Field Guide
This book armed activists on the streets-as well as the many who have become concerned about police abuse-with a critical analysis and ultimately a redefinition of the very idea of policing. The book contends that when we talk about police and police reform, we speak the language of police legitimation through the art of euphemism. So state sexual assault become "body-cavity search," and ruthless beatings become "non-compliance deterrence."A Field Guide to the Police is a study of the indirect and taken-for granted language of policing, a language we're all forced to speak when we talk about law enforcement. In entries like "Police dog," "Stop and frisk," and "Rough ride," the authors expose the way "copspeak" suppresses the true meaning and history of policing. Like any other field guide, it reveals a world that is hidden in plain view. The book argues that a redefined language of policing might help chart a future free society.Now in an expanded and updated edition, including explanations of newsmaking new terms, like "dead names", "kettling", and "qualified immunity", as well as a new foreword by leading criminal justice advocate Craig Gilmore
£14.81
Verso Books Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life
Praised by a wide variety of people from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Zadie Smith, Racecraft "ought to be positioned," as Bookforum put it, "at the center of any discussion of race in American life." Most people assume racism grows from a perception of human difference: the fact of race gives rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call "racecraft." And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life. So pervasive are the devices of racecraft in American history, economic doctrine, politics, and everyday thinking that the presence of racecraft itself goes unnoticed. That the promised post-racial age has not dawned, the authors argue, reflects the failure of Americans to develop a legitimate language for thinking about and discussing inequality. That failure should worry everyone who cares about democratic institutions.
£12.02
Verso Books Revolution: An Intellectual History
This book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions by composing a constellation of "dialectical images": Marx's "locomotives of history," Alexandra Kollontai's sexually liberated bodies, Lenin's mummified body, Auguste Blanqui's barricades and red flags, the Paris Commune's demolition of the Vendome Column, among several others. It connects theories with the existential trajectories of the thinkers who elaborated them, by sketching the diverse profiles of revolutionary intellectuals-from Marx and Bakunin to Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks, from Mao and Ho Chi Minh to José Carlos Mariátegui, C.L.R. James, and other rebellious spirits from the South-as outcasts and pariahs. And finally, it analyzes the entanglement between revolution and communism that so deeply shaped the history of the twentieth century. This book thus merges ideas and representations by devoting an equal importance to theoretical and iconographic sources, offering for our troubled present a new intellectual history of the revolutionary past.
£25.00
Verso Books Modern Times: Temporality in Art and Politics
In this book Jacques Rancière radicalises his critique of modernism and its postmodern appendix. He contrasts their unilinear and exclusive time with the interweaving of temporalities at play in modern processes of emancipation and artistic revolutions, showing how this plurality itself refers to the double dimension of time. Time is more than a line drawn from the past to the future. It is a form of life, marked by the ancient hierarchy between those who have time and those who do not. This hierarchy, continued in the Marxist notion of the vanguard and nakedly exhibited in Clement Greenberg's modernism, still governs a present which clings to the fable of historical necessity and its experts. In opposition to this, Rancière shows how the break with the hierarchical conception of time, formulated by Emerson in his vision of the new poet, implies a completely different idea of the modern. He sees the fulfilment of this in the two arts of movement, cinema and dance, which at the beginning of the twentieth century abolished the opposition between free and mechanical people, at the price of exposing the rift between the revolution of artists and that of strategists.
£12.02
Verso Books The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene
To understand the scale of what faces us and how it ramifies through every corner of our lives is to marvel at our inaction. Why aren't we holding emergency meetings in every city, town and village every week?What is to be done to create a planet where a communist horizon offers a new dawn to replace our planetary twilight? What does it mean to be a communist after we have hit a climate tipping point?The Tragedy of the Worker is a brilliant, stringently argued pamphlet reflecting on capitalism's death drive, the left's complicated entanglements with fossil fuels, and the rising tide of fascism. In response, the authors propose Salvage Communism, a programme of restoration and reparation that must precede any luxury communism. They set out a new way to think about the Anthropocene. The Tragedy of the Worker demands an alternative future - the Proletarocene - one capable of repairing the ravages of capitalism and restoring the world.
