Search results for ""Verso Books""
Verso Books Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there appeared in Central Europe a generation of Jewish intellectuals whose work was to transform modern culture. Drawing at once on the traditions of German Romanticism and Jewish messianism, their thought was organized around the cabalistic idea of the "tikkoun": redemption. Redemption and Utopia uses the concept of "elective affinity" to explain the surprising community of spirit that existed between redemptive messianic religious thought and the wide variety of radical secular utopian beliefs held by this important group of intellectuals. The author outlines the circumstances that produced this unusual combination of religious and non-religious thought and illuminates the common assumptions that united such seemingly disparate figures as Martin Buber, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukács.
£20.91
Verso Books Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition
What is the relation of art to the practice of radical politics today? Strike Art explores this question through the historical lens of Occupy, an event that had artists at its core. Precarious, indebted, and radicalized, artists redirected their creativity from servicing the artworld into an expanded field of organizing in order to construct of a new-if internally fraught-political imaginary set off against the common enemy of the 1%. In the process, they called the bluff of a contemporary art system torn between ideals of radical critique, on the one hand, and an increasing proximity to Wall Street on the other-oftentimes directly targeting major art institutions themselves as sites of action.Tracking the work of groups including MTL, Not an Alternative, the Illuminator, the Rolling Jubilee, and G.U.L.F, Strike Art shows how Occupy ushered in a new era of artistically-oriented direct action that continues to ramify far beyond the initial act of occupation itself into ongoing struggles surrounding labor, debt, and climate justice, concluding with a consideration of the overlaps between such work and the aesthetic practices of the Black Lives Matter movement.Art after Occupy, McKee suggests, contains great potentials of imagination and action for a renewed left project that are still only beginning to ripen, at once shaking up and taking flight from the art system as we know it.
£21.79
Verso Books Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression
Close to Home is the classic study of family, patriarchal ideologies, and the politics and strategy of women's liberation. On the table in this forceful and provocative debate are questions of whether men can be feminists, whether "bourgeois" and heterosexual women are retrogressive members of the women's movement, and how best to struggle against the multiple oppressions women endure.Rachel Hills's foreword to this new edition explores how Christine Delphy's analysis of marriage as the institution behind the exploitation of unpaid women's labor is as radical and relevant today as it ever was.
£19.15
Verso Books Marx on Money
The republication of Suzanne de Brunhoff's classic investigation into Karl Marx's conception of "the money commodity" shines light on commodities and their fetishism. The investigation of money as the crystallization of value in its material sense is central to how we understand capitalism and how it can be abolished. Marx on Money is an elegant analysis of how money, credit, debt and value fit into the "logic of capital" that characterizes commodity society.
£14.78
Verso Books Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
Everywhere we turn, a startling new device promises to transfigure our lives. But at what cost? In this urgent and revelatory excavation of our Information Age, leading technology thinker Adam Greenfield forces us to reconsider our relationship with the networked objects, services and spaces that define us. It is time to reevaluate the Silicon Valley consensus determining the future.Having successfully colonised everyday life, radical technologies - from smartphones, blockchain, augmented-reality interfaces and virtual assistants to 3D printing, autonomous delivery drones and self-driving cars - are now conditioning the choices available to us in the years to come. How do they work? What challenges do they present to us, as individuals and societies? Who benefits from their adoption? In answering these questions, Greenfield's timely guide clarifies the scale and nature of the crisis we now confront - and offers ways to reclaim our stake in the future.
£12.02
Verso Books The Seasons of Trouble: Life Amid the Ruins of Sri Lanka’s Civil War
For three decades, Sri Lanka's civil war tore communities apart. In 2009, the Sri Lankan army finally defeated the separatist Tamil Tigers guerrillas in a fierce battle that swept up about 300,000 civilians and killed more than 40,000. More than a million had been displaced by the conflict, and the resilient among them still dared to hope. But the next five years changed everything.Rohini Mohan's searing account of three lives caught up in the devastation looks beyond the heroism of wartime survival to reveal the creeping violence of the everyday. When city-bred Sarva is dragged off the streets by state forces, his middle-aged mother, Indra, searches for him through the labyrinthine Sri Lankan bureaucracy. Meanwhile, Mugil, a former child soldier, deserts the Tigers in the thick of war to protect her family.Having survived, they struggle to live as the Sri Lankan state continues to attack minority Tamils and Muslims, frittering away the era of peace. Sarva flees the country, losing his way - and almost his life - in a bid for asylum. Mugil stays, breaking out of the refugee camp to rebuild her family and an ordinary life in the village she left as a girl. But in her tumultuous world, desires, plans, and people can be snatched away in a moment.The Seasons of Trouble is a startling, brutal, yet beautifully written debut from a prize-winning journalist. It is a classic piece of reportage, five years in the making, and a trenchant, compassionate examination of the corrosive effect of conflict on a people.
