Search results for ""Verso""

Andrea Komlosy argues in this important intervention that, when we examine it closely, work changes its meanings according to different historical and regional contexts. Globalizing labour history from the thirteenth to the twenty-first centuries, she sheds light on the complex coexistence of multiple forms of labour (paid/unpaid, free/ unfree, with various forms of legal regulation and social protection and so on) on the local and the world levels. Combining this global approach with a gender perspective opens our eyes to the varieties of work and labour and their combination in households and commodity chains across the planet—processes that enable capital accumulation not only by extracting surplus value from wage-labour, but also through other forms of value transfer, realized by tapping into households’ subsistence production, informal occupation and makeshift employment. As the debate about work and its supposed disappearance intensifies, Komlosy’s book provides

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In this ambitious and original study, Stathis Kouvelakis paints a rich panorama of the key intellectual and political figures in the effervescence of German thought before the 1848 revolutions. He shows how the attempt to chart a moderate, reformist path entered into crisis, generating two antagonistic perspectives within the progressive currents of German society. On one side were those socialists - such as Moses Hess and the young Friedrich Engels - who sought to discover a principle of harmony in social relations. On the other side, the poet Heinrich Heine and the young Karl Marx developed a new perspective, articulating revolutionary rupture, thereby redefining the very notion of politics itself. This new edition of the book includes a long interview with Kouvelakis which puts the work in context.

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Why do patriarchal systems survive? In this groundbreaking work of feminist theory, Nancy Folbre examines the contradictory effects of capitalist development. She explains why the work of caring for others is under-valued and under-rewarded in today's global economy, calling attention to the organisation of childrearing, the care of other dependants, and the inheritance of assets. Upending conventional definitions of the economy based only on the market, Folbre emphasizes the production of human capabilities in families and communities and the social reproduction of group solidarities. Highlighting the complexity of hierarchical systems and their implications for political coalitions, The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems sets a new feminist agenda for the twenty-first century.

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According to the United Nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world. From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, and even from economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly unforeseen development, and asks whether the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, are volcanoes waiting to erupt.

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Neurodiversity is one of the most urgent political issues of our time. As the number of diagnoses of autism, ADHD, and other types of neurodivergence rises, we are starting to understand that there is no such thing as a 'normal' brain. But society is still organised around neuronormativity, and autism is treated as a disease.Jodie Hare, diagnosed with autism at twenty-three, argues it is time to redefine the politics of who we are. She calls for the recognition of diversity as part of natural variation, rather than a departure from sameness. This will have an impact on the places where we learn, work, and socialise - and Hare shows how these can be adapted to be more inclusive and accessible. She shows how we might commit to building a world where we can all thrive, one that works to combat discrimination based on race, class, gender, and disability.

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Following her acclaimed history of the Situationist International up until the late sixties, The Beach Beneath the Street, McKenzie Wark returns with a companion volume which puts the late work of the Situationists in a broader and deeper context, charting their contemporary relevance and their deep critique of modernity. Wark builds on their work to map the historical stages of the society of the spectacle, from the diffuse to the integrated to what he calls the disintegrating spectacle. The Spectacle of Disintegration takes the reader through the critique of political aesthetics of former Situationist T.J. Clark, the Fourierist utopia of Raoul Vaneigem, René Vienet's earthy situationist cinema, Gianfranco Sangunetti's pranking of the Italian ruling class, Alice-Becker Ho's account of the anonymous language of the Romany, Guy Debord's late films and his surprising work as a game designer.At once an extraordinary counter history of radical praxis and a call to arms in the age of financial crisis and the resurgence of the streets, The Spectacle of Disintegration recalls the hidden journeys taken in the attempt to leave the twentieth century, and plots an exit from the twenty first.The dustjacket unfolds to reveal a fold-out poster of the collaborative graphic essay combining text selected by McKenzie Wark with composition and drawings by Kevin C. Pyle.

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The formation of the modern state, the rise of capitalism, the Renaissance and Reformation, the scientific revolution and the Age of Enlightenment have all been attributed to the "early modern" period. Nearly everything about its history remains controversial, but one thing is certain: it left a rich and provocative legacy of political ideas unmatched in Western history. The concepts of liberty, equality, property, human rights and revolution born in those turbulent centuries continue to shape, and to limit, political discourse today. Assessing the work and background of figures such as Machiavelli, Luther, Calvin, Spinoza, the Levellers, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, Ellen Wood vividly explores the ideas of the canonical thinkers, not as philosophical abstractions but as passionately engaged responses to the social conflicts of their day.

