Haymarket Books

“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests.

But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests.

Táíwò’s crucial intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.

A major anthology that illuminates historical and contemporary solidarities between Black and Asian feminists.

A collaborative project between Black Women Radicals and the Asian American Feminist Collective, We Are Each Other's Liberation envisions a cross-racial and internationalist politics that explicitly addresses solidarity between Black and Asian feminists. Bringing together organizers, artists, journalists, poets, novelists, and more, this collection introduces readers to new ways of understanding and reflecting on race and feminism.

Drawing out lessons from the revolutionary work of movement forebearers—including the Combahee River Collective, Claudia Jones, Grace Lee Boggs, Yuri Kochiyama, and Third World Women’s Alliance as well as struggles today—We Are Each Other’s Liberation offers an urgent call for the just future we might build together.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“Mohammed El-Kurd has written a new Discourse on Colonialism for the twenty-first century.”
—Robin D. G. Kelley

Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.

Palestine is a microcosm of the world: on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured—the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.

Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.

How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple demand: dignity for the Palestinian.

The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Fascism and Genocide is Boston Review’s 50th anniversary issue. This milestone issue features many of our longtime contributors, including Robin D. G. Kelley, Vivian Gornick, and Elaine Scarry, and celebrates classics from our archive.  In this issue, historian and Boston Review contributing editor Robin D. G. Kelley revisits Noam Chomsky’s landmark 1967 essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” published near the height of the Vietnam War. The essay’s dissident injunction—that those in privileged positions have a duty to “speak the truth and expose lies”—remains a powerful call to conscience, Kelley argues, but the anti-fascist and anti-colonial struggles of even earlier decades reveal its limits, and they show how to refuse and resist complicity in our own age of fascism and genocide. Political philosopher Martin O’Neill, Palestinian human rights lawyer Jennifer Zacharia, and historian David Waldstreicher expand on what this moment requires—of intellectuals, of journalists, and of us all.

Also in the issue, Vivian Gornick reviews Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces, Elaine Scarry challenges the wisdom that Plato banished the poets, Brandon M. Terry interviews political scientist Cathy Cohen about social movements and the future of Black politics, Joelle M. Abi-Rached exposes the contradictions of the liberal international order over Gaza, Samuel Hayim Brody reviews three memoirs on the Arab Jewish world destroyed by colonialism, David Austin Walsh explains what Zohran Mamdani’s triumph means for the future of the Democratic Party, and Sandeep Vaheesan looks to the New Deal to assess the “abundance” agenda.

Plus, seven writers reflect on notable essays from our archive in a special anniversary feature:

• Susan Faludi on Vivian Gornick and anti-feminism
• Naomi Klein on William Callison + Quinn Slobodian and the global right
• Jay Caspian Kang on Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and identity politics
• Ryu Spaeth on Merve Emre and the personal essay
• Lea Ypi on Joseph Carens and amnesty
• Nathan J. Robinson on Noam Chomsky and U.S. foreign policy
• Rick Perlstein on Elaine Scarry and democracy after 9/11

A love letter to Palestinian ancestors, their descendants, and their land, to all anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, to a history that will never be forgotten, and to a future in which there thrives a free, free Palestine.

Poetry has always served as a mode of resistance in Palestinian culture. In defiance of dispossession and decades of military siege, of a nakba that never ended, of historical and cultural obfuscation, of unrelenting violence and thousands of martyred people, the “power to narrate,” as Edward Said wrote, remains a necessary tool for self-determination. The poems collected here reclaim that power, bridging borders, languages, and generations to forge new conversations around resistance and liberation.

HEAVEN LOOKS LIKE US is a battle-cry against the annihilation of a people. As Palestinian history remains haunted by exile, violence, and grief, so, too, are the poems in this anthology. And yet, editors George Abraham and Noor Hindi present these realities alongside other themes that are also true: queer and feminist perspectives, eco-poetry, meditations on love and time, and lineages of protest. This anthology dares to imagine a future beyond a nation-state for Palestinian people everywhere. Contributors include Refaat Alareer, Mahmoud Darwish, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mohammed El-Kurd, A.D. Lauren-Abunassar, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Hala Alyan, Fady Joudah, and Heba Abu Nada, and many other voices, both established and ascending.

