All Books

Raising the Red Flag is a stirring exploration of the origins of the British Marxist movement, from the creation of the Social Democratic Federation to the foundation of the Communist Party.

It tells a story of rising class struggle, the founding of the Labour Party, the fight against World War One, the Russian Revolution, and the explosive year of 1919.

The book also uses new archival sources to re-examine Marxist organisations such as the British Socialist Party, the Socialist Labour Party, and Sylvia Parkhurst's Workers' Socialist Federation.

Above all, this is the story of men and women who fought to liberate the working class from capitalism through socialist revolution.

The first book by the great French radical historian Maurice Dommanget (1888–1976) to be translated into English, this book is an engaging, sympathetic telling of the life and works of Sylvain Maréchal (1750–1803), an unjustly forgotten figure of the French Revolutionary era. Maréchal was not only a militant atheist and opponent of royalty, but, as the author of the Manifesto of the Equals he laid the groundwork for modern communism.

With an introduction by Jean-Numa Ducange.

How did imperialist elites build their power? The Struggle for Development and Democracy begins to answer this pressing question.

In this rousing study, Alessandro Olsaretti argues that we need significantly new theories of development and democracy to answer the problem posed by neoliberalism and the populist backlash, namely, uneven development and divisive politics heightened by the 9/11 attacks.

This volume proposes a general theory of development and democracy, as part of a unified theory of power, emphasizing that development needs markets, civil society, and the state, and also the proper networks and interactions amongst markets, civil society, and the state. Imperialism undermines these interactions, and turns countries into providers of cheap land or labour. This book begins to sketch the mechanisms at work that facilitate this process.

Potentia of Poverty opposes to the surplus-value of capital a surplus-concept of life—of the worker, of the non-worker, of the poor, of the rich: an excess of being with the power to undo capital by using its own mechanism.

Antonio Negri writes in the preface that "The poor is the powerful, Pascucci tells us. She interprets Marx as a reader of Spinoza; however, maybe there is something more here than there is in Spinoza and Marx themselves. A further passage is necessary to grasp this "more": namely, to tie the experience of poverty to an ontology of "cupiditas" [desire], that is, of "amor" [love]".

In this important book, Rebecca Carson develops the concept of "immanent externalities" to grasp the non-capitalist life processes produced by—and necessary for—capitalist reproduction. Immanent Externalities thus considers the category of reproduction by means of a philosophical re-reading of the three volumes of Marx's Capital. In doing so, the book locates capitalism's fundamental contradiction as that between the reproduction of profit-driven activity and ecologically situated human life, suggesting new orientations for theory and practice today.

Throwing the Dice of History with Marx builds a case for a historical materialism that is stripped of all teleology.

By digging through the stratigraphy of the history of ideas we can find within and beyond Marxism an 'aleatory current' that values the role of chance in history. Starting in the ancient Mediterranean with Epicurus, it traces the history of conceiving history as plural up to Marxism and modern science. It shows that concrete historical 'worlds' such as ancient Mesoamerica and Eurasia cannot be reduced to a single template. Affirming the potentiality of a future non-capitalist 'world', it invalidates any 'end of history' thesis.

Breaking from half a century of postmodernist readings of poetry, and bypassing the false divide between formalist and historicist criticism, these essays chart a path toward a new Marxist poetics.

In these innovative essays on poetry and capitalism, collected over the last fifteen years, Christopher Nealon shines a light on the upsurge of anticapitalist poetry since the turn of the century, and develops fresh ways of thinking about how capitalist society shapes the reading and the writing of all poetry, whatever its political orientation.

In theorizing on the causes, preconditions, dynamics and internal conflicts of the Greek Revolution of 1821, John Milios's analysis tackles the issue of bourgeois revolutions in general.

This sweeping investigation of the historical emergence, and the limits of the Greek nation, calls forth the broader theoretical and historical question of the economic, political, and ideological presuppositions of nation-building. Nationalism as a Claim to a State illustrates how nationalism brings the masses to the political forefront, which the capitalist state then incorporates into its apparatuses as 'sovereign people'. Nationalism, being enmeshed within the political element, consists of the basis upon which irredentism develops, recruiting populations into the expansionist-imperialist strategies of the ruling classes.

Jean-Numa Ducange is Professor of Contemporary History at the Université de Rouen Normandie and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. He is co-director of the journal Actuel Marx.

Antony Burlaud is a doctoral student in political science at the Université de Paris 1 Sorbonne. He has published articles on French politics, Marxism and the history of the French left.

4-poster set

Recy Taylor

Recy Taylor was born on December 31, 1919, to a family of sharecroppers in Abbeville, Alabama. She became the primary caretaker of her six siblings at age seventeen after her mother died. Recy went on to marry Willie Guy Taylor, and the couple had a child in 1941.

On September 3, 1944, Recy Taylor, her friend Fannie Daniels, and Daniels’s son West Daniels attended an evening church service. On their walk home, a car containing seven white men stopped alongside them, and the men kidnapped Taylor at gunpoint. They threatened her life and brought her to the woods, where six of them raped her. After the attack, they left her on the side of the highway.

Fannie Daniels reported the kidnapping of her friend to local authorities immediately. Taylor’s father, Benny Corbitt, and the former chief of police Will Cook went out looking for Taylor and found her as she was making her way home.

She described the assault to the police, and through her description of the car, the police identified and brought in Hugo Wilson. Wilson admitted to the attack, but alleged that the men had paid Taylor and argued that they could therefore not be charged with rape. He named the other six attackers as Dillard York, Billy Howerton, Herbert Lovett, Luther Lee, Joe Culpepper, and Robert Gamble. After Wilson confessed, the police sent him home and refused to arrest the other men. The following day, the Taylors’ home was set on fire.

The attack, and the lack of justice evident in the official response, spurred a major campaign of activism by Black civil rights organizers in Alabama. The NAACP chapter in Montgomery, Alabama, became involved, sending Rosa Parks to investigate and advocate on Taylor’s behalf. Parks launched the Alabama Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor.

About a month after the attack, a grand jury made up entirely of white men refused to indict the six rapists. Due to Rosa Parks’s and others’ organizing, the governor’s office was overwhelmed with letters of support for Taylor, and the governor reopened the case. However, on February 14, 1945, a second all-white, all-male grand jury refused to indict, and the men were never prosecuted.

In a 2011 interview, Recy Taylor said, "They didn't try to do nothing about it. I just get upset because I do my best to be nice to people, because I don't want people to mistreat me and do me any kind of way.” That year, the state of Alabama formally apologized to Taylor for the failure to prosecute her rapists.

A documentary about Taylor’s experience, titled The Rape of Recy Taylor, was released in 2017. Three weeks later, she died in Abbeville at the age of ninety-seven.

For more information:

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/14/578010819/recy-taylor-s-rape-still-haunts-us

https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/recy-taylor-rosa-parks-and-struggle-racial-justice

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/recy-taylor-alabama-woman-raped-six-white-men-dies-97-n833336

Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage, 2011).

Ella Mae Ellison

The story of Ella Mae Ellison’s wrongful conviction for first-degree murder and armed robbery begins on November 30, 1973, in Roxbury, Massachusetts. Three young Black men armed with handguns attempted to rob a local pawn shop, Suffolk Loan Co. As they began to rob the display cases, an off-duty police officer entered the store and attempted to intervene. Detective John Schroeder was killed in the ensuing struggle, and the young men fled.

Three days later, the young men were arrested, and, when questioned, one of them said that an eighteen-year-old “lighter-skinned Black girl” drove their getaway car. This unknown fourth participant would face murder charges under the felony-murder rule. Two of the three young men, Nathanial Williams and Anthony Irving, flipped to testify against Terrell Walker, who they said fired the gun, and agreed to testify against the unknown getaway driver. Williams and Irving stated that the driver was Ella Mae Ellison, a dark-skinned, twenty-seven-year-old, Black woman and mother of four. Ellison knew these young men, as they had resided in the same housing project, and she had given them rides before, furnishing them with details of her vehicle to describe to police.

Despite her total incompatibility with the description of the getaway driver, Ellison was convicted of first-degree murder and robbery in November 1974 and sentenced to life in prison. When she was convicted, she said, “I can’t live without my kids. I’ll kill myself.” The Ella Ellison Support Committee launched a robust defense campaign to free Ella. Two years later, Williams and Irving recanted their testimony about Ellison, admitting that there was no fourth person involved and that they had invented a getaway driver to shift blame from Irving. Two years after that, after Ellison had served four years in a state penitentiary, her conviction was reversed by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. Later, the charges against her were also dismissed.