£24.41
Verso Books Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist
Since 1843, the Economist has been the single most devoted and influential champion of liberalism anywhere in the world. But what exactly is liberalism, and how has the liberal message evolved? Liberalism at Large presents a history of liberalism on the move, confronting the challenges that classical doctrine left unresolved: the rise of democracy, the expansion of empire, the ascendancy of finance. Today, neither economic crisis at home, nor permanent warfare abroad, has dimmed the Economist's belief in unfettered markets, limited government and a free hand for the West. Confidante to the powerful, emissary for the financial sector, portal onto international affairs, the bestselling news weekly shapes the world its readers-and the rest of us-inhabit. This is the first critical biography of one of the architects of a liberal world order now under increasing strain.
£25.00
Verso Books Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain
Britain began the twenty-first century convinced of its creativity. Throughout the New Labour era, the visual and performing arts, museums and galleries, were ceaselessly promoted as a stimulus to national economic revival, a post-industrial revolution where spending on culture would solve everything, from national decline to crime. Tony Blair heralded it a "golden age." Yet despite huge investment, the audience for the arts remained a privileged minority. So what went wrong?In Cultural Capital, leading historian Robert Hewison gives an in-depth account of how creative Britain lost its way. From Cool Britannia and the Millennium Dome to the Olympics and beyond, he shows how culture became a commodity, and how target-obsessed managerialism stifled creativity. In response to the failures of New Labour and the austerity measures of the Coalition government, Hewison argues for a new relationship between politics and the arts.
£15.17
Verso Books Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life
Most people assume that 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.
£13.02
Verso Books On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions Without Owners
In this fascinating work of cultural theory and philosophy, Robert Pfaller explores the hidden cost of our contemporary approach to pleasure, belief and illusion. Sports, design, eroticism, social intercourse and games-indeed, all those aspects of our culture commonly deemed "pleasurable"-seem to require beliefs that many regard as illusory. But in considering themselves above the self-deceptions of the crowd, those same sceptics are prone to dismissing a majority of the population as naive or misguided. In doing so, they create a false opposition between the 'simple' masses and their more enlightened rulers. And this dichotomy then functions as an ideological support for neoliberal government: citizens become irrational victims, to be ruled over by a protective security state. What initially appears to be a universal pleasure principle-the role of "anonymous illusions" in mass culture-in this way becomes a rationale for dismantling democracy.
£18.28
Verso Books Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire
Why do people work for other people? This seemingly naïve question is more difficult to answer than one might at first imagine, and it lies at the heart of Lordon's Willing Slaves of Capital. To complement Marx's partial answers, especially in the face of the disconcerting spectacle of the engaged, enthusiastic employee, Lordon brings to bear a "Spinozist anthropology" that reveals the fundamental role of affects and passions in the employment relationship, reconceptualizing capitalist exploitation as the capture and remoulding of desire. A thoroughly materialist reading of Spinoza's Ethics allows Lordon to debunk notions of individual autonomy and selfdetermination while simultaneously saving the ideas of political freedom and liberation from capitalist exploitation. Willing Slaves of Capital is a bold proposal to rethink capitalism and its transcendence on the basis of the contemporary experience of work.
£18.28
Verso Books The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire
The all-encompassing embrace of world capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century was generally attributed to the superiority of competitive markets. Globalization had appeared to be the natural outcome of this unstoppable process. But today, with global markets roiling and increasingly reliant on state intervention to stay afloat, it has become clear that markets and states aren't straightforwardly opposing forces.In this groundbreaking work, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin demonstrate the intimate relationship between modern capitalism and the American state. The Making of Global Capitalism identifies the centrality of the social conflicts that occur within states rather than between them. These emerging fault lines hold out the possibility of new political movements that might transcend global markets.