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The award-winning, highly acclaimed Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as "social practice." In recent decades, the art gallery and the museum have become a place for participatory art, where an audience is encouraged to take part in the artwork. This has been heralded as a revolutionary practise that can promote new emancipatory social relations. What was it is really? In this fully updated edition, Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Pawel Althamer and Paul Chan.Bishop challenges the political and aesthetic ambitions of participatory art this practise. She not only scrutinizes the emancipatory claims, but also provides an alternative to the ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such artworks. In response Artificial Hells calls for a less prescriptive approach to art and politics, and for more compelling, troubling and bolder forms of participatory art and criticism.

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In Balzac’s vast Human Comedy, a body of ninety-one completed novels and stories, he endeavoured to create a complete picture of contemporary French society and manners. Within this work is a loving ode to Paris and an incomparable introduction to the first capital of the modern world.To this ageless city he makes a declaration of love in an accumulation of finely observed detail - the cafés, landmarks, avenues, parks - and captures the populace in countless meticulously drawn portraits: its lawyers, grisettes, journalists, concierges, usurers, salesmen, speculators.Balzac gathered the elements of this Paris by sauntering through it. ‘To saunter is a science,’ he writes, ‘it is the gastronomy of the eye. To take a walk is to vegetate; to saunter is to live.’ Eric Hazan follows in Balzac’s footsteps, criss-crossing the city in the novelist’s outsize boots, running between printers, publishers, coffee merchants, mistre

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In this fiery, theoretical tour de force, Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant offer an overview of life and death under capitalism and argue for a new global left politics aimed at severing the ties between capital and one of its primary tools: health.Written by co-hosts of the hit "Death Panel" podcast and longtime disability justice and healthcare activists Adler-Bolton and Vierkant, Health Communism first examines how capital has instrumentalized health, disability, madness, and illness to create a class seen as "surplus," regarded as a fiscal and social burden. Demarcating the healthy from the surplus, the worker from the "unfit" to work, the authors argue, serves not only to undermine solidarity but to mark whole populations for extraction by the industries that have emerged to manage and contain this "surplus" population. Health Communism then looks to the grave threat capital poses to global public health, and at the rare movements around the world that have successfully challenged the extractive economy of health.Ultimately, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue, we will not succeed in defeating capitalism until we sever health from capital. To do this will require a radical new politics of solidarity that centers the surplus, built on an understanding that we must not base the value of human life on one's willingness or ability to be productive within the current political economy.Capital, it turns out, only fears health.

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Steve Bell’s If… cartoon strip in the Guardian attracted generations of loyal readers. If… Stands Up is his hilarious commentary on the past six years of political madness.Unmissable highlights include a Jubilee fly-past over Buckingham Palace by Boris Johnson’s bottom. Liz Truss taking back control of her own eyeballs. A dead-horse race between zombie ‘Treeza’ May and pink-rubber fiend David Cameron, towing his bijou shepherd’s hut. Rishi Sunak flogging the skeletal remains of Margaret Thatcher. Donald Trump with a golden toilet seat brain. And Keir Starmer, aka Keeves the butler, assuring the toffs that ‘the below-stairs movement is realigning its values with those of the British people’. If… Stands Up also keeps a gimlet eye on Charles and the Royals.Bell draws an unforgettable picture of a nation that has left reality behind. Why did the chlorinated chicken cross the Atlantic? Wh

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In this groundbreaking work the essayist and critic Adewale Maja-Pearce delivers a mordant verdict on Nigeria’s crisis of democracy. A mosaic of ethnic and religious groups, the most populous country in Africa was fabricated by British colonizers at the turn of the twentieth century. When Nigerians went to the polls to vote in the 2023 elections, they had experienced a quarter century of democracy, after a similar period of almost unbroken military dictatorship. Yet the blessings of self-rule are unclear to many, especially among the more than half of the population living in extreme poverty. Buffeted by unemployment, saddled with debt, rent by bandits and Islamic fundamentalists, Nigeria faces the threat of disintegration. Maja-Pearce shows that recent mobilizations against police brutality, sexism and homophobia reveal a powerful undercurrent of discontent, especially among the country’s youth. If Nigeria has a future, he shows here, it is in the hands of the youn

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Young people are inheriting a world of climate catastrophe. Young people are also one of the strongest forces leading movements for climate justice, and to halt the fossil fuel emissions that are making our Earth unlivable. As Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for the Future movement have made clear, solutions offered by adults are far too little, far too late: the measures in unenforceable international agreements won't halt our reliance on fossil fuels, or take the drastic steps humans need to take in order to keep our planet livable.What kinds of drastic steps are needed? What kind of bold actions can the climate justice begin using to bring a stop to climate destruction, and that can be employed alongside existing strategies of mass protest, awareness, and legal appeals? Why does our society consider profit for oil companies more important than the future of young people and the health of our shared environment? In this adaptation of Andreas Malm's best-selling book on the need for a bolder, more confrontational climate justice movement, How to Blow Up a Pipeline these urgent questions are brought to the most important audience of all: those who are growing up in a world on fire.