For more information: 

https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetailpre1989.aspx?caseid=87

https://law.justia.com/cases/massachusetts/supreme-court/volumes/376/376mass1.html

https://open.spotify.com/track/0MBvoxytkgsVz4c7uB3b2K?si=676079ae0bfc4e8d 

Celia

On June 23, 1855, after enduring five years of sexual violence, Celia, a nineteen-year-old enslaved woman from Missouri, killed her master, Robert Newsom. Newsom was a widower at least forty-five years older than Celia who purchased her when she was fourteen. On the day he purchased her, Newsom raped her on the way to his farm.

By the time she killed Newsom, Celia already had two children and was pregnant with a third. According to trial records, she had started a relationship with one of Newsom’s male slaves named George, who insisted that she end her sexual “relationship” with Newsom if she wanted to continue her relationship with him.

Celia approached Newsom’s daughters and implored them to ask their father to end the sexual assaults. No one could or would protect her, and so she confronted Newsom herself when he came to force yet another unwanted sexual encounter. She clubbed him to death and then burned his body in her fireplace. 

Celia’s court-appointed defense lawyers suggested that a Missouri law permitting a woman to use deadly force to defend herself against sexual advances extended to enslaved women as well as to free ones. The court rejected this vigorous defense, finding that Celia was property rather than a person and was therefore guilty of murder. She was sentenced to death by hanging. While Celia was not considered a person under the law and could therefore not be considered to have been raped, she was granted enough agency to be judged a murderess and punished for her act of resistance. 

While incarcerated, Celia gave birth to a baby that the public record suggests was stillborn. On November 11, five days before her scheduled execution, Celia was rescued from her jail cell by sympathetic supporters who were concerned that she would be killed before her appeal had been heard. She was returned to jail after her execution date had passed. After the Missouri Supreme Court rejected an appeal of her case, Celia was hanged on December 21, 1855.

For more information: https://www.famous-trials.com/celia/180-home

https://digpodcast.org/2018/01/28/celia-a-slave/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/10/19/missouri-v-celia-a-slave-she-killed-the-white-master-raping-her-then-claimed-self-defense/

https://www.mdpi.com/2313-5778/4/2/49/htm 

Margaret Garner

Margaret Garner was born enslaved in about 1833 on the Maplewood plantation in Kentucky. Her desperate choice to kill her daughter rather than return her to slavery became the subject of Toni Morrison’s canonical text Beloved. 

Margaret was a domestic servant inside the home of the plantation’s owner, John P. Gaines, and from her early childhood helped to care for his children. At the age of sixteen, Margaret married Robert Garner, who was enslaved on a neighboring plantation. Around the same time, Gaines was appointed governor of the Oregon Territories and sold the plantation—and its enslaved people—to his brother, Archibald Gaines. 

Archibald Gaines is believed to have repeatedly raped Garner, possibly fathering three of the four children she bore over the next six years. 

On January 27, 1856, Margaret, who was again pregnant, and Robert escaped with a group of families to southwest Ohio. The group crossed the frozen Ohio River and pursued different paths after reaching the free state. The Garners made it to the home of a free relative living outside Cincinnati. There, they were ambushed by US marshals and Archibald Gaines. Robert attempted to protect the family with a gun he had taken from his former slave owner, but was unsuccessful. During the altercation, Margaret attempted to kill all her children and herself rather than return to slavery. She only succeeded in killing her two-year-old daughter, Mary, before being captured and arrested. 

The fugitive slave trial that followed pitted Ohio’s interest in treating Margaret and Robert as free people who could be tried for murder against the federal Fugitive Slave Act, under which they were considered property. The judge ordered Margaret and Robert returned to slavery in Kentucky as the property of Archibald Gaines. Authorities from Ohio continued to work to bring Margaret to Ohio and arrest her as part of a complex plan to secure her freedom, but Archibald Gaines moved Margaret from location to location to prevent them from finding her. In one of the moves, the Garner family was sent to Arkansas via riverboat. Their boat collided with another boat and Margaret’s youngest child, the baby Priscilla, drowned in the accident. 

Margaret died of typhoid fever in 1858. 

For more information:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110520031508/http://www.motopera.org/mg_ed/educational/HS_HistoricalMGarner.html

Even the River Starts Small is a collection of stories from the movement to stop construction of the Line 3 pipeline through northern Minnesota.

The collection features anonymous writing, art, and photos spanning nearly a decade, and includes reflections on many of the diverse experiences that made up this grassroots resistance. There are hundreds of individual pieces of writing and visual art in the collection published in full color.
Line 3 is a tar sands oil pipeline that threatens communities, land, and water along its route, as well as the future of our climate. In 2021, despite fierce resistance, Enbridge completed construction of Line 3. Anishinaabe water protectors led the fight, asserting their sovereignty to oppose construction of this extractive project through their lands. For the better part of a decade thousands of people in Minnesota and around turtle island joined together to try and stop construction with a wide range of tactics.
After construction of the pipeline was complete, a group of young volunteer organizers from the movement set out to gather stories from the resistance to create a book that could be given to the movement as a gift. That team originally published Even the River Starts Small, the result of that project, in a limited distribution and gave away copies for free to people who were involved in resisting construction of Line 3. The book is now available for all through Haymarket Books.

Even the River Starts Small is a collection of stories from the movement to stop construction of the Line 3 pipeline through northern Minnesota.

The collection features anonymous writing, art, and photos spanning nearly a decade, and includes reflections on many of the diverse experiences that made up this grassroots resistance. There are hundreds of individual pieces of writing and visual art in the collection published in full color.
Line 3 is a tar sands oil pipeline that threatens communities, land, and water along its route, as well as the future of our climate. In 2021, despite fierce resistance, Enbridge completed construction of Line 3. Anishinaabe water protectors led the fight, asserting their sovereignty to oppose construction of this extractive project through their lands. For the better part of a decade thousands of people in Minnesota and around turtle island joined together to try and stop construction with a wide range of tactics.
After construction of the pipeline was complete, a group of young volunteer organizers from the movement set out to gather stories from the resistance to create a book that could be given to the movement as a gift. That team originally published Even the River Starts Small, the result of that project, in a limited distribution and gave away copies for free to people who were involved in resisting construction of Line 3. The book is now available for all through Haymarket Books.

“A curious thing has happened within American culture,” Aziz Rana writes. “The language of freedom has been claimed almost entirely by the political right.” Can it be reclaimed?

Freedom has a dual legacy. On the one hand, it stands for the great struggles long associated with the left, from abolition and anticolonialism to women’s and queer liberation. On the other hand, it has long been the watchword of an exclusionary right—playing a central role in the politics of neoliberalism and resurgent white nationalism. Rejecting this view of freedom as an exclusively right-wing concern, this issue reclaims freedom as a fundamental political value essential to any vision of a more just world.

Aziz Rana leads a forum on the path to a different politics of freedom. In the United States, he argues, reactionary uses of freedom at home have been emboldened by U.S. imperial power abroad. But the language of freedom can be genuinely liberating by building emancipatory institutions of collective agency and self-rule. Featuring eleven respondents—including Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jefferson Cowie, political theorists Adom Getachew, Lea Ypi, and Nancy Hirschmann, and philosophers Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and Philippe Van Parijs—the forum clarifies how both political messaging and institution building are essential to extending real freedom to all.

Including essays on the legacy of Cold War liberalism, fifty years of liberation theology, violence in Israel/Palestine, and the Stop Cop City movement; reviews of M. E. O’Brien’s Family Abolition, Melissa Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege, Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek’s After Work, and Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy; an interview on Black existentialism; and prose poetry.

The TRiiBE Guide is an annual printed magazine created with a goal of connecting Chicago’s communities in a tangible way. We hope to encourage a deep dive into the city’s Black and Indigenous histories, uplifting our forgotten or buried narratives in the mainstream conversation. Originally released in 2021, this new 2023 edition features six new stories. Filled with stories that both highlight the rich history of Black and Indigenous Chicago and reclaim this city for the people who continue the struggles for liberation today, the Triibe Guide is a must-read for all Chicagoans. 