£27.99
Verso Books The Frontman: Bono (In the Name of Power)
Celebrity philanthropy comes in many guises, but no single figure better encapsulates its delusions, pretensions and wrongheadedness than U2's iconic frontman, Bono-a fact neither sunglasses nor leather pants can hide. More than a mere philanthropist-indeed, he lags behind many of his peers when it comes to parting with his own money-Bono is better described as an advocate, one who has become an unwitting symbol of a complacent wealthy Western elite.The Frontman reveals how Bono moved his investments to Amsterdam to evade Irish taxes; his paternalistic and often bullying advocacy of neoliberal solutions in Africa; his multinational business interests; and his hobnobbing with Paul Wolfowitz and shock-doctrine economist Jeffrey Sachs. Carefully dissecting the rhetoric and actions of Bono the political operator, The Frontman shows him to be an ambassador for imperial exploitation, a man who has turned his attention to a world of savage injustice, inequality and exploitation-and helped make it worse.
£11.24
Verso Books Critique of Instrumental Reason
These essays, written between 1949 and 1967, focus on a single theme: the triumph in the twentieth century of the state-bureaucratic apparatus and 'instrumental reason' and the concomitant liquidation of the individual and the basic social institutions and relationships associated with the individual.
£16.53
Verso Books From Stalinism to Eurocommunism: The Bitter Fruits of 'Socialism in One Country'
Ernest Mandel's book is a study of Eurocommunism unlike any other. Written in the polemical tradition of Trotsky, its sweep extends well beyond the immediate prospects of the Communist Parties of Western Europe. Mandel traces the long historical process which has transformed the once embattled detachments of the Third International into the constitutionalist formations of "historic compromise" and "union of the people" today. He then goes on to argue that the national roads to socialism of contemporary Eurocommunism are the "bitter fruits of socialism in one country" in the USSR.Mandel's book contains trenchant and documented criticisms of the ideas of Santiago Carrillo in Spain, the economic policies of the PCI in Italy, and the PCF's theories of the State in France. But it also sets these Western developments in the context of European politics as a whole-discussing the Russian response to Carrillo, the organizational attitudes of the CPSU to the Western parties, and the emergence of major dissident currents in Eastern Germany sympathetic to Eurocommunism.From Stalinism to Eurocommunism represents the first systematic and comprehensive critique from the Marxist Left of the new strategy of Western Communism. It can be read as a barometer of the storms ahead in the European labour movement.
£18.28
Verso Books The Making of the Second Cold War
We are living through the Second Cold War, yet what is it? Millions in East and West now fear a nuclear conflict, yet confrontation and panic continue to obscure understanding of the processes that might trigger a "hot" war. Fred Halliday presents a clearly written anatomy of these international tensions. He identifies the chief cause of cold war as the globalized contest between the USA and USSR and the arms race in which these states are engaged. He then explains the five main elements of the conflict: the relative decline in US nuclear strategic superiority since the 1960s; the new wave of Third World revolutions; the political stalemate of the post-capitalist states; the rise of the New Right in the USA; and the sharpened contradictions between the Western countries themselves.The Making of the Second Cold War provides a careful, integrated political history of international developments since the 1960s. No other book on the subject has the same range, or attempts to knit together all the factors that have produced the contemporary world situation.
£22.66
Verso Books Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch
Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) is now recognized as a philosopher and cultural critic of the greatest importance, his subtle and profound developments of utopian Marxism as influential for the student New Left of the 1960s and 1970s as they were for the leftist movements of the twenties. Today, in the United States and Britain, his enormous body of work is attracting new generations of readers: more translations are appearing, and his utopian thought is finding a new resonance in many different contexts.Several of the authors here address the centrality of a radically unconventional concept of utopia to Bloch's thought; others write on the question of memory and pedagogical theory. There is a Blochian reading of crime fiction, illuminating overviews of Bloch's work and an exploration of the stylistics of hope in Bloch's Spuren, as well as a translation of excerpts from that extraordinary book.The essays gathered here are intended, above all, to recommend Bloch's work as a challenge to older models of historical materialism and utopian emancipation, and to give specific examples of how that work can contribute to current debates about utopia, nationalism and collective memory, the liberatory content of popular cultural forms, and the complex relationship between ideology and everyday life. Together they provide a timely introduction to one of the most untimely and inspiring thinkers of the twentieth century.