New York Times Bestseller

In the spirit of her bestselling book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit explores how our actions can shape the future and the liberatory possibilities of embracing uncertainty.

Beginning with an essay about a three-hundred-year-old violin and what it can tell us about forests, abundance, and climate, and ending with on about a prisoner dreaming of seeing the ocean, No Straight Road Takes You There deftly bridges the political and the literary, offering unique insights, nuanced understanding, and inspiration for the challenging work ahead. In her latest essay collection, the award-winning author explores climate change, feminism, democracy, hope, and power and its abuse. Throughout she asks us to heed the stories we tell or have been told, and the ways those stories can be, or should be changed. Solnit offers a reappraisal of the value of indirect consequences, an embrace of unpredictability, slowness, and imperfection in the politics of how to change the world.

“I've tried to find other ways of seeing and to prize the migratory routes ideas take,” Solnit writes in the introduction, “the way that hope is most often grounded in memory, because you can't see the future but you can understand the patterns and possibilities if you know the past.”

A collection of interviews with some of the world’s leading progressive thinkers on the movement for Palestinian liberation and its connections to struggles for justice across the globe.

As more and more people align themselves with the Palestinian people, Palestine in a World on Fire provides the global perspective and analysis needed to inform how we forge ahead on this path of newfound solidarity. Editors Ilan Pappé and Katherine Natanel have gathered a collection of interviews that are intimate, challenging, and rigorous—many of them conducted before October 7th but still startlingly prescient. The interviewees connect the struggle for Palestinian liberation to various liberatory movements around the world, simultaneously interrogating and recontextualizing their own positions given the ongoing aggression in Palestine. This incredible group includes Angela Y. Davis, Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Nadine El-Enany, Gabor Mate, Mustafa Barghouti, Yanis Varoufakis, Paul Gilroy, Elias Khoury, Gayatri Spivak, and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian.

Palestine in a World on Fire highlights the centrality of Palestine in struggles shared across the world: capitalism, imperialism, misogyny, neo-colonialism, racism, and more. Each conversation tackles urgent events and unfolding dynamics, and the scholar-activists interviewed here provide invaluable perspectives and insights, illuminating the richness and relevance of recent scholarship on Palestine.

Abolish Rent takes aim at one of the foremost engines of inequality and injustice.

Rent drives millions into debt, despair, and onto the streets. The social cost of rent is too damn high. Written for anyone fed up with the permanent housing crisis, complicit politicians, and real estate greed, Abolish Rent dissects our housing system from the perspective of those it immiserates. Through unsparing analysis and striking stories of resistance, it shows us how tenants can, through organizing and collective action, harness our power and win the housing we deserve.

From two co-founders of the largest tenants union in the country, this deeply reported account of the resurgent tenant movement centers poor and working-class people who are fighting back, staying put, and remaking the city in the process. Authors Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis take us to trilingual strategy meetings, raucous marches against gentrification, and daring eviction defenses where immigrants put their lives on the line. These are the seeds of the revolutionary movement we need to make our housing, our cities, and the world our home.

“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.

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.

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.

A global account of the grassroots environmental movements on the frontlines of the climate crisis.

Environmentalism from Below takes readers inside the popular struggles for environmental liberation in the Global South. These communities—among the most vulnerable to but also least responsible for the climate crisis—have long been at the forefront of the fight to protect imperiled worlds. Today, as the world’s forests burn and our oceans acidify, grassroots movements are tenaciously defending the environmental commons and forging just and sustainable ways of living on Earth.

Scholar and activist Ashley Dawson constructs a gripping narrative of these movements of climate insurgents, from international solidarity organizations like La Via Campesina and Shack Dwellers International to local struggles in South Africa, Colombia, India, Nigeria, and beyond. Taking up the four critical challenges we face in a warming world—food, urban sustainability, energy transition, and conservation—Dawson shows how the unruly power of environmentalism from below is charting an alternative path forward, from challenging industrial agriculture through fights for food sovereignty and agroecology to resisting extractivism using mass nonviolent protest and sabotage.