The border regimes of imperialist states have brutally oppressed migrants throughout the world. To enforce their borders, these states have constructed a new digital fortress with far-reaching and ever-evolving new technologies. This pathbreaking volume exposes these insidious means of surveillance, control, and violence.
In the name of “smart” borders, the U.S. and Europe have turned to private companies to develop a neocolonial laboratory now deployed against the Global South, borderlands, and routes of migration. They have established immigrant databases, digital IDs, electronic tracking systems, facial recognition software, data fusion centers, and more, all to more “efficiently” categorize and control human beings and their movement.
These technologies rarely capture widespread public attention or outrage, but they are quietly remaking our world, scaling up colonial efforts of times past to divide desirables from undesirables, rich from poor, expat from migrant, and citizen from undocumented. The essays and case studies in Resisting Borders and Technologies of Violence shed light on this new threat, offering analyses of how the high-tech system of borders developed and inspiring stories of resistance to it.
The organizers, journalists, and scholars in these pages are charting a new path forward, employing creative tools to subvert the status quo, organize globally against high-tech border imperialism, and help us imagine a world without borders.

One Book South Dakota Common Read, South Dakota Humanities Council, 2022
PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, PEN America, 2020
One Book One Tribe Book Award, First Nations Development Institute, 2020
Finalist, Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize, 2019
Shortlist, Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize, 2019

Our History Is the Future is at once a work of history, a personal story, and a manifesto. 
Now available in paperback on the fifth anniversary of its original publication, Our History Is the Future features a new afterword by Nick Estes about the rising indigenous campaigns to protect our environment from extractive industries and to shape new ways of relating to one another and the world.
In this award-winning book, Estes traces traditions of Indigenous resistance leading to the present campaigns against fossil fuel pipelines, such as the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, from the days of the Missouri River trading forts through the Indian Wars, the Pick-Sloan dams, the American Indian Movement, and the campaign for Indigenous rights at the United Nations.
In 2016, a small protest encampment at the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota, initially established to block construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline, grew to be the largest Indigenous protest movement in the twenty-first century, attracting tens of thousands of Indigenous and non-Native allies from around the world. Its slogan “Mni Wiconi”—Water Is Life—was about more than just a pipeline. Water Protectors knew this battle for Native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even with the encampment gone, their anti-colonial struggle would continue.
While a historian by trade, Estes draws on observations from the encampments and from growing up as a citizen of the Oceti Sakowin (the Nation of the Seven Council Fires) and his own family’s rich history of struggle.

As the rivalry between the US and China enters a dangerous new phase, reaffirming the politics of anti-imperialism is a task more important than ever.
From trade wars and pandemic politics to rioting workers, intercontinental balloons, and battles over TikTok, the US media tends to present contemporary China—when it’s discussed at all—in sensationalist terms. This portrayal has only intensified as China’s relationship with the United States has grown increasingly hostile. Whether in the form of overtly racist rhetoric and aggressive trade actions, or the more buttoned down but equally antagonistic efforts to oppose Chinese interests abroad, the US has made clear that it has no interest in giving up its position as global hegemon. This seemingly endless cycle of nationalism, jingoism, and reactionary politics on both sides of the Pacific suggests a downward spiral that could plausibly result in catastrophic military confrontation.
Against Imperialism forcefully makes the case that workers and socially marginalized people in both the US and China must oppose our rulers’ claims that they have our best interests in mind as they ratchet up their rivalry. Rather, if we’re to avert nuclear calamity, we must oppose imperialism in all its forms, and regardless of its source and rhetoric.
Through snapshots of China’s growing social movements—from its labor struggles to feminist campaigns, and more—Lin, Liu, Friedman, and Smith provide some of the building blocks we’ll need to construct a movement that centers international solidarity across borders.

The story of the fight against fascism across the African diaspora, revealing that Black antifascism has always been vital to global freedom struggles.
At once a history for understanding fascism and a handbook for organizing against, The Black Antifascist Tradition is an essential book for understanding our present moment and the challenges ahead.
From London to the Caribbean, from Ethiopia to Harlem, from Black Lives Matter to abolition, Black radicals and writers have long understood fascism as a threat to the survival of Black people around the world—and to everyone.
In The Black Antifascist Tradition, scholar-activists Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill Mullen show how generations of Black activists and intellectuals—from Ida B. Wells in the fight against lynching, to Angela Y. Davis in the fight against the prison-industrial complex—have stood within a tradition of Black Antifascism. 
As Davis once observed, pointing to the importance of anti-Black racism in the development of facism as an ideology, Black people have been “the first and most deeply injured victims of fascism.” Indeed, the experience of living under and resisting racial capitalism has often made Black radicals aware of the potential for fascism to take hold long before others understood this danger.
The book explores the powerful ideas and activism of Paul Robeson, Mary McLeod Bethune, Claudia Jones, W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, and Walter Rodney, as well as that of the Civil Rights Congress, the Black Liberation Army, and the We Charge Genocide movement, among others.
In shining a light on fascism and anti-Blackness, Hope and Mullen argue, the writers and organizers featured in this book have also developed urgent tools and strategies for overcoming it.

From the critically acclaimed author of HoodWitch, Faylita Hicks’s second collection explores the question, Where do our desires take us?
An offspring of Audre Lorde’s seminal essay “Uses of the Erotic,” Hicks’s A Map of My Want follows a nonbinary femme as they explore the sensual intersection of the personal and the political, a crossroads to which their sexual liberation brought them after their escape from a religious cult. Lyrically, Hicks interprets the US Declaration of Independence's infamous “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for themselves. Combining storytelling with Western astrology, this poetry collection is an intimate erotic spell through which Hicks conjures joy as they develop an alternate theory on how to attain happiness—through ecstatic healing.

A critical anthology exploring the debates, conundrums, and promising practices around abolition and social work in academia and within impacted communities.

Within social work—a profession that has been intimately tied to and often complicit in the building and sustaining of the carceral state—abolitionist thinking, movement-building, and radical praxis are shifting the field. Critical scholarship and organizing have helped to name and examine the realities of carceral social work as a form of “soft policing.” For radical social work, abolition moves beyond critique to the politics of possibility.

Featuring a foreword by Mariame Kaba, Abolition and Social Work offers an orientation to abolitionist theory for social workers and explores the tensions and paradoxes in realizing abolitionist practice in social work—a necessary intervention in contemporary discourse regarding carceral social work, and a compass for recentering this work through the lens of abolition, transformative justice, and collective care.

“Those who build walls are their own prisoners. I am going to go fulfill my proper function in the social organism. I’m going to go unbuild walls.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Drawing from over twenty years of activism on local and national levels, this striking book offers an organizer’s perspective on the intersections of immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition.
In the wake of post-9/11 xenophobia, Obama’s record-level deportations, Trump’s immigration policies, and the 2020 uprisings for racial justice, the US remains entrenched in a circular discourse regarding migrant justice. As organizer Silky Shah argues in Unbuild Walls, we must move beyond building nicer cages or advocating for comprehensive immigration reform. Our only hope for creating a liberated society for all, she insists, is abolition.
Unbuild Walls dives into US immigration policy and its relationship to mass incarceration, from the last forty years up to the present, showing how the prison-industrial complex and immigration enforcement are intertwined systems of repression. Incorporating historical and legal analyses, Shah’s personal experience as an organizer, as well as stories of people, campaigns, organizations, and localities that have resisted detention and deportation, Shah assesses the movement’s strategies, challenges, successes, and shortcomings. Featuring a foreword by Amna A. Akbar, Unbuild Walls is an expansive and radical intervention, bridging the gaps between movements for immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition.

A collection of illuminating interviews with leading abolitionist organizers and thinkers, reflecting on the uprisings of summer 2020, the rise of #defund, and the work ahead of bridging the divide between reform and abolition. 
The 2020 uprisings against police violence launched a nation conversation about defunding the police and prisons, propelling the #defund movement into the spotlight. The backlash has been swift, beating back efforts to reallocate public funds away from police and other punitive carceral systems and into social welfare programs that provide care, stability, and community. 
But as Calvin John Smiley reveals through pointed conversations with academics, activists, and system-impacted individuals, #defund was always more than a brief moment; it is part of an ongoing struggle against white supremacy, capitalism, police state-sanctioned violence, and mass incarceration.
Through interviews with Marisol LeBrón, Dan Berger, Zellie Imani, and Olayemi Olurin, among others, Smiley considers how #defund can bridge the divide between reform and abolition, becoming a catalyst to help organizers realize abolitionist visions. Along the way, these rich conversations illuminate the long histories of systems of repression and protests against them; how policing serves as a colonial project in Puerto Rico and beyond; why creativity and music-making are essential to movement-building; and much more. 
Giving voice to those committed to abolitionist praxis, Defund is an essential tool for organizers as we imagine how defund goes from a hashtag to a movement to a reality. 