£20.04
Verso Books Bloody Panico
The most successful political party in history?The Tory Party has been in power for eighty-five of the past 135 years. In 2019 they won their largest parliamentary majority in more than three decades. They have had a long way to fall since, and they’ve done it at incredible speed.As Geoffrey Wheatcroft shows, we have witnessed not simply the collapse of the party but the shattering of its very foundations. Bloody Panico! opens the sorry tale with the Tories’ return to power in 2010, with ‘Call Me Dave’Cameron at the helm. The turmoil of the referendum followed, as Boris championed a Leave campaign he didn’t believe in for supporters with no clear idea what they were demanding.Beyond the pantomime of Boris, Truss’s kamikazee premiership, and the squirming managerial tedium of Sunak, the party is riven by resentment and confusion. It is a maelstrom of petty and shameless in-fighting. The Tories’ ancient i
£15.17
Verso Books The EU: An Obituary
With Britain leaving the EU, now is the time for an obituary for the EU as an institution. In this short, rigorously argued book, updated after Brexit, John R. Gillingham tells the history of an idea that has soured and withered away. He reveals the failures from its postwar origins to set out what the EU was; the role that Delors played in creating the neoliberal monster it is today, and the contemporary - crises; refugees, Brexit, the Euro - that the current institution fails to deal with.
£19.79
Verso Books Shattered Hopes: Obama’s Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian Peace
On just the second day of his first term, Barack Obama appointed former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell as his special envoy for Middle East peace and boldly asserted that his administration would "actively and aggressively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians." At the outset of Obama's second term, here is the first hard-hitting analysis of why the administration has entirely failed on this issue, a failure brought on in part because of Obama's wrongheaded obeisance to Israeli policy and its US advocates.Written in a clear and accessible style by the director of a national peace organization who has also been a Middle East analyst for the Congressional Research Service, this book offers an informed history of the Obama administration's policies and maps out a progressive path forward.
£15.29
Verso Books Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict
First published in 1995, this acclaimed study challenges generally accepted truths of the Israel-Palestine conflict as well as much of the revisionist literature. This new edition critically reexamines dominant popular and scholarly images in the light of the current failures of the peace process.
£22.66
Verso Books Barbaric Sport: A Global Plague
Marc Perelman pulls no punches in this succinct and searing broadside, assailing the 'recent form of barbarism' that is the global sporting event. Forget the Olympics and consider, under Perelman's guidance, the ledger of inequities maintained by such supposedly harmless games.They have provided a smokescreen for the forcible removal of 'undesirables'; aided governments in the pursuit of racist agendas; affirmed the hypocrisy of drug-testing in an industry where doping is more an imperative than an aberration; and developed the pornographic hybrid that Perelman dubs 'sporn', a further twist in our corrupt obsession with the body.Drawing examples from the modern history of the international sporting event, Perelman argues that today's colosseums, upheld as examples of 'health', have become the steamroller for a decadent age fixated on competition, fame and elitism.
£12.99
Verso Books Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World
Banks have taken a backseat since the global financial crisis over a decade ago. Today, our new financial masters are asset managers, like Blackstone and BlackRock. And they don't just own financial assets.The roads we drive on; the pipes that supply our drinking water; the farmland that provides our food; energy systems for electricity and heat; hospitals, schools, and even the homes in which many of us live-all now swell asset managers' bulging investment portfolios.As the owners of more and more of the basic building blocks of everyday life, asset managers shape the lives of each and every one of us in profound and disturbing ways. In this eye-opening follow-up to Rentier Capitalism, Brett Christophers peels back the veil on ""asset manager society.""Asset managers, he shows, are unlike traditional owners of housing and other essential infrastructure. Buying and selling these life-supporting assets at a dizzying pace, the crux of their business model is not long-term investment and careful custodianship but making quick profits for themselves and the investors that back them.In asset manager society, the natural and built environments that sustain us become one more vehicle for siphoning money from the many to the few.
£20.00
Verso Books Hit Parade of Tears
A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom.Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of the land. In this new collection, her skewed imagination distorts and enhances some of the classic concepts of science fiction and fantasy.A philandering husband receives a bestial punishment from a wife with her own secrets to keep; a music lover finds herself in a timeline both familiar and as wrong as can be; a misfit band of space pirates discover a mysterious baby among the stars; Emma, the Bovary-like character from one of Suzuki's stories in Terminal Boredom, lands herself in a bizarre romantic pickle.Wryly anarchic and deeply imaginative, Suzuki was a writer like no other. These eleven stories offer readers the opportunity to delve deeper in this singular writer's work.