An urgent, essential intervention, Environmentalism from Below offers a hopeful alternative to the gridlock of UN-based climate negotiations and the narrow nationalism of some Green New Deal efforts. As Dawson reminds us, the fight against ecocide is already being waged worldwide. Building on longstanding traditions of anticolonial struggle, environmentalism from below is a model for a people’s movement for climate justice—one that demands solidarity.

A major collection of essays and  speeches from pioneering freedom fighter Angela Y. Davis

For over fifty years, Angela Y. Davis has been at the forefront of collective movements for abolition and feminism and the fight against state violence and oppression. Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises, the first of two important new volumes, brings together an essential collection of Davis’s writing over the years, showing how her thinking has sharpened and evolved even as she has remained uncompromising in her commitment to collective liberation. In pieces that address the history of abolitionist practice and thought in the United States and globally, the unique contributions of women to abolitionist struggles, and stories and lessons of organizing inside and beyond the prison walls, Davis is always curious, always incisive, and always learning.

Rich and rewarding, Abolition: Politics, Practices, Promises will appeal to fans of Davis, to students and scholars reflecting on her life and work, and to readers new to feminism, abolition, and struggles for liberation.

Hating Girls is a collection of cutting-edge essays addressing the pervasive problem of misogyny from an intersectional framework, particularly focused on identities of gender, race, class, sexuality, and religion. Scholars, activist reformers, and social justice practitioners offer multiple perspectives on the misogyny that dominates our culture, providing both macro-views and case studies in the United States. This interdisciplinary analysis exposes the destructive, oppressive beliefs and practices inherent in our society and offers a progressive, equitable way forward.

Contributors are: Portia Allie-Turco, Mary Sue Barnett, Melissa Brennan, Angela Cowser, Diane Dougherty, Dorislee Gilbert, Kristi Gray, Tammy Hatfield, Sarah E. Johansson, Sandy Phillips Kirkham, Francoise Knox-Kazimierczuk, Debra Meyers, Donna Pollard, Meredith Shockley-Smith, Tara M. Tuttle, Johanna W.H. van Wijk-Bos, and Stephanie A. Welsh.

What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.

Longtime organizers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes examine some of the political lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the convergence of mass protest and mass formations of mutual aid, and consider what this confluence of power can teach us about a future that will require mass acts of care, rescue and defense, in the face of both state violence and environmental disaster.
The book is an assemblage of co-authored reflections, interviews and questions that are intended to aid and empower activists and organizers as they attempt to map their own journeys through the work of justice-making. It includes insights from a spectrum of experienced organizers, including Sharon Lungo, Carlos Saavedra, Ejeris Dixon, Barbara Ransby, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore about some of the difficult and joyous lessons they have learned in their work.

This groundbreaking anthology engages the theme of abolition feminisms, a political tradition grounded in radical anti-violence organizing, Black feminist and feminist of color rebellion, survivor knowledge production, strategies devised inside and across prison walls, and a full, fierce refusal of race-gender pathology and punitive control. This analysis disrupts the politics of carceral feminism as conversations about the ramifications of the prison-industrial complex continue.

Contributors include: molly ackhurst, Anne-lise Ah-fat, Asantewaa Boykin, Melanie Brazzell, Lauren Caulfield, Esmat Elhalaby, Christine Finley, Joseph Hankins, Whess Harman, April Harris, Eileen Jimenez, Lacey Johnson, Mimi Kim, Victoria Law, Tabitha Lean, Colby Lenz, Shirley Leslie, Meenakshi Mannoe, Cece McDonald, Erica R. Meiners, Kelsey Mohamed, Nadine Naber, Gloria A. Negrete-Lopez, Ky Peterson, Minh-Ha T. Pham, Amanda Priebe, Romarilyn Ralston, Clarissa Rojas, Samah Saleh, Tina Shull, dean spade, Ash Stephens, Vanessa Eileen Thompson, Emily L. Thuma, and Jana Traboulsi.

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.