A beautiful anthology featuring some of the brightest voices in contemporary American poetry who challenge, expand, and illuminate the meaning of the label “Asian American and Pacific Islander” in today’s world.

In this thoughtfully curated, intergenerational collection, poets of multiple languages, lands, and waters write against and through the contested terrain of AAPI identity. Too often, Pacific Islanders and Asian Americans are squeezed into the same story. The poets gathered here, and the lineages they represent, exceed this sameness. May this anthology uplift complexities and incite transformation and joy.

Contributors include Marilyn Chin, Joshua Nguyen, Teresia Teaiwa, Haunani-Kay Trask, and many more writers, both established and emerging.

From the organizers of the Palestine Festival of Literature, this anthology of essays connects Palestinian resistance with global freedom struggles against settler colonialism and calls on us to think more concretely about the practice of solidarity.
The Palestine Festival of Literature, or PalFest, was created in 2008 as “a cultural initiative committed to the creation of language and ideas for combating colonialism in the 21st century.” The annual festival brings authors from around the world to convene with readers, artists, writers, and activists in cities across Palestine for cross-pollination of radical art, ideas, and literature.
These efforts resulted in Beyond Frontiers, an anthology thoughtfully arranged and introduced by PalFest cocurator Mahdi Sabbagh. Contributors include writers and scholars such as Tareq Baconi and Dina Omar, architect Mabel O. Wilson, and filmmaker Omar Robert Hamilton, among others, each bringing their diverse intellectual and geographic backgrounds to the forefront. Each piece grapples with the questions: How do we confront the need to take inevitable and often difficult political stances? How do we make sense of the destruction, uprooting, and pain that we witness? And given our seemingly impossible reality, how is mutuality constructed?

An incisive, lyrical, and deeply reported account of India’s descent into authoritarianism.
Traveling across India, interviewing Hindu zealots, armed insurgents, jailed dissidents, and politicians and thinkers from across the political spectrum, Siddhartha Deb reveals a country in which forces old and new have aligned to endanger democracy. The result is an absorbing—and disturbing—portrait. India has become a religious fundamentalist dystopia, one depicted here with a novelist’s precise language and eye for detail.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party—a formation explicitly drawing on European fascism—has deftly exploited modern technologies, the media, and market forces to launch a relentless campaign on minorities, women, dissenters, and the poor. Deb profiles these people, as well as those fighting back, including writers, scholars, and journalists. Twilight Prisoners sounds the alarm now that the world’s largest democracy is under threat in ways that echo the fissures in the United States, United Kingdom, and so-called democracies the world over.

An eye-opening account of the Great Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, showing how the strike—and the violent backlash that ensued—reveal the genesis of modern policing.
In the early years of the twentieth century, in the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, nearly 150,000 miners took part in one of the most critical events in the history of US labor organizing. The brutal response by the state of Pennsylvania—as well as the federal government—inaugurated the structure and power of policing that we know today.
In this gripping account of the Great Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902, scholar and activist David Correia takes readers through the story of the United Mine Workers of America, their struggle against systems of private policing—which were present in practically every industry in the US—and the development of public, professionalized, state-sanctioned, and state-serving police.
The demands of their strike included shorter work days, higher wages, and safer conditions in the deadly mines. However, their labor was crucial to westward expansion, colonial occupations in the Caribbean and the Philippines, and many burgeoning industries in the US. To keep the fires of capitalism burning, industrialists prodded state and federal governments to intervene. Together, they established the first uniformed police force of its kind—a model soon emulated in other states.

Appalachia has been a place of movement and migration—for individuals, families, and entire communities—for centuries.
Beginning Again brings together twelve narratives of refugees, migrants, and generations-long residents that explore complex journeys of resettlement. In their stories, Appalachia—despite how it’s popularly portrayed—is not simply a region of poverty and strife populated only by white people. It is a diverse place where belonging and connection are created despite displacement, resource extraction, and inequality. 

Among the narratives included:

Hear from Claudine Katete, a Rwandan asylum seeker raised in refugee camps who graduated college into the chaos of COVID-19. Follow Amal as she and her family fled war-ravaged Syria and navigated mice-infested housing and unresponsive case workers. Listen to Mekyah Davis, born and raised in Big Stone Gap, as he describes the “slow burn” of everyday racism and his efforts to organize Black Appalachian youth to stay in their communities. Taken together, their stories and more collected here present a nuanced look at life in contemporary Appalachia.

From one of the most imaginative and radical voices in contemporary poetry, a debut collection of fierce tenderness, political acuity, and powerful lyricism.
Tarik Dobbs’s work explores surveillance, queerness, disability, race, and working-class identity in post-9/11 America. As an Arab American writer, Dobbs is achingly familiar with the power dynamics, violence, and capitalistic undercurrents woven through the language of the colonizer. They challenge this power in visual, free-verse, and formally intense poems—both traditional and innovative—that stretch the elasticity of borders, verbs, images, redactions, and more. Ranging from sonnets to concrete poems, Nazar Boy is visually stimulating, thought-provoking, emotionally wrenching, and exquisitely crafted.
Dobbs’ poems blur and collapse narrative distances within and between places, from the Levant to Michigan, and break down dichotomies portrayed in Western media: between Arabness and whiteness, intellectualism and the working poor, Muslimness and queerness, disability and desire. By turns irreverent and serenely gentle, Dobbs calls us to speak, to dream, and to imagine beyond those distances so that we might speak, dream, and imagine better versions of ourselves, our relationships to each other, and our places in the world.

A landmark abolitionist primer on migration, sex work, policing, and the “anti-trafficking industry”—and a powerful argument about who is really leading the way toward justice: migrant sex workers themselves.

In this impassioned corrective to decades of misguided, carceral approaches to migration and sex work, long-time organizers Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam deftly expose the harms of criminalization in the name of “anti-trafficking” and lift up migrant sex workers’ organizing in the US, Canada, and elsewhere. In doing so, they make the compelling case that the only effective response to the needs of migrant sex workers must be led by migrants in the sex trade, as they fight for rights, safety, and autonomy.

Gallant and Lam illustrate how this movement is taking aim at the root causes of violence and abuse: the white supremacist securitization of borders, the criminalization of both migration and sex work, the patriarchial devaluation of women’s labor, and forced displacement due to climate disaster, war, and poverty—all fueled by racial capitalism.

An indispensable exploration of the relationship between migration and sex work—and the underlying societal conditions they reflect—Not Your Rescue Project is a thorough indictment of the anti-trafficking industry as an engine of criminalization and state violence, and an instructive account of the emancipatory politics already being practiced by migrant sex workers in their organizing. Throughout, Gallant and Lam place migrant sex workers at the center of struggles against border imperialism, carceral states, and capitalism—dispelling a range of poisonous myths and paving the way for deeper alliances across movements with the shared goal of dismantling and abolishing carceralism in all its forms.

What does the politics of solidarity look like in practice, and how can left-wing organizations grow—in numbers and power—while remaining accountable to the broader movements of which they are a part?

Against enormous odds and in the face of fierce pushback, the Palestine solidarity movement has succeeded in transforming the landscape of American politics. The movement has catapulted Palestine from being an untouchable topic in even liberal political circles to a central rallying cry in grassroots progressive organizing, one that is championed by some of the highest profile and beloved members of Congress.

In the fall and winter of 2023, with the attention of the world focused on Israel’s unprecedented aggression against the people of Gaza, millions across the globe mobilized in solidarity with Palestinians and their struggle for liberation. Jewish progressives in the US played a highly visible role in denouncing Israel’s actions and US complicity in them: leading mobilizations and disruptions from the US Capitol to Grand Central Station.

In this book, two key leaders and former staff of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) —Rebecca Vilkomerson and Rabbi Alissa Wise—focus on the important role of anti-Zionist Jewish organizing within the broader Palestine solidarity movement, reflecting on their decade of leadership of JVP and drawing lessons especially relevant to those organizing from a position of solidarity.