£14.95
Verso Books Red Africa: Reclaiming Revolutionary Black Politics
Red Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anticolonial struggles in Africa. Contemporary debates on Black radicalism and decolonisation have lost sight of the concerns that animated their twentieth-century intellectual forebears. Okoth responds, challenging the claim that Marxism and Black radicalism are incompatible and showing that both are embraced in the anti-imperialist tradition he calls 'Red Africa'. The politics of Black revolutionary writers Eduardo Mondlane, Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney and Andrée Blouin gesture toward a decolonised future that never materialised - instead it was betrayed, violently sup- pressed, or erased. We might yet build something new from the ruins of national liberation, something which sustains the utopian promise of freedom and refuses to surrender. Red Africa is a political project that hopes to salvage what remains of this tradition.
£14.95
Verso Books Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)
Around the world, people are faced with crisis after crisis, from the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to-or actively engineer-each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support vulnerable members of their communities. This survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid. This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid has been a part of all larger, powerful social movements, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout. Mutual aid isn't charity: it's a form of organizing where people get to create new systems of care and generosity so we can survive.
£11.64
Verso Books The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat: A Novel of Ideas
The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat is a brilliant fictional journey through Western political philosophy by one of our most original thinkers. Professor Caritat, a middle-aged Candide, walks naively through the neighbouring countries of Utilitaria, Communitaria and Libertaria, in his quest to find the best of all possible worlds. Cut loose from the confines of his ivory tower, this wandering professor is made to confront the perplexed state of modern thinking in this dazzling comedy of ideas.
£11.24
Verso Books Shattered Nation: Inequality and the Geography of A Failing State
Britain was once the leading economy in Europe; it is now the most unequal. In Shattered Nation, leading geographer and author of Inequality and the 1% shows that we are growing further and further apart. Visiting sites across the British Isles and exploring the social fissures that have emerged, Danny Dorling exposes a new geography of inequality. Middle England has been hit hard by the cost-of-living crisis, and even people doing comparatively well are struggling to stay afloat. Once affluent suburbs are now unproductive places where opportunity has been replaced by food banks. Before COVID, life expectancy had dropped as a result of poverty for the first time since the 1930s.Fifty years ago the UK led the world in child health; today, twenty-two of the twenty-seven EU countries have better mortality rates for newborns. No other European country has such miserly unemployment benefits; university fees so high; housing so unaffordable; or a government economically so far to the right. In the spirit of the 1942 Beveridge Report, Dorling identifies the five giants of twenty-first-century poverty that need to be conquered: Hunger, Precarity, Waste, Exploitation, and Fear. He offers powerful insights into how we got here and what we must do in order to save Britain from becoming a failed state.
£15.17
Verso Books Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom
Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, Maya Wind shatters this myth and documents how Israeli universities are directly complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights.As this book shows, Israeli universities serve as pillars of Israel's system of oppression against Palestinians. Academic disciplines, degree programs, campus infrastructure, and research laboratories all service Israeli occupation and apartheid, while universities violate the rights of Palestinians to education, stifle critical scholarship, and violently repress student dissent. Towers of Ivory and Steel is a powerful expose of Israeli academia's ongoing and active complicity in Israel's settler-colonial project.
£19.99
Verso Books Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet
The environmental crisis under way is unique in human history. It is a true existential crisis. Those alive today will decide the fate of humanity. Meanwhile, the leaders of the most powerful state in human history are dedicating themselves with passion to destroying the prospects for organized human life. At the same time, there is a solution at hand, which is the Green New Deal. Putting meat on the bones of the Green New Deal starts with a single simple idea: we have to absolutely stop burning fossil fuels to produce energy within the next 30 years at most; and we have to do this in a way that also supports rising living standards and expanding opportunities for working people and the poor throughout the world. This version of a Green New Deal program is, in fact, entirely realistic in terms of its purely economic and technical features. The real question is whether it is politically feasible. Chomsky and Pollin examine how we can build the political force to make a global Green New Deal a reality.
£12.99
Verso Books Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World
What should a metropolis for working women look like? A city of friendships beyond Sex and the City. A transit system that accommodates mothers with strollers on the school run. A public space with enough toilets. A place where women can walk without harassment. Through history, personal experience and popular culture Leslie Kern exposes what is hidden in plain sight: the social inequalities are built into our cities, homes, and neighbourhoods. She maps the city from new vantage points, laying out a feminist intersectional approach to urban histories and proposes that the city is perhaps also our best hope for shaping a new urban future. It is time to dismantle what we take for granted about cities and to ask how we can build more just, sustainable, and care-full cities together.