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One of Europe's most mythologized Marxist intellectuals of the 20th century, Pier Paolo Pasolini was not only a poet, filmmaker, novelist, and political martyr. He was also a keen critic of painting. An intermittently practicing artist in his own right, Pasolini studied under the distinguished art historian Roberto Longhi, whose lessons marked a life-long affinity for figurative painting and its centrality to a particular cinematic sensibility. Pasolini set out wilfully to "contaminate" art criticism with semiotics, dialectology, and film theory, penning catalogue essays and exhibition reviews alongside poems, autobiographical meditations, and public lectures on painting. His fiercely idiosyncratic blend of Communism and classicism, localism and civic universalism, iconophilia and aesthetic "heresy," animated and antagonized Cold War culture like few European contemporaries. This book offers numerous texts previously available only in Italian, each accompanied by an editorial note elucidating its place in the tumultuous context of post-war Italian culture. Prefaced by the renowned art historian T.J. Clark, a historical essay on Pasolini's radical aesthetics anchors the anthology. One hundred years after his birth, Heretical Aesthetics sheds light on one of the most consequential aspects of Pasolini's intellectual life, further illuminating a vast cinematic and poetic corpus along the way.

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Democracy is in crisis. In every major company it has been stole by elites or in the hands of strong men. In democracy's name we see a raft of policies that spread inequality and xenophobia worldwide. It is clear that democracy - the principle of government by and for the people - is not living up to its promise.In fact, real democracy- inclusive and egalitarian - has in fact never existed. In this urgent and engaging book, Astra Taylor invites us to re-examine the term. Is democracy a means or an end? A process or a set of desired outcomes? What if the those outcomes, whatever they may be - peace, prosperity, equality, liberty, an engaged citizenry - can be achieved by non-democratic means? Or if an election leads to a terrible outcome? If democracy means rule by the people, what does it mean to rule and who counts as the people? The inherent paradoxes are too often unnamed and unrecognized. But to ignore them is no longer possible. Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone offers a better understanding of what is possible, what we want, and why democracy is so hard to realize.

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In a moment of rising authoritarianism, climate crisis, and ever more exploitative forms of neoliberal capitalism, there is a compelling and urgent need for radical paradigms of thought and action. Through interviews with key revolutionary scholars, Bhandar and Ziadah present a thorough discussion of how anti-racist, anti-capitalist feminisms are crucial to building effective political coalitions. Collectively, these interviews with leading scholars including Angela Y. Davis, Silvia Federici, and many others, trace the ways in which black, indigenous, post-colonial and Marxian feminisms have created new ways of seeing, new theoretical frameworks for analysing political problems, and new ways of relating to one another. Focusing on migration, neo-imperial militarism, the state, the prison industrial complex, social reproduction and many other pressing themes, the range of feminisms traversed in this volume show how freedom requires revolutionary transformation in the organisation of the economy, social relations, political structures, and our psychic and symbolic worlds. The interviews include Avtar Brah, Gail Lewis and Vron Ware on Diaspora, Migration and Empire. Himani Bannerji, Gary Kinsman, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Silvia Federici on Colonialism, Capitalism, and Resistance. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Avery F. Gordon and Angela Y. Davis on Abolition Feminism.

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For three decades, until the day he collapsed in the Brazilian surf in 1979, Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death who performed horrific experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz, floated through South America in linen suits, keeping two steps ahead of Mossad agents, international police and the world's journalists. In this rigorusly researched factual novel-drawn almost entirely from historical documents-Olivier Guez traces Mengele's footsteps through these years of flight. This chilling novel situates the reader in a literary manhunt on the trail of one of the most elusive and evil figures of the twentieth century.Selected as one of The 50 best books of 2022 by The Telegraph

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Now a classic of Marxian economics, The Limits to Capital provides one of the best theoretical guides to the history and geography of capitalist development. In this edition, Harvey updates his classic text with a substantial discussion of the turmoil in world markets today.In his analyses of 'fictitious capital' and 'uneven geographical development' Harvey takes the reader step by step through layers of crisis formation, beginning with Marx's controversial argument concerning the falling rate of profit, moving through crises of credit and finance, and closing with a timely analysis geopolitical and geographical considerations.