Mahdi Amel (1936–87) was a prominent Arab Marxist thinker and Lebanese Communist Party member. For the first time in English, this collection makes available lengthy excerpts from six major works by Mahdi Amel. These include the two founding texts on colonialism and underdevelopment in which Amel began to grapple with the question of dependency, his treatise on sectarianism and the state, his critique of Edward Said’s analysis of Marx, his exposure of emerging Islamised bourgeois trends of thought as part of a broader critique of everyday thought, and his reflection on cultural heritage as perceived by Arab bourgeoisie. Amel’s writings serve as a reminder of the need to renew Marxist thought based on concrete and particular social realities, like colonialism.

This book provides a ground breaking re-examination of the changing relationship between art, craft, and industry focusing on the transition from workshop to studio, apprentice to pupil, guild to gallery and artisan to artist. Responding to the question whether the artist is a relic of the feudal mode of production or is a commodity producer corresponding to the capitalist mode of cultural production, Beech reveals, instead, that the history of the formation of art as distinct from handicraft, commerce, and industry can be traced back to the dissolution of the dual system of guild and court. This essential history needs to be revisited in order to rethink the categories of aesthetic labour, attractive labour, alienated labour, nonalienated labour and unwaged labour that shape the modern and contemporary politics of work in art.

Each day after school, Mohammed El-Kurd’s grandmother welcomed him at the door of his home with a bouquet of jasmine. Her name was Rifqa—she was older than Israel itself and an icon of Palestinian resilience.

With razor-sharp wit and glistening moral clarity, El-Kurd lays bare the brutality of Israeli settler colonialism. His poems trace Rifqa’s exile from Haifa to his family’s current dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, exposing the cyclical and relentless horror of the Nakba.

El-Kurd’s debut collection definitively shows that the Palestinian struggle is a revolution, until victory.

In Migration, Reproduction and Society, Alejandro I. Canales offers a theoretical model for understanding the dilemmas presented by migration in the transformation of contemporary society. Aging and changing demographics in advanced societies make economic and social reproduction dependent upon the contributions made by immigration. However, these same demographic processes are conducive to ethnic transformations. The political dilemma facing advanced societies is that immigration is required to ensure their reproduction, but this entails becoming multicultural societies where the political hegemony of ethnic and demographic majorities becomes radically subverted. This paves the way to a pervasive political conflict already evident in the current immigration crisis in Europe just as in the revival of racism and xenophobia in the United States.

Since the movement’s founding in 2014, #SayHerName has gained international attention and has served as both a rallying cry and organizing principle in the aftermath of police killings of Black women, including, most recently, the police killing of Breonna Taylor.
Black women, girls, and femmes as young as seven and as old as ninety-three have been killed by the police, though we rarely hear their names or learn their stories. Breonna Taylor, Alberta Spruill, Rekia Boyd, Shantel Davis, Shelly Frey, Kayla Moore, Kyam Livingston, Miriam Carey, Michelle Cusseaux, and Tanisha Anderson are among the many lives that should have been. The #SayHerName campaign lifts up the stories of these women and girls in order to build a gender-inclusive framework for understanding, discussing, and combating police violence.
Without this knowledge, we cannot have a full understanding of the wide-ranging circumstances that make Black bodies disproportionately subject to police violence, and we cannot understand the ways in which racialized policing and gendered violence intersect and produce lethal consequences. #SayHerName provides an analytical framework for understanding Black women's susceptibility to police brutality and state-sanctioned violence, and it explains how—through black feminist storytelling and ritual—we can effectively mobilize various communities and empower them to advocate for racial justice.
Including Black women in police violence and gender violence discourses sends the powerful message that, in fact, all Black lives matter and that the police cannot kill without consequence.This is a powerful story of Black feminist practice, community-building, enablement, and Black feminist reckoning.

New York Times Bestseller

“Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then figuring out who your targets are, always being concerned about power, always being concerned about how you’re going to actually build power in order to be able to push your issues, in order to be able to get the target to actually move in the way that you want to.”
What if social transformation and liberation isn’t about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle.
With a foreword by Naomi Murakawa and chapters on seeking justice beyond the punishment system, transforming how we deal with harm and accountability, and finding hope in collective struggle for abolition, Kaba’s work is deeply rooted in the relentless belief that we can fundamentally change the world. As Kaba writes, “Nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone.”