£14.59
Verso Books Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism
In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences.Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasised the possibility of progress while trying to destroy what came before, and voraciously sought out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums.By practising what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas to the Congo ruled by Belgium's brutal King Léopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. In Potential History, Azoulay travels alongside historical companions - an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums - to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics.Rather than looking for a new future, Azoulay calls upon us to rewind history and unlearn our imperial rights, to continue to refuse imperial violence by making present what was invented as "past" and making the repair of torn worlds the substance of politics.
£30.00
Verso Books How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, Rodney makes the unflinching case that African maldevelopment is not a natural feature of geography, but a direct product of imperial extraction from the continent, a practice that continues up into the present. Meticulously researched, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains an unshakably relevant study of the so-called "great divergence" between Africa and Europe, just as it remains a prescient resource for grasping the the multiplication of global inequality today. In this new edition, Angela Davis offers a striking foreword to the book, exploring its lasting contributions to a revolutionary and feminist practice of anti-imperialism.
£18.91
Verso Books New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
We live in times of increasing inscrutability. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically generated by anonymous software. As a result, we no longer understand what is happening around us. Underlying all of these trends is a single idea: the belief that quantitative data can provide a coherent model of the world, and the efficacy of computable information to provide us with ways of acting within it. Yet the sheer volume of information available to us today reveals less than we hope. Rather, it heralds a new Dark Age: a world of ever-increasing incomprehension.In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle offers us a warning against the future in which the contemporary promise of a new technologically assisted Enlightenment may just deliver its opposite: an age of complex uncertainty, predictive algorithms, surveillance, and the hollowing out of empathy. Surveying the history of art, technology and information systems he reveals the dark clouds that gather over discussions of the digital sublime.
£14.83
Verso Books The New Poverty
Today 13 million people are living in poverty in the UK. According to a 2017 report, 1 in 5 children live below the poverty line. The new poor, however, are an even larger group than these official figures suggest. They are more often than not in work, living precariously and betrayed by austerity policies that make affordable good quality housing, good health and secure employment increasingly unimaginable.In The New Poverty investigative journalist Stephen Armstrong travels across Britain to tell the stories of those who are most vulnerable. It is the story of an unreported Britain, abandoned by politicians and betrayed by the retreat of the welfare state. As benefit cuts continue and in-work poverty soars, he asks what long-term impact this will have on post-Brexit Britain and-on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 1942 Beveridge report-what we can do to stop the destruction of our welfare state.
£13.60
Verso Books Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy
Why are we so obsessed by the pursuit of happiness? With new ways to measure contentment we are told that we have a right to individual joy. But at what cost? In an age of increasing individualism, we have never been more alone and miserable. But what if the true nature of happiness can only be found in others? In Radical Happiness, leading feminist thinker Lynne Segal believes that we have lost the art of radical happiness- the art of transformative, collective joy. She shows that only in the revolutionary potential of coming together it is that we can come to understand the powers of flourishing. Radical Happiness is a passionate call for the re-discovery of the political and emotional joy that emerge when we learn to share our lives together.
£11.68
Verso Books Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power
Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault's biopower, has discovered the productive force of the psyche. In the course of discussing all the facets of neoliberal psychopolitics fueling our contemporary crisis of freedom, Han elaborates an analytical framework that provides an original theory of Big Data and a lucid phenomenology of emotion. But this provocative essay proposes counter models too, presenting a wealth of ideas and surprising alternatives at every turn.
£13.94
Verso Books Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically
Political conflict in our society is inevitable, and the results are often far from negative. How then should we deal with the intractable differences arising from complex modern culture?In Agonistics, Mouffe develops her philosophy, taking particular interest in international relations, strategies for radical politics and the politics of artistic practices. In a series of coruscating essays, she engages with cosmopolitanism, post-operaism, and theories of multiple modernities to argue in favor of a multipolar world with a real cultural and political pluralism.