Against the backdrop of rapid and often devastating political developments, they explore how JVP grew larger as the organization shifted to the left and helped to alter the public narrative about Palestinian liberation, while also navigating the tensions of organization-building and creating a space for Judaism liberated from Zionism. Their insights help contextualize the intense suppression of activism for Palestinian freedom, while illuminating the roots of today’s flourishing Jewish solidarity with Palestinians worldwide.

In addressing their shortcomings and failures no less than their inspiring successes, Vilkomerson and Wise deliver an account of JVP’s organizing during the 2010s that offers crucial strategic lessons for anyone engaging in the collective work of building organizations and fighting for justice as our movements evolve over time.

An incisive guide to abolitionist strategy, and a love letter to the movement that made this moment possible.

Critics of abolition sometimes castigate the movement for its utopianism, but in How to Abolish Prisons, long-time organizers Rachel Herzing and Justin Piché reveal a movement that has made the struggle for abolition as real as the institutions they are fighting against.
Drawing on extensive interviews with abolitionist crews all over North America, Herzing and Piché provide a collective reconstruction of what the grassroots movement to abolish prisons actually is, what initiatives it has launched, how it organizes itself, and how its protagonists build the day-to-day practice of politics. Readers sit in on the Winnipeg rideshares of Bar None and the meetings of the Chicago Community Bail Fund as they assess the utility of politicized mutual aid. They follow the campaigns and coalitions of Critical Resistance in Oakland and San Francisco and Survived and Punished in New York City, and learn about the prisoner correspondence projects that keep activists behind bars and outside them in constant coordination.
Abolitionist campaigns are constructing on-the-ground initiatives across North America to deconstruct carceral society and build resistant communities.Through the words, deeds, and personalities of this beautifully peopled movement, How to Abolish Prisons emerges as a stunning snapshot of a movement’s thinking in motion.

Economist Rob Larson combines wit, righteous anger, and clear-eyed analysis as he dissects the lifestyle, moral bankruptcy, and stupidly large sums of money hoarded by the disgustingly wealthy.

The fact that we live in one of the most unequal societies in the history of the world is becoming common knowledge. And while lists of “richest people in x country” may be easy to come by, how much do we really know about the billionaires who sit atop our global economic system? Who are they, really? How did they accumulate their ill-gotten gains? And what kind of depravities do they use to maintain their positions?

Turning their own weapons of class-war against them—from the fawning profiles found in the Mansion section of the Wall Street Journal to the national income data buried in white papers meant solely for investors and technocrats—Larson crunches the numbers so you don’t have to.  But he doesn’t stop there, because appreciating the sheer scale of the global wealth gap doesn’t even touch on all the ways the ruling class are making us miserable, breaking our society to pieces, and destroying the planet in their pursuit of ever-increasing power and profit. As we behold whole continents on fire, pandemics thrashing public health systems to smithereens, and declining lifespans for the vast majority, Larson argues that the only way forward is to yank on the emergency break and give capitalism the boot.

A landmark abolitionist primer on migration, sex work, policing, and the “anti-trafficking industry”—and a powerful argument about who is really leading the way toward justice: migrant sex workers themselves.

In this impassioned corrective to decades of misguided, carceral approaches to migration and sex work, long-time organizers Chanelle Gallant and Elene Lam deftly expose the harms of criminalization in the name of “anti-trafficking” and lift up migrant sex workers’ organizing in the US, Canada, and elsewhere. In doing so, they make the compelling case that the only effective response to the needs of migrant sex workers must be led by migrants in the sex trade, as they fight for rights, safety, and autonomy.

Gallant and Lam illustrate how this movement is taking aim at the root causes of violence and abuse: the white supremacist securitization of borders, the criminalization of both migration and sex work, the patriarchial devaluation of women’s labor, and forced displacement due to climate disaster, war, and poverty—all fueled by racial capitalism.

An indispensable exploration of the relationship between migration and sex work—and the underlying societal conditions they reflect—Not Your Rescue Project is a thorough indictment of the anti-trafficking industry as an engine of criminalization and state violence, and an instructive account of the emancipatory politics already being practiced by migrant sex workers in their organizing. Throughout, Gallant and Lam place migrant sex workers at the center of struggles against border imperialism, carceral states, and capitalism—dispelling a range of poisonous myths and paving the way for deeper alliances across movements with the shared goal of dismantling and abolishing carceralism in all its forms.

Equal opportunity is a widely shared ideal. As Joe Biden put it in his first executive order as president, “equal opportunity is the bedrock of American democracy.”

But is equal opportunity enough? Does it truly capture the meaning of equality? In a neoliberal age that prizes personal responsibility and individual merit, the ideal has been increasingly called into question. Taking equality seriously, critics argue, means aiming to ensure that we all live equally flourishing lives—not merely that we have equal shots at upward mobility. That means rethinking a range of social institutions, from education and land ownership to finance and neighborhood development. Featuring work by philosophers and economists, historians and sociologists, this issue explores the importance of outcomes, not just opportunities.

Aim High, Little Giant, Aim High! is a story about Taína, a nine-year-old Afro Boricua basketball player growing up in Brooklyn during a pandemic who learns valuable life lessons from family, friends, and the community, both on and off the court.

"Peeeace!" That’s how Taina opens this book, and that’s how we get a tour of Brooklyn: through Taina’s eyes! There’s the biddy court where Papa is doing a b-ball clinic, and where Taina is joined by friends Theophilus, Ireyna, Mamushi and Ibrahim. Then there are the legendary parks of Brooklyn—Bed Stuy to Brownsville to Tillary Park—and all the legendary players, the folklore of NYC playground basketball culture. At home and on the court, Taina learns math and stories through the city and basketball.

"Pa’lante, siempre pa’lante!" Mama says this is what the Young Lords Party used to shout for social justice. Taina’s mother says it means "forward, always forward!" and that’s where Taina is going, forward in life!

Aim High, Little Giant, Aim High! features:

A meditation on freedom-making in the academy for women scholars of color.

Weaving personal narrative with political analysis, Community as Rebellion offers a meditation on creating liberatory spaces for students and faculty of color within academia.  Much like other women scholars of color, Lorgia García Peña has struggled against the colonizing, racializing, classist, and unequal structures that perpetuate systemic violence within universities. Through personal experiences and analytical reflections, the author invites readers—in particular Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian women—to engage in liberatory practices of boycott, abolition, and radical community-building to combat the academic world’s tokenizing and exploitative structures.

García Peña argues that the classroom is key to freedom-making in the university, urging teachers to consider activism and social justice as central to what she calls “teaching in freedom”: a progressive form of collective learning that prioritizes the subjugated knowledge, silenced histories, and epistemologies from the Global South and Indigenous, Black, and brown communities. By teaching in and for freedom, we not only acknowledge the harm that the university has inflicted on our persons and our ways of knowing since its inception, but also create alternative ways to be, create, live, and succeed through our work.

A collection of compelling, hard-hitting first-person essays, poems, and photos that expose what our punitive social systems do to so many Americans.

Going for Broke, edited by Alissa Quart, Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and David Wallis, former Managing Director of EHRP, gives voice to a range of gifted writers for whom "economic precarity" is more than just another assignment. All illustrate what the late Barbara Ehrenreich, who conceived of EHRP, once described as "the real face of journalism today: not million dollar-a-year anchorpersons, but low-wage workers and downwardly spiraling professionals."

One essayist and grocery store worker describes what it is like to be an “essential worker” during the pandemic; another reporter and military veteran details his experience with homelessness and what would have actually helped him at the time. These dozens of fierce and sometimes darkly funny pieces reflect the larger systems that have made writers' bodily experiences, family and home lives, and work far harder than they ought to be.

Featuring introductions by luminaries including Michelle Tea, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Astra Taylor, Going for Broke is revelatory. It shows us the costs of income inequality to our bodies and our minds—and demonstrates real ways to change our conditions.

Transitions: Methods, Theory, Politics focuses on the political discourse about both the pattern and the desirability of economic development, and how/why historical interpretations of social phenomena connected to this systemic process can alter. It is a trajectory pursued here with reference to the materialism of Marxism, via mid-nineteenth century ideas about race, through the development decade, the 'cultural turn', debates about modes of production and their respective labour regimes, culminating in the role played by immigration before and after the Brexit referendum.

Brass also turns his attention to trajectory followed by travel writing, unearthing the way that many of its core assumptions overlap with those made in the social sciences and development studies. The object is to account for the way concepts informing these trajectories do or do not alter.