£11.72
Verso Books Confronting Capitalism: How the World Works and How to Change It
Why is our society so unequal? Why, despite their small numbers, do the rich dominate policy and politics even in democratic countries? Why is it often difficult for working people to organize around common interests? How do we begin building a more equal and democratic society? These are the questions that are answered in Confronting Capitalism.Even though political organizing can be very hard, political education does not have to be. This will be the book that a generation of socialists turn to for strategy and understanding. Combining elements of Marxism and modern social science with clear language, Chibber is able to outline the core dynamics of our economy and politics. This book provides an indispensable map of how our world works and a proposal for how socialists might overcome the odds and build a democratic and egalitarian future.
£11.24
Verso Books The Third Unconscious: The Psychosphere in the Viral Age
The Unconscious knows no time, it has no before-and-after, it does not have a history of its own. Yet, it does not always remain the same. Different political and economic conditions transform the way in which the Unconscious emerges within the "psychosphere" of society. In the early 20th century, Freud characterized the Unconscious as the dark side of the well-order framework of Progress and Reason. At the end of the past century, Deleuze and Guattari described it as a laboratory: the magmatic force ceaselessly bringing to the fore new possibilities of imagination. Today, at a time of viral pandemics and in the midst of the catastrophic collapse of capitalism, the Unconscious has begun to emerge in yet another form. In this book, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi vividly portraits the form in which the Unconscious will make itself manifest for decades to come, and the challenges that it will pose to our possibilities of political action, poetic imagination, and therapy.
£15.17
Verso Books The Apocalypse and the End of History: Modern Jihad and the Crisis of Liberalism
In this authoritative, accessible study, historian Suzanne Schneider examines the politics and ideology of the Islamic State (better known as ISIS). Schneider argues that today's jihad is not the residue from a less enlightened time, nor does it have much in common with its classical or medieval form, but it does bear a striking resemblance to the reactionary political formations and acts of spectacular violence that are upending life in Western democracies. From authoritarian populism to mass shootings, xenophobic nationalism, and the allure of conspiratorial thinking, Schneider argues that modern jihad is not the antithesis of neoliberalism, but rather a dark reflection of its inner logic.The Apocalypse and the End of History is written with the sensibility of a political theorist and based on extensive research into a wide range of sources, from Islamic jurisprudence to popular recruitment videos, contemporary apocalyptic literature and the Islamic State's Arabic-language publications. The book explores modern jihad as an image of a potential dark future already heralded by neoliberal modes of life. Surveying ideas of the state, violence, identity, and political community, Schneider argues that modern jihad and neoliberalism are two versions of a politics of failure: the inability to imagine a better life here on earth.
£19.03
Verso Books The Prisoner: A Memoir
In 1993, writer and democracy activist Hwang Sok-yong was sentenced to five years in the Seoul Detention Center upon his return to South Korea from North Korea, the country he had fled with his family as a child at the start of the Korean War. Already a dissident writer well-known for his part in the democracy movement of the 1980s, Hwang's imprisonment forced him to consider the many prisons to which he was subject-of thought, of writing, of Cold War nations, of the heart. In this capacious memoir, Hwang's life is set against the volatile political backdrop of modern Korea, a country subject to colonialism, Cold War division, a devastating war, decades of authoritarian dictatorships, a mass democratic uprising, and a still-lingering, painful division between North and South. The Prisoner moves between Hwang's imprisonment and scenes from his life-as a boy in Pyongyang and Seoul, as a young activist protesting South Korea's military dictatorships, as a soldier in the Vietnam War, as a dissident writer first traveling abroad-and in so doing, braids his extraordinary life into the dramatic revolutions and transformations of Korean society during the twentieth century.
£30.00
Verso Books Contraventions: Editorials from New Left Review
From 9/11 to the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq, the eurozone crisis to the Brexit vote, the Great Recession to the Arab Spring, the rise of China to the annexation of Crimea, the passage from Obama to Trump and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the London-based New Left Review has offered a series of sharply critical editorials, combining argument with analysis-radical antidotes to the self-serving accounts of the Anglophone press. Contraventions brings together a selection of NLR's key political writings, covering capitalist boom and bust, the changing forms of American hegemony, the combined and uneven development of world powers, the domestic politics of the US and UK and multiple revolts from below, at the ballot box or in the streets. Bookended by broader surveys of the political-intellectual conjuncture, these essays dismantle mainstream narratives and anatomize the ideologies, institutions and on-the-ground operations of liberal-imperial rule.Contraventions includes texts by Perry Anderson, Tariq Ali, Mike Davis, Susan Watkins, Alexander Cockburn, Peter Gowan, Tony Wood, JoAnn Wypijewski, Tom Hazeldine and Dylan Riley.