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In this fully updated edition of his coruscating polemic, Tariq Ali shows how, since 1989, politics has become a contest to see who can best serve the needs of the market. In this urgent and wide-ranging case for the prosecution, Ali looks at the people and the events that have informed this moment across the world. This reaches its logical conclusion with the presidency of Donald Trump, the success of En Marche in France and the dominance of Merkel's Germany through Europe.But are we starting to see cracks within the fabric of the extreme centre? In a series of new chapters Ali suggests that there is room for hope. He finds promise in developments in Latin America and at the edges of Europe. Emerging parties across Europe, Greece and Spain, formed out of the 2008 crisis, are offering new hope for democracy. In the UK, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn indicates that the hegemony of the centre may be weaker than imagined.

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The intensive research coupled with public silence during the last decade of Marx's life represented a new, theoretical 'post-Capital' threshold. This phase corresponded - not accidentally - with intensive studies of Russia and contacts with its theorists and revolutionaries. Russia was the first 'developing society', and its social and intellectual context were to produce by the turn of the century the first wave of 'modernisation' theories and strategies, as well as Leninism. Late Marx and the Russian Road addresses in a new way Marx's attitudes to these 'developing' or 'peripheral' societies, and to social and socialist theories that originated in them and reflect their particularities.The book carries the first full translation into English of Marx's 1881 drafts concerning rural Russia, as well as supplementary material focused on the last decade of his life. It also presents the first translation from Russian of a sequence of writings by Chernyshevskii and the People's Will party known to have directly influenced Marx. It includes essays by Shanin, Wada, Sayer and Corrigan, which consider the late period of Marx's analysis and its interdependence with nineteenth-century experience.

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Neoliberalism isn't working. Austerity is forcing millions into poverty and many more into precarious work, while the left remains trapped in stagnant political practices that offer no respite.Inventing the Future is a bold new manifesto for life after capitalism. Against the confused understanding of our high-tech world by both the right and the left, this book claims that the emancipatory and future-oriented possibilities of our society can be reclaimed. Instead of running from a complex future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams demand a postcapitalist economy capable of advancing standards, liberating humanity from work and developing technologies that expand our freedoms.This new edition includes a new chapter where they respond to their various critics.

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A luminous sequel to the highly acclaimed first volume of Theatres of Memory, Island Stories is an engrossing journey of discovery into the multiple meanings of national myths, their anchorage in daily life and their common sense of a people's destiny. Raphael Samuel reveals the palimpsest of British national histories, offering a searching yet affectionate account of the heroes and villains, legends and foibles, cherished by the "four nations" that inhabit the British Isles. Samuel is interested by the fact that traditions can disappear no less abruptly than they were invented. How is it, he asks, that the Scots have lost interest in a British narrative of which they were once a central protagonist? Why is the celebration of "Britons" thriving today just as its object has become problematic? Island Stories marvelously conveys the mutability of national conceits. Samuel calls as witness a galaxy of authorities-Bede and Gerald of Barri, Macaulay and Stubbs, Shakespeare and Dickens, Lord Reith and Raymond Williams, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Benn-each of whom sought to renew the sense of national identity by means of an acute sense of the past. Island Stories is a luminous study of the way nations use their past to lend meaning to the present and future. This sequel to the widely acclaimed Theatres of Memory is as passionate, unexpected and enjoyable as its predecessor.

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The autumn and winter of 2010 saw an unprecedented wave of student protests across the UK, in response to the coalition government's savage cuts in state funding for higher education, cuts which formed the basis for an ideological attack on the nature of education itself. Involving universities and schools, occupations, sit-ins and demonstrations, these protests spread with remarkable speed. Rather than a series of isolated incidents, they formed part of a growing movement that spans much of the Western world and is now spreading into North Africa. Ever since the Wall Street crash of 2008 there has been increasing social and political turbulence in the heartlands of capital.From the US to Europe, students have been in the vanguard of protest against their governments' harsh austerity measures. Tracing these worldwide protests, this new book explores how the protests spread and how they were organized, through the unprecedented use of social networking media such as Facebook and Twitter. It looks, too, at events on the ground, the demonstrations, and the police tactics: kettling, cavalry charges and violent assault.From Athens to Rome, San Francisco to London and, most recently, Tunis, this new book looks at how the new student protests developed into a strong and challenging movement that demands another way to run the world. Consisting largely of the voices that participated in the struggle, Springtime will become an essential point of reference as the uprising continues.

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Badiou indicts this approach, which reduces politics to a matter of opinion, thus eliminating any of its truly radical and emancipatory possibilities. Against this intellectual tradition, Badiou proposes instead the consideration of politics in terms of the production of truth and the affirmation of equality. He demands that the question of a possible "political truth" be separated from any notion of consensus or public opinion, and that political action be rethought in terms of the complex process that binds discussion to decision. Starting from this analysis, Badiou critically examines the thought of anthropologist and political theorist Sylvain Lazarus, Jacques Ranciere's writings on workers' history and democratic dissensus, the role of the subject in Althusser, as well as the concept of democracy and the link between truth and justice.