According to Matteo Battistini, The 'middle class' has become a fetish forged by the social sciences to legitimize American capitalism. In this invaluable monograph, Battistini traces the intellectual history of the middle class, and offers a social history of the political concept, whose specific scientific content has acquired an ideological centrality in the U.S. that has no equal in European history. Middle Class argues that the social sciences have freed the middle class from its historical relationship with work in an attempt to emancipate it from the tension into which it was continually dragged by class conflict. In the process, the social sciences overtun the image of opposing forces of labour and capital, replacing it with an image of a consensual order whereby capitalism and democracy can coexist without tensions.

Originally published as Storia di un feticcio. La classe media americana dalle origini alla globalizzazione, by Mimesis, Milan, Italy, 2020.

Prepared by an international team of authors representing leading universities from different parts of the world, this expansive volume elucidates various aspects of the theory of noonomy, developed by Professor S. Bodrunov. A positive assessment is given to the key provisions of this theory (the transition to knowledge-intensive production, the gradual socialisation of economy, the diffusion of property, the progress of solidarity relations, the removal of simulative needs and the progress of a culture). Significant attention is also paid to the global context of ongoing technological and socio-economic transformations, undergirding a political, economic and philosophical understanding of the theory of noonomy.

The contributors to the volume are Sergey Glazyev, James Kenneth Galbraith, Oleg Smolin, Enfu Cheng, Siyang Gao, Alan Freeman, Andrey Kolganov, Jesús Pastor García Brigos, Anatoly Porokhovsky, Radhika Desai and Leo Gabriel.

In National (un)Belonging: Bengali American Women on Imagining and Contesting Culture and Identity, Roksana Badruddoja focuses on the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, citizenship, and nationalism among contemporary "second-generation" Bengali American women. Badruddoja engages in a yearlong feminist ethnographic study with a nationwide sample of 25 women in the U.S. to poignantly explore perceptions about daily social and cultural practices.

Exploring the conceptual and theoretical perspectives of the social, economic, cultural, aesthetic, and political dimensions of transnational migrations, Badruddoja interrogates assimilation to depict the messy nature of diasporic movement and the resulting complexities of diasporic identities. Badruddoja demonstrates racialized identities are often part of a constellation of loyalties that are multiple, contradictory, constantly shifting, and overlapping.

Global Marx coheres a collective assessment of Marx's account of capital's domination, through his critique of disciplinary languages, investigation of political structures and analysis of specific political spaces within the world market. His discourse appears here as global not only because global is the geography of the world market but also because Marx redefined the relationships between the spaces on which capital exerts its command. Global Marx proves that Marx's texts do not identify any global working class, nor a centre of power to be conquered, but show that – within and against the world market – there is a social movement that is irreducible to any identity or to a single space from whose perspective one can write a universal history of class struggle.

Contributors are: Luca Basso, Michele Basso, Matteo Battistini, Eleonora Cappuccilli, Michele Cento, Luca Cobbe, Isabella Consolati, Niccolò Cuppini, Roberta Ferrari, Michele Filippini, Giorgio Grappi, Maurizio Merlo, Mario Piccinini, Fabio Raimondi, Maurizio Ricciardi, Paola Rudan, and Federico Tomasello.

Contending Global Apartheid: Transversal Solidarities and Politics of Possibility spells out a plea for utopia in a crisis-ridden 21st century of unequal development, exclusionary citizenship, and forced migrations. The volume offers a collection of critical essays on human rights movements, sanctuary spaces, and the emplacement of antiracist conviviality in cities across North and South America, Europe, and Africa. Each intervention proceeds from the idea that cities may accommodate both a humanistic sensibility and a radical potential for social transformation. The figure of the 'migrant' is pivotal. It expounds the prospect of transversal solidarity to capture a plurality of commonalities and to abjure dichotomies between in-group and out-group, the national and the international, or society and institutions.

In Crisis, Inequalities and Poverty, Schettino and Clementi provide an empirical and theoretical analysis of the economic breakdown that has characterised the last two decades of capitalist development—from the Lehman collapse to the Covid-19 pandemic—with a particular focus on the impact on poverty and inequality. The book provides a materialist account of the current global crisis of overproduction and looks at the link between capitalist crisis and systemic inequity, making the case through detailed quantification that the principal engine of these structural phenomena is in fact the general law of accumulation of the capitalist mode of production.

This important book critically engages with the dynamics of caste in the politics of West Bengal, which unlike other parts of India has remained relatively free from large scale caste-based political mobilisation. The insignificance of caste in West Bengal politics has remained an enigma. Despite a growing interest in the politics of caste in West Bengal in recent years, in part due to the end of the world’s longest serving democratically elected Communist government (1977-2011) – which put forward a class centric non-identitarian politics, the Caste question in West Bengal politics has remained under-researched. In this context, scholar Ayan Guha explores the reasons for the relative insignificance of caste in post-colonial West Bengal’s politics and also assesses the future possibilities of caste-based identity politics in the state.

Noam Chomsky dissects the multiple crises facing humankind and the planet; and provides a road map for resistance.

In this completely original set of interviews between the legendary duo of Noam Chomsky and David Barsamian, the two confront topics such as the pandemic, the wealth gap (made worse because of the pandemic), climate destruction, the increasing power of the corporate owned media, systematic racism,  Big Tech, and more. 

Noam Chomsky is one of the most cited scholars in human history. He ranks right up there with Aristotle and Marx, and this book reaffirms his esteemed reputation. Notes on Resistance will inspire all those struggling for human liberation.

What does a just world look like? This volume begins with a planet beset by accumulating crises—environmental, social, and political—and imagines how we can move beyond them.

Drawing on the legacy of post-colonial struggles for liberation, Imagining Global Futures explores a range of radical visions for a world after neoliberalism and empire. Centered on movements in the Global South, the collection challenges dominant patterns of social and political life and sketches more just and sustainable futures we might build in their place. How can we build a world where people are both freer and more equal? An urgent resource for collective imagination, Imagining Global Futures counterposes thick visions of a better world to our dystopian present.

On Solidarity clarifies a key idea in struggles for a more just world. What does solidarity mean, and how can diverse movements build enough of it to change society?

Organizer and political theorist Mie Inouye leads a forum on obstacles to collective actiontoday. Rejecting the language of “allyship” and the politics of deference, she makes the case for maintaining solidarity through conflict in durable institutions over time, none of which is possible without the hard work of good organizing. With responses from activists and theorists—from Astra Taylor and Sarah Schulman to Charisse Burden-Stelly, Jodi Dean, and Juliet Hooker—the forum helps us think about what solidarity is and what it requires.

Also in this volume, Simon Torracinta shows how a universal basic income can pave the way toa more solidaristic society, Judith Levine considers how films have portrayed solidarity among women in the face of abortion restrictions, Gaiutra Bahadur suggests terrain for Black-Asian solidarities, and Mariame Kaba, Kelly Hayes, and Dan Berger offer key lessons from the world of organizing.

April 4, 2018, marked the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s death. This collection grapples with his enduring legacy. Though he is widely celebrated as a national hero—martyr to an inspiring dream about our country’s largest possibilities—many younger Americans now greet his name with suspicion, viewing him as an essentially conservative figure. These essays offer critical engagement in place of canonization, recovering—and scrutinizing—the profoundly radical nature of King’s political, moral, and religious thought.

Efforts to green the economy and distribute wealth more equitably often sound like a program for joyless lives: make do with less and give up your pleasures. To philosopher Kate Soper, this gets it all wrong. Leading this issue’s forum, she urges that we see “post-growth living” as an opportunity for greater pleasure, not less. A simpler life of “alternative hedonism”—built around local community and abun­dant free time—could make us happier and healthier while giving our overextended planet a new lease on life. Forum respondents, including Green New Deal economist Robert Pollin and Kenyan activist Nanjala Nyabola, embrace Soper’s call to remake society but question her prescription. The result is a wide-ranging debate about the limitations of lifestyle critique, the value of economic growth, and the kinds of alternatives that are possible.

Other contributions focus on the connections between pleasure and gender, including the joys of collective action and care work, the ordinary pleasures of Black motherhood, the misogyny of Pos­itive Psychology, and the links between good sex and democracy. Together they imagine what it will take to make a pleasurable life possible for everyone.