Palestine: A Socialist Introduction systematically tackles a number of important aspects of the Palestinian struggle for liberation, contextualizing it in an increasingly polarized world and offering a socialist perspective on how full liberation can be won.
Through an internationalist, anti-imperialist lens, this book explores the links between the struggle for freedom in the United States and that in Palestine, and beyond. It examines both the historical and contemporary trajectory of the Palestine solidarity movement in order to glean lessons for today’s organizers, and compellingly lays out the argument that, in order to achieve justice in Palestine, the movement has to take up the question of socialism regionally and internationally.
Contributors include: Jehad Abusalim, Shireen Akram-Boshar, Omar Barghouti, Nada Elia, Toufic Haddad, Remi Kanazi, Annie Levin, Mostafa Omar, Khury Petersen-Smith, and Daphna Thier.

In Marx, Women and Capitalist Social Reproduction, Martha E. Giménez offers a distinctive perspective on social reproduction which posits that the relations of production determine the relations of social reproduction, and which links the effects of class exploitation and location to forms of oppression predominantly theorised in terms of identity. Grounding her analysis in Marx's theory and methodology, Giménez examines the relationship between class, reproduction and the oppression of women in different contexts such as the reproduction of labour power, domestic labour, feminisation of poverty, and reproductive technologies. Because most people, whether members of dominant or oppressed groups, are working class, she argues that the future of feminist politics is inextricably tied to class politics and the fate of capitalism.

“Arundhati Roy combines her brilliant style as a novelist with her powerful commitment to social justice in producing these eloquent, penetrating essays.” —Howard Zinn

“Arundhati Roy is one of the most confident and original thinkers of our time.” —Naomi Klein

“The scale of what Roy surveys is staggering. Her pointed indictment is devastating.” —The New York Times Book Review

Bookended by her two award-winning novels, The God of Small Things (1997) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), My Seditious Heart collects the work of a two-decade period when Arundhati Roy devoted herself to the political essay as a way of opening up space for justice, rights, and freedoms in an increasingly hostile world. Taken together, the essays speak in a voice of unique spirit, marked by compassion, clarity, and courage. Radical and superbly readable, they speak always in defense of the collective, of the individual and of the land, in the face of the destructive logic of financial, social, religious, military, and governmental elites.

Arundhati Roy studied architecture in New Delhi where she now lives. She is the author of the novels The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. She has written several nonfiction books, including Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, Capitalism: A Ghost Story, Walking with the Comrades, Things That Can and Cannot Be Said (with John Cusack), and The End of Imagination. She is the recipient of the 2002 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize.

“We are in a fight for our lives. Hurricanes Irma and María unmasked the colonialism we face in Puerto Rico, and the inequality it fosters, creating a fierce humanitarian crisis. Now we must find a path forward to equality and sustainability, a path driven by communities, not investors. And this book explains, with careful and unbiased reporting, only the efforts of our community activists can answer the paramount question: What type of society do we want to become and who is Puerto Rico for?” —Carmen Yulín Cruz, Mayor of San Juan

In the rubble of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans and ultrarich “Puertopians” are locked in a pitched struggle over how to remake the island. In this vital and startling investigation, bestselling author and activist Naomi Klein uncovers how the forces of shock politics and disaster capitalism seek to undermine the nation's radical, resilient vision for a “just recovery.”

All royalties from the sale of this book in English and Spanish go directly to JunteGente, a gathering of Puerto Rican organizations resisting disaster capitalism and advancing a fair and healthy recovery for their island. For more information, visit http://juntegente.org/.

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, documentary filmmaker and author of the international bestsellers No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, and No Is Not Enough.

Marx’s Capital: Hegelian Sources is the second volume in Andy Blunden’s series on how Marx used Hegel’s Logic in his Capital.

Following the companion volume, The Capital/Logic Debate, Blunden presents a systematic presentation of the Hegelian structure of the three volumes of Capital. It is shown that Capital contains three distinct layers of structure, originating from Marx’s reading of Hegel’s Logic and his Philosophy of Right. Capital reflects Marx’s critique of the Political Economists, his unique appropriation of economic history and an application of the method outlined by Hegel in his Logic and applied to his Encyclopaedia. These insights into Capital are presented here for the first time.