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In Hiding is the spellbinding story of a man who spent thirty years holed up in his own home to escape execution. Manuel Cortés was a Socialist Party member, an activist in the Republic's land reform movement, and an organizer in the farm workers' unionization struggles. As Mayor of Mijas in Andalusia, he became caught up in the ferment of revolutionary Spain in the late 1930s.A marked man, he evaded Franco's execution squads to survive in hiding through a generation of persecution and terror until amnesty was decreed in 1969-a period of thirty years. With his wife and daughter, he attempted to escape to France, but failed. In this absorbing narrative, based on numerous interviews with the mayor conducted by Ronald Fraser, a master of oral history, Cortés's truly awe-inspiring ordeal is supplemented by his family's life histories and experiences during the Civil War.A haunting tale and a monument to the art of the oral historian, In Hiding reminds us what the Spanish Civil War was really about.

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After the Second World War, nationalism emerged as the principle expression of resistance to Western imperialism in a variety of regions from the Indian subcontinent to Africa, to parts of Latin America and the Pacific Rim. With the Bandung Conference and the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement, many of Europe's former colonies banded together to form a common bloc, aligned with neither the advanced capitalist "First World" nor with the socialist "Second World." In this historical context, the category of "Third World literature" emerged, a category that has itself spawned a whole industry of scholarly and critical studies, particularly in the metropolitan West, but increasingly in the homelands of the Third World itself.Setting himself against the growing tendency to homogenize "Third World" literature and cultures, Aijaz Ahmad has produced a spirited critique of the major theoretical statements on "colonial discourse" and "post-colonialism," dismantling many of the commonplaces and conceits that dominate contemporary cultural criticism. With lengthy considerations of, among others, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, and the Subaltern Studies group, In Theory also contains brilliant analyses of the concept of Indian literature, of the genealogy of the term "Third World," and of the conditions under which so-called "colonial discourse theory" emerged in metropolitan intellectual circles.Erudite and lucid, Ahmad's remapping of the terrain of cultural theory is certain to provoke passionate response.

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During the last fifty years, the writing of history underwent two massive transformations. First, powered by Marxism and other materialist sociologies, the great social history wave instated the value of social explanation. Then, responding to new theoretical debates, the cultural turn upset many of those freshly earned certainties. Each challenge was profoundly informed by politics - from issues of class, gender, and race to those of identity, empire, and the postcolonial. The resulting controversies brought historians radically changed possibilities - expanding subject matters, unfamiliar approaches, greater openness to theory and other disciplines, a new place in the public culture. History Made Conscious offers snapshots of a discipline continuously rethinking its charge. How might we understand "the social" and "the cultural" together? How do we collaborate most fruitfully across disciplines? If we take theory seriously, how does that change what historians do? How should we think differently about politics?

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Margot is the child of renowned musicians and the product of a particularly punky upbringing. Burnt-out from the burden of expectation and the bad end of the worst relationship yet, she leaves New York and heads to Montana. She's seeking to escape both the eyes of the world and the echoing voice of that last bad man. But a chance encounter with a dubious doctor in a graveyard, and the discovery of a dozen old film reels, opens the door to a study of both the peculiarities of her body and the absurdities of her famous family.A literary take on cinema du corps, Stephanie LaCava's new novel is an audaciously sexy and moving exploration of culture and connections, bodies and breakdowns.

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Even as the rewards of work decline and its demands on us increase, many people double-down on their commitment to wage slavery—working harder, doing overtime, and learning to hustle. To paraphrase Spinoza, why do people fight to be exploited as if it were liberation?To find the answer, The Double Shift turns to the intersection of Marx and Spinoza and examines contemporary ideologies and the modern phenomena of work—motivational meetings at Apple Stores, the culture of Silicon Valley, as well as film and television, from Office Space to Better Call Saul—to argue for the transformation of our collective imagination and attachment to work.

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Ilya Budraitskis, one of the country's most prominent leftist political commentators, explores the strange fusion of free-market ideology and postmodern nationalism that now prevails in Russia, and describes the post-Soviet evolution of its left. He incisively describes the twists and contradictions of the Kremlin's geopolitical fantasies, which blend up-to-date references to "information wars" with nostalgic celebrations of the tsars of Muscovy. Despite the revival of aggressive Cold War rhetoric, he argues, the Putin regime takes its bearings not from any Soviet inheritance, but from reactionary thinkers such as the White émigré Ivan Ilyin. Budraitskis makes an invaluable contribution by reconstructing the forgotten history of the USSR's dissident left, mapping an entire alternative tradition of heterodox Marxist and socialist thought from Khrushchev's Thaw to Gorbachev's perestroika. Doubly outsiders, within an intelligentsia dominated by liberal humanists, they offer a potential way out of the impasse between condemnations of the entire Soviet era and blanket nostalgia for Communist Party rule-suggesting new paths for the left to explore.