Despite decades of activism and scientific consensus about the perils of climate change, our economies remain deeply dependent on fossil fuels. How are we to meet the challenge of global warming before it is too late? Climate Action asks what we must do to begin realizing a green future today.
Leading off a forum, Charles Sabel and David G. Victor argue that global climate change diplomacy—from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the 2015 Paris Agreement—has monopolized policy thinking but failed to deliver significant results. Instead, the authors suggest we must embrace what they call “experimentalist governance.” Taking inspiration from the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey as well as from the Montreal Protocol’s successful approach to another environmental crisis—ozone depletion—they contend that deep decarbonization of the economy can only be achieved by integrating bottom-up, local experimentation and top-down, global cooperation.
Respondents consider how that program might work in practice, where it fits alongside plans for a Green New Deal, and what political forces climate action must reckon with. Other contributors explore the limitations of carbon pricing, the prospects of recent corporate commitments to rein in emissions, and the nature of life on a polluted and overheated planet. Together they sketch an urgent vision for climate action—now.

How can the speculative imagination help us build a better world?

At a world-historical moment of global upheaval, speculative writing is enjoying a renaissance. This collection of poetry, stories, and essays engages speculation as both a ubiquitous feature of financial capitalism and a radical tool of collective imagination. By rejecting dominant ideas about what is possible, speculation empowers us to plot new paths to a more just world.

Creative works range over violence and healing, memory and erasure, and alternative worlds, while essays span the meaning of land and community in the African diaspora, Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction, and the ethics of the far future. Taken together, these works suggest that speculation is ultimately about our relationships with each other—as one contributor puts it, “what they have been, what they are, and most important, what they could be.”

We bear deep wounds, individually and collectively. All have been worsened by a period of destructive politics that left us ill-equipped to respond to a global health catastrophe. As we struggle to recover our footing and grieve our dead, we believe that the arts must have a voice in the conversation about how we heal.

This anthology draws together a wide range of artists and thinkers, established and emerging. In essays, memoir, poetry, fiction, and comics, contributors explore what it might look like to repair. Topics include the Salem witch trials, climate catastrophe, the January 6 siege of the Capitol, gender identity, the failures (and hope) of Western medicine, and the entwined horrors of racial, sexual, and colonial violence.

No single text in this volume offers a definitive answer for what it means to repair. But together, they reveal a promising vision for where to go from here.

What might happen if a woman’s right to vote is seen as coequal with her right to be elected?

Why are other countries so much better than the United States at electing women to office? In her lead essay in this anthology, Jennifer Piscopo argues that women in the United States haven’t fought for the right to be elected. A comparative political scientist, she shows that suffrage movements around the world often focused not only on the right to vote, but also the right to stand for office. As a result, when these movements succeeded, they saw the right to be elected as a positive right, enabling nationwide-efforts to both encourage and actively recruit female candidates. In her exploration of positive and negative rights in the United States, Piscopo explores what might happen if a woman’s right to vote is seen as coequal with her right to be elected, considering, among other things, how our definitions of representational government could both change and restore public trust in democracy.

It is rare now for people to stay where they were raised, and when we encounter one another—whether in person or, increasingly, online—it is usually in contexts that obscure if not outright hide details about our past. But even in moments of pure self-invention, we are always shaped by the past. In Ancestors, some of today’s most imaginative writers consider what it means to be made and fashioned by others. Are we shaped by grandparents, family, the deep past, political forebears, inherited social and economic circumstances? Can we choose our family, or is blood always thicker? And looking forward, what will it mean to be ancestors ourselves, and how will our descendants remember us?

As automation and the decline of manufacturing fuel fears of a coming age of mass unemployment, basic income—a government cash grant given unconditionally to all—has won wide support across the ideological spectrum, from Silicon Valley to labor. This issue asks what to make of such strange bedfellows. Some extol basic income’s merits, not only as a salve for financial precarity, but as a path toward racial justice and equality. Others caution that we must not forget to fight for the power of workers and the quality of work. Together these voices offer a nuanced debate about what it takes to tackle inequality and what kind of future we should aim to create.

Known around the world for challenging mainstream economics, economist Mariana Mazzucato believes, as the Financial Times writes, that “the public sector can and should be a cocreator of wealth that actively steers growth to meet its goals.” In Public Purpose: Industrial Policy’s Comeback and Government’s Role in Shared Prosperity, she calls on governments to create the economies we need today.

Mazzucato’s challenge leads off a debate on the revival of industrial policy—roughly defined as deliberate government action to shape the economy. Industrial policy has fallen out of favor in recent decades as economists defer to free markets to produce innovation and growth. Yet today, thinkers across the political spectrum have begun expressing new interest in industrial policy as a way to address the most serious problems of our times: from national security and climate change, to the market’s underfunding of public goods, to sluggish economic growth and labor market dysfunction.

Public Purpose makes a compelling case for industrial policy—what it is, and why we need it now. Addressing investment, innovation, supply chains, and growth, it provides a robust vision of a renewed industrial policy, and what it can offer the US economy in the face of climate change and a global pandemic.

A conservative Supreme Court is poised to roll back many progressive achievements, from affirmative action to abortion. In the forum that opens Rethinking Law, legal scholars Joseph Fishkin and William E. Forbath argue that the left must stop thinking of the law as separate from politics. Instead, we must recover a lost progressive vision, a “democracy of opportunity,” that sees the public—not the judiciary—as the ultimate arbiter of what the Constitution means.

Offering a nuanced picture of the relationship between law and politics, other essays in Rethinking Law further explore the meaning of law beyond the Constitution and the courts. They look to social movements, including civil rights and LGBTQ rights, for lessons about social transformation. While contributors debate the limits of law in a vastly unequal society, they agree that it remains an essential resource for building a more just world.

How do we know who is on our side? Is it possible for someone who is not like us to share our same hopes? Can links forged by empathy or mutual interest match those created by shared experience? What can we gain from alliances that we cannot achieve on our own?

These are difficult questions to answer even in intimate settings, and more so in arenas of cultural and political struggle. Through original poetry, fiction, and cultural criticism from renowned writers and newcomers, Allies will offer indispensable insights into issues of trust, bridge-building, difference, and betrayal. Drawing on the prophetic power of the imagination to conjure both the possible dangers and life-giving possibilities of alliances—be they political, private (such as marriage), therapeutic, or even aesthetic (between readers and writers, for example)—Allies will be indispensable reading for our times.

Walter Johnson, Harvard historian and author of the acclaimed River of Dark Dreams, urges us to embrace a vision of justice attentive to the history of slavery—not through the lens of human rights, but instead through an honest accounting of how slavery was the foundation of capitalism, a legacy that continues to afflict people of color and the poor. Inspired by Cedric J. Robinson’s work on racial capitalism, as well as Black Lives Matter and its forebears—including the black radical tradition, the Black Panthers, South African anti-apartheid struggles, and organized labor—contributors to this volume offer a critical handbook to racial justice in the age of Trump.

Racist Logic tackles how racist thinking can be found in surprising—and often overlooked—places. In the forum’s lead essay, historian Donna Murch traces the origins of the opioid epidemic to Big Pharma’s aggressive marketing to white suburbanites. The result, Murch shows, has been to construct a legal world of white drug addiction alongside an illicit drug war that has disproportionately targeted people of color.

Other essays examine how the global surrogacy industry incentivizes the reproduction of whiteness while relying on the exploited labor of women of color, how black masculinity is commodified in racial capitalism, and how Wall Street exploited Caribbean populations to bankroll U.S. imperialism.

Racist logic, this issue shows, continues to pervade our society, including its nominally colorblind business practices. Contributors not only explore the institutional structures that profit from black suffering, but also point the way to racial justice.

What can technology do for feminism?

Almost fifty years ago, Shulamith Firestone imagined it could liberate women from the work of reproduction—so long as it was conceived as part of a cultural revolution. This collection casts a critical eye on the promises and the perils, asking not just whether an emancipatory feminism is possible today, but also what it might look like.

Nearly two years into a global pandemic, uncertainty has profoundly unsettled both our personal and political lives. Some of its sources are epistemic: How long will vaccine immunity last? Do rising prices threaten economic recovery? Others are sharply existential: How will I pay rent next month? Will I see my loved one again? At no other moment in the twenty-first century has there been such widespread unease about what the future holds.