£25.00
Verso Books Behind Enemy Lies: War, News and Chaos in the Middle East
In this urgent and timely book, Patrick Cockburn writes the first draft of the history of the current crisis in the Middle East.Here he charts the period from the recapture of Mosul in 2017 to Turkey's attack on Kurdish territory in November 2019, and recounts the new phase in the wars of disintegration that have plagued the region, leading to the assassination of Iranian General Sulemani.Cockburn offers panoramic on-the-ground analysis as well as a lifetime's study of the region. As author of The Rise of Islamic State, and the Age of Jihad, he has proved to be leading, critical commentator of US intervention and the chaos it has wrecked/ And here he shows how, since Trump entered the White House promising an end to the Forever War, peace appears a distant possibility with the continuation of conflict in Syria, Saudi Arabia's violent intervention in the Yemen, the fall of the Kurds, riots in Baghdad, and the continued aggression towards Iran. While ISIS has been defeated, it is not clear whether it has disappeared from the region. Trump's policies has appeared to pour petrol on the flames, emboldening the other superpowers involved in the proxy wars. Following the collapse of the deal with Iran, and the threat of war crimes, is a new balance of power possible?
£18.99
Verso Books Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent
Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women's desire is often slow to emerge. And men are keen to insist that they know what women-and their bodies-want. Meanwhile, sexual violence abounds. How can women, in this environment, possibly know what they want? And why do we expect them to?In this elegant, searching book-spanning science and popular culture; pornography and literature; debates on Me-Too, consent and feminism-Katherine Angel challenges our assumptions about women's desire. Why, she asks, should they be expected to know their desires? And how do we take sexual violence seriously, when not knowing what we want is key to both eroticism and personhood?In today's crucial moment of renewed attention to violence and power, Angel urges that we remake our thinking about sex, pleasure, and autonomy without any illusions about perfect self-knowledge. Only then will we fulfil Michel Foucault's teasing promise, in 1976, that 'tomorrow sex will be good again'
£14.75
Verso Books Tomorrow They Won't Dare to Murder Us: A Novel
A young revolutionary plants a bomb in a factory on the outskirts of Algiers during the Algerian War. The bomb is timed to explode after work hours, so no one will be hurt. But the authorities have been watching. He is caught, the bomb is defused, and he is tortured, tried in a day and sentenced to death by guillotine. A routine event, perhaps, in a brutal conflict that ended the lives of more than a million Muslim Algerians.But what if the militant is a "pied-noir"? What if his lover is a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust? What happens to a "European" who chooses the side of anti-colonialism? By turns lyrical, meditative, and heart-stoppingly suspenseful, this debut novel by Joseph Andras, based on a true story, was a literary and political sensation in France, winning the Prix Goncourt for First Novel and being acclaimed by Le Monde as "vibrantly lyrical and somber" and by the journal La Croix as a "masterpiece".
£10.45
Verso Books Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith Butler responds in this profound appraisal of post-9/11 America to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for a deeper understanding of how mourning and violence might instead inspire solidarity and a quest for global justice.
£11.24
Verso Books Culture and Materialism
A comprehensive introduction to the work of one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century.Raymond Williams is a towering presence in cultural studies, most importantly as the founder of the apporach that has come to be known as "cultural materialism." Yet Williams's method was always open-ended and fluid, and this volume collects together his most significant work from over a twenty-year peiod in which he wrestled with the concepts of materialism and culture and their interrelationship. Aside from his more directly theoretical texts, however, case-studies of theatrical naturalism, the Bloomsbury group, advertising, science fiction, and the Welsh novel are also included as illustrations of the method at work. Finally, Williams's identity as an active socialist, rather than simply an academic, is captured by two unambiguously political pieces on the past, present and future of Marxism.
£14.69