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Walter Benjamin was fascinated by the impact of new technology on culture, an interest that extended beyond his renowned critical essays. From 1927 to '33, he wrote and presented something in the region of eighty broadcasts using the new medium of radio. Radio Benjamin gathers the surviving transcripts, which appear here for the first time in English. This eclectic collection demonstrates the range of Benjamin's thinking and his enthusiasm for popular sensibilities. His celebrated "Enlightenment for Children" youth programs, his plays, readings, book reviews, and fiction reveal Benjamin in a creative, rather than critical, mode. They flesh out ideas elucidated in his essays, some of which are also represented here, where they cover topics as varied as getting a raise and the history of natural disasters, subjects chosen for broad appeal and examined with passion and acuity.Delightful and incisive, this is Walter Benjamin channeling his sophisticated thinking to a wide audience, allowing us to benefit from a new voice for one of the twentieth century's most respected thinkers.

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Philosophy was born out of discussion, out of the rivalry between world views. From the philosophical ferment of the Enlightenment arose the idea of emancipation, a conflictual perspective which Marina Garcés would have us rethink. New Radical Enlightenment lays out the need for critical dissent as a new beginning for the humanities in apocalyptic times. The productive dissent she envisions is established on the inclusion of multiple perspectives attending to common problems.Our societies are faced with the urgency of combating dogmatism in all its forms. Fundamentalism, authoritarianism, and the struggle of the rich against the poor are returning. We also see dogmatic ways of dealing with science, data, and technology emerging. In the face of this, unfinished philosophy is a bid to make thought exciting once again. It is not a question of nurturing sterile theories. Today’s young people need powerful tools for a critical imagination. Leaping out of historicis

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Many would rather change worlds than change the world. The settlement of communities in 'empty lands' somewhere else has often been proposed as a solution to growing contradictions. While the lands were never empty, sometimes these communities failed miserably, and sometimes they prospered and grew until they became entire countries. Building on a growing body of transnational and interdisciplinary research on the political imaginaries of settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination, this book uncovers and critiques an autonomous, influential, and coherent political tradition - a tradition still relevant today. It follows the ideas and the projects (and the failures) of those who left or planned to leave growing and chaotic cities and challenging and confusing new economic circumstances, those who wanted to protect endangered nationalities, and those who intended to pre-empt forthcoming revolutions of all sorts, including civil and social wars. They displaced, and moved to other islands and continents, beyond the settled regions, to rural districts and to secluded suburbs, to communes and intentional communities, and to cyberspace. This book outlines the global history of a resilient political idea: to seek change somewhere else as an alternative to embracing (or resisting) transformation where one is.

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Tens of millions of people poured onto the streets for Black Lives Matter, bringing with them a wholly new idea of public safety, common security, and the delivery of justice, communicating that vision in the fiery vernacular of riot, rebellion, and protest. A World without Police transcribes these new ideas-written in slogans and chants, over occupied bridges and hastily assembled barricades-into a compelling, must-read manifesto for police abolition.Compellingly argued and lyrically charged, A World without Police offers concrete strategies for confronting and breaking police power, as a first step toward building community alternatives that make the police obsolete. Surveying the post-protest landscape in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Oakland, as well as the people who have experimented with policing alternatives at a mass scale in Latin America, Maher details the institutions we can count on to deliver security without the disorganizing interventions of cops: neighborhood response networks, community-based restorative justice practices, democratically organized self-defense projects, and well-resourced social services.A World without Police argues that abolition is not a distant dream or an unreachable horizon but an attainable reality. In communities around the world, we are beginning to glimpse a real, lasting justice in which we keep us safe.

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Prophet against Slavery is an action-packed chronicle of a remarkable and radical individual. It is based on the award-winning biography by Marcus Rediker, which prompted the Quaker community that once disowned Lay to embrace him again after 280 years. Graphic novelist David Lester brings the full scope of Lay's activism and ideas to life.Born in 1682 to a humble Quaker family in Essex, England, Lay was a forceful and prescient visionary. Understanding the fundamental evil that slavery represented, he employed guerrilla theatre tactics and direct action to shame slave owners and traders. The prejudice Lay suffered as a dwarf and a hunchback, as well as his devout faith, informed his passion for human and animal liberation. Exhibiting stamina, fortitude, and integrity in the face of the cruelties practiced against his 'fellow creatures', he was frequently a solitary voice speaking truth to power.Lester's beautiful imagery and storytelling, accompanied by afterwords from Rediker and Paul Buhle, capture the radicalism, the humour, and the humanity of this uncannily modern figure. A testament to the impact each of us can make, Prophet against Slavery brings Lay'' prophetic vision to a new generation of young activists who today echo his call of 300 years ago: 'No justice, no peace!'