Uncertainty is perhaps never more consequential than where it intersects with political power. Leading this issue’s forum, Sheila Jasanoff, pioneering scholar of science and technology studies, argues that public policy could benefit from a much more serious acknowledgment of uncertainty. In place of the hubris of technocratic expertise, Jasanoff calls for “technologies of humility”—institutional mechanisms, including greater citizen participation, for incorporating a wider range of experience and views in our schemes of democratic governance. Respondents to Jasanoff consider other causes of pandemic mismanagement and ask whether humility is the best response.

This collection of new fiction, essays, and interviews—including celebrated authors Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, Maureen McHugh, and Charlie Jane Anders—conjures visions of political, environmental, and gender dystopias. Some stretch the imagination; others feel uncomfortably possible. Such stories look toward the future, but they also offer readers a new perspective on the crises of our time.

In the era of Trump, resurgent populism, catastrophic inequality, and climate change, this collection raises vital questions about political and civic responsibility. If we have, as Junot Díaz says, reached peak dystopia, then Global Dystopias might just be the handbook we need to weather the storm.

In an age of record-breaking superstorms and environmental degradation, this collection of poetry seeks to make sense of how we interact with and are influenced by nature. But the poems in What Nature were not written on Walden Pond. If they are a far cry from last century’s nature poetry, it is because “nature” today is a far cry from sanctuary or retreat.

What do we owe each other as members of a democratic society? Public goods—from clean water to health care to schools—are under siege in the United States, with access too often restricted by class and race. Against this background, Trump’s nearly empty White House symbolizes the crisis we face: our increasing abandonment of the idea of the public. At stake is not only what we owe to each other but who we are.

“Rural spaces,” writes Elizabeth Catte, author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, “are often thought of as places absent of things, from people of color to modern amenities to radical politics. The truth, as usual, is more complicated.”

With activists, historians, and political scientists as guides, Left Elsewhere explores the radical politics of rural America—its past, its priorities, and its moral commitments—that mainstream progressives overlook. This volume shows how these communities are fighting, and winning, some of the left’s biggest battles. From novel health care initiatives in the face of the opioid crisis to living wages for teachers, these struggles do not fall neatly into the “puny language,” as Rev. William Barber says, of Democrat or Republican. Instead they help us rethink the rural–urban opposition at the heart of U.S. politics. The future of the left, this collection argues, could be found elsewhere.

Artificial intelligence will not create superintelligence anytime soon. But it is already making huge advances—revolutionizing medicine and transport, transforming jobs and markets, and reshaping the fabric of social life. At the same time, the promises of AI have been increasingly overshadowed by its perils, from automation and disinformation to powerful new forms of bias and surveillance. Reckoning with these threats to work, democracy, and justice, Redesigning AI asks what can be done to redirect AI for the good of everyone.

Leading off a forum, economist and best-selling author Daron Acemoglu argues that though the challenges are dire, the future is not inevitable. Respondents debate the precise role new technology plays in economic inequality, the wide range of algorithmic harms facing workers and citizens, and other concrete steps that can be taken to ensure a just future for AI. Other contributors explore the impact of new technology in domains from medicine to carework, the nature of skills training in a rapidly changing economy, and the ethical case for not building certain forms of AI in the first place. Together they sketch an urgent vision for redirecting the course of technological change for good.

Economics After Neoliberalism offers a powerful case for a new brand of economics—one focused on power and inequality and aimed at a more inclusive society.

Three prominent economists—Suresh Naidu, Dani Rodrik, and Gabriel Zucman—lead off with a vision “for economic policy that stands as a genuine alternative to market fundamentalism.” Expanding on “the state of creative ferment” they describe, Boston Review has commissioned responses to their essay from economists, philosophers, political scientists, and policymakers across the political spectrum as well as new essays that challenge the current shape of markets and suggest more democratic alternatives.

Anger looms large in our public lives. Should it?

Reflecting on two millennia of debates about the value of anger, Agnes Callard contends that efforts to distinguish righteous forms of anger from unjust vengeance, or appropriate responses to wrongdoing from inappropriate ones, are misguided. What if, she asks, anger is not a bug of human life, but a feature—an emotion that, for all its troubling qualities, is an essential part of being a moral agent in an imperfect world? And if anger is both troubling and essential, what then do we do with the implications: that angry victims of injustice are themselves morally compromised, and that it might not be possible to respond rightly to being treated wrongly? As Callard concludes, “We can’t be good in a bad world.”

The contributions that follow explore anger in its many forms—public and private, personal and political—raising an issue that we must grapple with: Does the vast well of public anger compromise us all?

“All history,” writes Maximillian Alvarez in his contribution to this issue, “is the history of empire—a bid for control of that greatest expanse of territory, the past.” Evil Empire confronts these histories head-on, exploring the motivations, consequences, and surprising resiliency of empire and its narratives.

Contributors grapple with the economic, technological, racial, and rhetorical elements of U.S. power and show how the effects are far-reaching and, in many ways, self-defeating. Drawing on a range of disciplines—from political science to science fiction—our authors approach the theme with imagination and urgency, animated by the desire to strengthen the fight for a better future.

As the rivalry between the US and China enters a dangerous new phase, reaffirming the politics of anti-imperialism is a task more important than ever.
From trade wars and pandemic politics to rioting workers, intercontinental balloons, and battles over TikTok, the US media tends to present contemporary China—when it’s discussed at all—in sensationalist terms. This portrayal has only intensified as China’s relationship with the United States has grown increasingly hostile. Whether in the form of overtly racist rhetoric and aggressive trade actions, or the more buttoned down but equally antagonistic efforts to oppose Chinese interests abroad, the US has made clear that it has no interest in giving up its position as global hegemon. This seemingly endless cycle of nationalism, jingoism, and reactionary politics on both sides of the Pacific suggests a downward spiral that could plausibly result in catastrophic military confrontation.
Against Imperialism forcefully makes the case that workers and socially marginalized people in both the US and China must oppose our rulers’ claims that they have our best interests in mind as they ratchet up their rivalry. Rather, if we’re to avert nuclear calamity, we must oppose imperialism in all its forms, and regardless of its source and rhetoric.
Through snapshots of China’s growing social movements—from its labor struggles to feminist campaigns, and more—Lin, Liu, Friedman, and Smith provide some of the building blocks we’ll need to construct a movement that centers international solidarity across borders.

A collection of illuminating interviews with leading abolitionist organizers and thinkers, reflecting on the uprisings of summer 2020, the rise of #defund, and the work ahead of bridging the divide between reform and abolition. 
The 2020 uprisings against police violence launched a nation conversation about defunding the police and prisons, propelling the #defund movement into the spotlight. The backlash has been swift, beating back efforts to reallocate public funds away from police and other punitive carceral systems and into social welfare programs that provide care, stability, and community. 
But as Calvin John Smiley reveals through pointed conversations with academics, activists, and system-impacted individuals, #defund was always more than a brief moment; it is part of an ongoing struggle against white supremacy, capitalism, police state-sanctioned violence, and mass incarceration.
Through interviews with Marisol LeBrón, Dan Berger, Zellie Imani, and Olayemi Olurin, among others, Smiley considers how #defund can bridge the divide between reform and abolition, becoming a catalyst to help organizers realize abolitionist visions. Along the way, these rich conversations illuminate the long histories of systems of repression and protests against them; how policing serves as a colonial project in Puerto Rico and beyond; why creativity and music-making are essential to movement-building; and much more. 
Giving voice to those committed to abolitionist praxis, Defund is an essential tool for organizers as we imagine how defund goes from a hashtag to a movement to a reality. 

Appalachia has been a place of movement and migration—for individuals, families, and entire communities—for centuries.
Beginning Again brings together twelve narratives of refugees, migrants, and generations-long residents that explore complex journeys of resettlement. In their stories, Appalachia—despite how it’s popularly portrayed—is not simply a region of poverty and strife populated only by white people. It is a diverse place where belonging and connection are created despite displacement, resource extraction, and inequality. 

Among the narratives included:

Hear from Claudine Katete, a Rwandan asylum seeker raised in refugee camps who graduated college into the chaos of COVID-19. Follow Amal as she and her family fled war-ravaged Syria and navigated mice-infested housing and unresponsive case workers. Listen to Mekyah Davis, born and raised in Big Stone Gap, as he describes the “slow burn” of everyday racism and his efforts to organize Black Appalachian youth to stay in their communities. Taken together, their stories and more collected here present a nuanced look at life in contemporary Appalachia.