£18.28
Verso Books The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work
The Imperial Messenger reveals the true value of this media darling, a risible writer whose success tells us much about the failures of contemporary journalism. Belén Fernández dissects the Friedman corpus with wit and journalistic savvy to expose newsroom practices that favor macho rhetoric over serious inquiry, a pacified readership over an empowered one, and reductionist analysis over integrity. The Imperial Messenger is polemic at its best, relentless in its attack on this apologist for American empire and passionate in its commitment to justice.About the series: Counterblasts is a new Verso series that aims to revive the tradition of polemical writing inaugurated by Puritan and leveller pamphleteers in the seventeenth century, when in the words of one of them, Gerard Winstanley, the old world was "running up like parchment in the fire." From 1640 to 1663, a leading bookseller and publisher, George Thomason, recorded that his collection alone contained over twenty thousand pamphlets. Such polemics reappeared both before and during the French, Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions of the last century. In a period of conformity where politicians, media barons and their ideological hirelings rarely challenge the basis of existing society, it's time to revive the tradition. Verso's Counterblasts will challenge the apologists of Empire and Capital.
£11.24
Verso Books Unhitched: The Trial of Christopher Hitchens
Irascible and forthright, Christopher Hitchens stood out as a man determined to do just that. In his younger years, a career-minded socialist, he emerged from the smoke of 9/11 a neoconservative "Marxist," an advocate of America's invasion of Iraq filled with passionate intensity. Throughout his life, he played the role of universal gadfly, whose commitment to the truth transcended the party line as well as received wisdom. But how much of this was imposture? In this highly critical study, Richard Seymour casts a cold eye over the career of the "Hitch" to uncover an intellectual trajectory determined by expediency and a fetish for power.As an orator and writer, Hitchens offered something unique and highly marketable. But for all his professed individualism, he remains a recognizable historical type-the apostate leftist. Unhitched presents a rewarding and entertaining case study, one that is also a cautionary tale for our times.
£11.24
Verso Books Lives on the Left: A Group Portrait
The extended critical interview is especially flexible as a form, by turns tenacious and glancing, elliptical or sustained, combining argument and counter-argument, reflection, history and memoir with a freedom normally denied to its subjects in conventional writing formats. Lives on the Left brings together sixteen such interviews from New Left Review in a group portrait of intellectual engagement in the twentieth century and since.Four generations of intellectuals discuss their political histories and present perspectives, and the specialized work for which they are, often, best known. Their recollections span the century from the Great War and the October Revolution to the present, ranging across Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. Psychoanalysis, philosophy, the gendering of private and public life, capital and class formation, the novel, geography, and language are among the topics of theoretical discussion. At the heart of the collection, in all its diversity of testimony and judgement, is critical experience of communism and the tradition of Marx, relayed now for a new generation of readers.Lives on the Left includes interviews with Georg Lukács, Hedda Korsch, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dorothy Thompson, Jir?i Pelikan, Ernest Mandel, Luciana Castellina, Lucio Colletti, K. Damodaran, Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, Adolfo Gilly, João Pedro Stédile, Asada Akira, Wang Hui and Giovanni Arrighi.New Left Review was founded in 1960 in London, which has remained its base ever since. In fifty years of publication, it has won an international reputation as an independent journal of socialist politics and ideas, attracting readers and contributors from every part of the world. A Spanish-language edition is published bi-monthly from Madrid.
£22.49
Verso Books Broonland: The Last Days of Gordon Brown
How did the intellectually intimidating, industrious architect of the New Labour project become its maligned and feckless undertaker? In this scathing, witty indictment of Gordon Brown's tenure as prime minister, Christopher Harvie says goodbye to Broon by exploring the Britain New Labour helped create. It is a place where the gap between rich and poor grows ever wider and manufacturing has been replaced by 'retail, entertainment and recreation' (for which read shopping, gambling and drinking). Now that the casino economy has veered wildly out of control, and our public utilities and industries have been auctioned to the highest bidder, Broonland is both an essential anatomy of a country on the brink of collapse and a caustic, darkly funny portrait of a decade that took Britain from boom through bust to busted.
£10.45
Verso Books Strategy of Deception
Written with his characteristic flair, Virillo's latest book is a trenchant denunciation of the Kosovo war in which he successfully unites theory with a riveting study of the conflict. Tearing aside the veil of hypocrisy in which the USA and its allies wrapped the war, Virillo demonstrates that the nature of the bombing was set by strategic rather than ethical considerations.Beneath the humanitarian rhetoric, Virillo sees a sinister innovation in the methods of waging war: territorial space is being replaced by orbital space in which a system of global telesurveillance is linked to the destructive power of bombers and missiles. Governments, the military and the media are becoming part of a seamless and self-justifying process linked by new information and arms technologies.Passionate and political, Strategy of Deception is a vital examination not only of the war in Yugoslavia but also what Virillo calls our "fin-de-siécle infantilization" in which the reality of battle is reduced to flickering images on a screen.