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Dhirendra Jha's deeply researched history places Nathuram Godse's life as the juncture of the dangerous fault lines in contemporary India: the quest for independence and the rise of Hindu nationalism.On a wintry Delhi evening on 30 January 1948, Nathuram Godse shot Gandhi at point-blank range, forever silencing the man who had delivered independence to his nation. Godse's journey to this moment of international notoriety from small towns in western India is, by turns, both riveting and wrenching. Drawing from previously unpublished archival material, Jha challenges the standard account of Gandhi's assassination, and offers a stunning view on the making of independent India.Born to Brahmin parents, Godse started off as a child mystic. However, success eluded him. The caste system placed him at the top of society but the turbulent times meant that he soon became a disaffected youth, desperately seeking a position in the infant nation. In such confusing times, Godse was one of hundreds, and later thousands, of young Indian men to be steered into the sheltering fold of early Hindutva, Indian nationalism. His association with early formations of the RSS and far-right thinkers such as Sarvakar proves that he was not working alone. Today he is considered to be a patriotic hero by many for his act of bravery, despite being found guilty in court and executed in 1949.

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No other art movement has so profoundly influenced radical politics as the Situationist International. But beyond the clichés about its purported leader Guy Debord, the "society of the spectacle," détournement and dérive, lies a more complex story about key historical shifts in the composition of capital, work, labor, art, and revolutionary theory during the 1950s and 60s.With and Against reframes the history of the Situationist International as a struggle to come to terms with the then-emerging ideologies of cybernetics and automation. Through each of the book's four chapters, Dominique Routhier dissects Situationist pamphlets, documents, artworks, and objects that refract elements of a "cybernetic hypothesis": the theoretically hyperbolic belief that technological progress, computers and automation make class struggle and the idea of revolution obsolete. With equal attention to aesthetic detail and to the broader contours of political economy, this book serves as a critical intervention in art history as well a call to reconsider, more broadly, the contemporary lessons of the most political of all artistic avantgardes.

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The culmination of a lifetime’s work by the celebrated journalist and historian Paul Foot, The Vote tells the thrilling story of how the universal franchise was secured in Britain, and the slow erosion that followed. Foot takes readers from the smoke-filled church of the Putney Debates to the incendiary arguments between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke in the aftermath of the French Revolution, to the rise of Chartism and the fight for women’s suffrage. Throughout, Foot shows how vested interests first delayed and then hobbled the progress of democracy.Looking to the twentieth century, Foot exposes the gaps between the promises of a succession of Labour governments and their actions once in power, and the party’s abandonment of any aspiration to economic democracy.Written with Paul Foot’s inimitable energy and engaging style, this is a classic work of history and a must-read for anyone interested in the origins of today’s political scene.

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The photograph is not just an image but an event, one in the longer sequence of a photographic moment. Challenging given definitions of photography and of the political, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls for us to use photographs of political violence, such as the colonial regime in Palestine, to envision the political relationships that made each photograph possible, and to be able to intervene in them. In this way, we can build our capacity for civil imagination: a way of seeing and imagining ourselves as part of the image rather than only as spectators.The new edition includes a discussion of the legal battles to reclaim the images of the enslaved Papa Renty, held by Harvard University, rejecting the regime of photographs as private property, established by institutions that claim ownership of images seized with violence.This trenchant, perennially contemporary book valorizes powerful intersubjective relations enabled by photography, relations that exceed the strictur

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Drawing on years of research with activists around the world, sociologist Naomi Braine describes the strategies, politics, and tactics of direct action feminists bringing abortion pills, information, and support to people seeking to end unwanted pregnancies. From combatting the legal strictures of Bolsonaro's Brazil, to navigating the NGO-dominated landscape of Kenya and Nigeria, feminist activists are making safe, accessible abortion care available against the odds.Even more important, these women are building a robust transnational feminist network. Tactics developed in the Global South - hotlines, practices of accompaniment and peer-to-peer care, and scientific information - are now being shared with activists in Europe and North America, building a new model for international feminist solidarity.

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In 1973 a group of North Wales building workers were arrested for picketing-related offences during the first and only national building workers strike in Britain the year before. It was a turning point for halting the growth of trade unionism in the building industry, from which it has never recovered. A Very British Conspiracy is the first book to tell the full story of how the state prosecuted these workers and the campaign that was established to overturn this miscarriage of justice. Eileen Turnbull uncovers government and police documents that reveal the careful planning of the prosecution of the 24 men. She forensically reveals how the state used the criminal justice system to secure convictions. It analyses how, in the absence of hard evidence, the Police and prosecution went to extraordinary lengths to criminalise trade unionists.The premature death of the lead picket, Des Warren, was the catalyst for a group of North West trade unionists and several of the pickets to come together in 2006 to organise a campaign to achieve justice. In March 2021, the convictions were finally quashed by the Court of Appeal. The book describes how the pickets and their families felt after forty-eight years being ostracised and considered as criminals in their communities, as well as the response of the Campaign committee members who had brought this historic victory about.

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In Dreams of Leaving and Remaining, award winning journalist Meek explores a nation uneasy with itself. In the decades since the twilight of empire, Britain has struggled to find its place, and identity, in the world. This has come to the point of crisis since the 2008 financial crash. Meek meets the farmers and fishermen who wish Britain to turn its back on the world and restore its former glory, and are willing to lose the very support that their industry depends on. He reports on a Cadbury's factory that is to be shut down and moved to Poland in the name of free market economics, exploring the impact on the local community left behind. He charts how the NHS is coping with the twin burdens of austerity and an ageing population. Through his journey he asks what we can recover from the debris of an old nation as we head towards new horizons, and what we must leave behind. There are no easy answers, and what he creates instead is a masterly portrait of an anxious, troubled nation. Instead, he demands that we reconsider the power of the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are, a nation's alienated from itself.

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On 18th May 1980, student activists gathered in the South Korean city of Gwangju to protest the coup d'état and martial law government of General Chun Doo-hwan. The security forces responded with unmitigated violence, and over the next ten days hundreds of students, activists and citizens were arrested, tortured and murdered. The events of the uprising shaped over a decade of resistance to the repressive South Korean regime, and paved the way for the country's democratisation in the 1990s. The subject of right-wing conspiracy and controversy in South Korea, the texts of Gwangju Uprising survived in underground circulation and were recently republished. This fresh translation by Slin Jung of the original text, compiled from eye-witness testimonies, forms a gripping and full account of both the events of the uprising and the political situation which preceded and followed the violence of those days. The edition contains a preface by Hwang Sok-yong, material which situates the uprising in its longer-term local and international context. The resulting volume is an unrivalled account of the movement for democracy and freedom in South Korea in the tumultuous period of the 1980s dictatorship. A vital collection for those interested in East Asian contemporary history and the global struggle for democracy.

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Active in the 1830s and 1840s, Flora Tristan is best known for her book "Workers' Union", an account of the conditions of women and workers in Peru, London, Paris and the provinces of France. Regarded as something of a pariah, she was one of the first women radicals to draw clear connections between the plight of disaffected workers and powerless women. Her version of socialism has been regarded as leading towards Marx. Sandra Dijkstra aims to paint a clear picture of Tristan as a class- and gender-conscious women writer in a transitional historical period, and to demonstrate her influence on Marxism.

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After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin implemented a political system of "imitation democracy," marked by "a huge disparity between formal constitutional principles and the reality of authoritarian rule." How did this system take shape, how else might it have developed, and what are the prospects for re-envisioning it more democratically in the future?These questions animate Dmitrii Furman's Imitation Democracy, a welcome antidote to books that blandly decry Putin as an omnipotent dictator, without considering his platforms, constituencies, and sources of power. With extensive public opinion polling drawn from throughout the late- and post-Soviet period, and a thorough knowledge of both official and unofficial histories, Furman offers a definitive account of the formation of the modern Russian political system, casting it into powerful relief through comparisons with other post-Soviet states.Peopled with grey technocrats, warring oligarchs, patriots, and provocateurs, Furman's narrative details the struggles among partisan factions, and the waves of public sentiment, that shaped modern Russia's political landscape, culminating in Putin's third presidential term, which resolves the contradiction between the "form" and "content" of imitation democracy, "the formal dependence of power on elections and the actual dependence of elections on power."

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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."

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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.

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Surveying the transformation of San Francisco in the early millenium by Silicon Valley, critically acclaimed writer Rebecca Solnit and photographer Susan Schwartzenberg describe the complex interactions that make up a living, creative, diverse city.One of our most impassioned and acclaimed chroniclers of American urbanism, Rebecca Solnit explores the impact of skyrocketing rents, architectural homogenization, and the links between artists and gentrification. Wealth, she argues, is just as capable of ravaging cities as poverty. Schwartzenberg's social documentary photographs work with Solnit's interlinked essays to memorialize San Francisco's vanishing spaces of civic memory and public life. Both a portrait of an acute crisis and a call to defend collective public life, Hollow City makes a fervent case for the imaginative potential of cities.

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