£8.88
Verso Books Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America
In the fall of 2011, a small protest camp in downtown Manhattan exploded into a global uprising, sparked in part by the violent overreactions of the police. An unofficial record of this movement, Occupy! combines adrenalin-fueled first-hand accounts of the early days and weeks of Occupy Wall Street with contentious debates and thoughtful reflections, featuring the editors and writers of the celebrated n+1, as well as some of the world's leading radical thinkers, such as Slavoj Zizek, Angela Davis, and Rebecca Solnit.The book conveys the intense excitement of those present at the birth of a counterculture, while providing the movement with a serious platform for debating goals, demands, and tactics. Articles address the history of the "horizontalist" structure at OWS; how to keep a live-in going when there is a giant mountain of laundry building up; how very rich the very rich have become; the messages and meaning of the "We are the 99%" tumblr website; occupations in Oakland, Boston, Atlanta, and elsewhere; what happens next; and much more.
£11.24
Verso Books Our Bloc: How We Win
In Our Bloc, Momentum co-founder James Schneider lays out an action plan for the British left. To move from defeatism to renewed confidence, he proposes a Left Bloc: an explicit alliance of socialists in Parliament, the Labour grassroots, the trade unions and social movements.In the wake of Corbyn's defeat, Schneider makes a bold argument: the central question is not whether to stay in or leave the Labour Party. Instead, we should focus on federating our forces - to strengthen our movements and voices today, and lay the ground to construct the party we need to enter the state tomorrow.Now is not the moment to scale back our ambitions. Climate shocks, rising debt, inequality and energy costs are hard barriers to neoliberalism's viability. If we can build power and prepare to seize the moment, we have a world to win.
£10.45
Verso Books The Twilight of Unionism: Ulster and the Future of Northern Ireland
The fissures that have split the United Kingdom in the last decades have run through Northern Ireland. Since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the fragile peace has been threatened by Brexit, the rise and fall of the D U P and the failure of power-sharing arrangement between the main parties at the Stormont Assembly. As the very future of Northern Ireland is now in jeopardy, will Britain face up to its imperial legacy and address the deep inequalities that remain in the aftermath of the Troubles, and the uneven development of the 'New Ireland'?Geoffrey Bell offers an insightful history of Ulster Unionism from the 1960s to the present day. In recent years this has come to a crisis point. What is the future of the Union in the post-Brexit reality? How will the relationship between Northern Ireland and Westminster develop? Can the United Kingdom survive?
£15.17
Verso Books Is Socialism Possible in Britain?: Reflections on the Corbyn Years
Selected as one of the 15 best political and current affairs books of 2022 by The TimesIs Socialism Possible in Britain? analyses Jeremy Corbyn's tenure as Labour leader and the prospects for parliamentary socialism in a post-Corbyn Britain. Lively and insightful, it is informed by an insider's view of the most radical period in Labour's history. A veteran of the Stop the War Coalition, Andrew Murray was seconded to Corbyn's office from the Unite trade union and witnessed an extraordinary daily bombardment from sections of the Parliamentary Labour Party and the media. He candidly assesses the leadership's response to the antisemitism controversy and the dilemmas of Brexit, as well as Keir Starmer's restoration of a turgid neo-Blairism. The problems that beset Corbyn are likely to confront any similar political project. Is Socialism Possible in Britain? explores how they can be more effectively addressed in the future - a future which we must hope is not so far away.
£14.99
Verso Books Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity
For sixty years, Noel Ignatiev provided an unflinching account of "whiteness" - a social fiction and an unmitigated disaster for all working-class people. This new essay collection from the late firebrand covers the breadth of his life and insights as an autodidact steel worker, a groundbreaking theoretician, and a bitter enemy of racists everywhere.In these essays, Ignatiev confronts the Weather Underground and recounts which strategies proved most effective to winning white workers in Gary, Indiana, to black liberation. He discovers the prescient political insights of the nineteenth-century abolition movement, surveys the wreckage of the revolutionary twentieth century with C.L.R. James, and attends to the thorny and contradictory nature of working-class consciousness. Through it all, our attentions are turned to the everyday life of "ordinary" people, whose actions anticipate a wholly new society they have not yet recognized or named.In short, Ignatiev reflects on the incisive questions of his time and ours: How can we drive back the forces of racism in society? How can the so-called "white" working class be won over to emancipatory politics? How can we build a new human community?
£25.00