Mode of Production: The Final Horizon of Practice and Theory re-invigorates the Marxist concept “mode of production” by showing how it continues to have a central place in understanding the broad sweep of human history.

Drawing on recent materialist theory and newer insights from historical and anthropological scholarship, the book discusses the three modes of production that existed, the conflicts between them, the importance of Indigenous struggles to socialism, and explicates a materialist contemporary cultural politics. The authors present pathways for activism and theory through the wide range of contemporary hegemonies and offer crucial resources to inform social justice activism today.

First published in 1984, Mike Milotte’s classic study of Irish communism in the early twentieth century leaves no stone unturned.

The book offers a clear and meticulous reconstruction of Irish communism in the 1920s, reassessing the movement and its key figures in light of previously overlooked or misinterpreted material from the Comintern archives. Milotte follows a wide range of characters who shaped Irish communism in this period. During the revolutionary era, Roddy Connolly’s Communist Party robbed banks to fund its activities, and 20-year-old Connolly engaged in gun-running for the IRA while struggling to maintain control of his fractious party. In a later period of retreat, James Larkin refused to submit to the “imperialistic” British Communist Party or follow the dictates of Moscow’s Stalinist bureaucracy, resisting its policies and practices on instinct.

An introduction to the life and thought of the Marxist economist and social scientist Helene Bauer, who shaped intellectual and political debates in Austria’s First Republic.

In 1914, the Polish Jewish Helene Gumplowitz Landau left her husband and children to relocate to Vienna, driven by her unwavering passion for socialism and her love for Otto Bauer, a leading Austrian Marxist a decade her junior. In Vienna, Bauer became one of the first female economists to challenge the founding figures of neoliberalism, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. She criticised Otto Neurath for the flaws in his vision of a moneyless economy, confronted Ottmar Spann – Austria's foremost philosopher and ideologue of the fascist corporatist state – and was among the earliest voices warning that the Great Depression could fuel the rise of fascism. Helene Bauer spent her final years in exile in the United States, her contributions largely forgotten in Austria’s Second Republic. Yet, a century later, her incisive analyses of the crises of her time remain strikingly relevant, offering profound insights into the challenges of today.

Histories examined here extend from the ancient to the modern, encompassing also the political and the personal.

The reason for examining recent trends in the historiography of the Roman empire is because it is there, at the starting point of the historical trajectory on which the whole of Marxist theory is based, that attempts are being made to undermine its foundations. Against this the efficacy of class and much else besides is reasserted via an examination of how and why discourse about work, gender, and property relations features at the rural grassroots, together with a critical analysis of how and why discarding Marxism has contributed to the current empowerment of populism.

A groundbreaking analysis of neoliberalism’s turn to authoritarianism and a bold call for fairness, justice, and equality. 

We live in an era of crises. How should we address them? Many turn to experts, particularly economists or technologists. Others look to strong, authoritarian leaders, as seen in China or Russia. Some advocate a return to the nation-state, rejecting globalization and targeting immigrants. But what about democracy? Are we prepared to abandon it? This book argues that since the 1970s, neoliberalism has increasingly favored authoritarian solutions. It's time to break this cycle and strive for a more just, fair, green, and equitable planet.

Artistic Labour of the Body examines VALIE EXPORT’s and Elfriede Jelinek’s use of the body and psyche as artistic material to explore Adorno’s concept of artistic labor.

By deploying the body as artistic material, their works challenge women’s reduction to reproductive function or sexual object, articulating a feminism beyond “innocence”. Gush demonstrates how their art critiqued post-war Austria’s culture of disavowal, where unprocessed legacies of Nazism perpetuated Austria’s victimhood myth, while also exploring the complex identifications within this critique. The book reframes post-war artistic practices that revealed the body as both a site of patriarchal-capitalist violence and of resistance.

What if everything you thought you knew about socialism was wrong? Socialism: the 100-Year-Old Misnomer invites you to rethink a century of political and cultural myth-making.

Dana Neacşu distinguishes real socialism—rooted in democracy and wealth redistribution—from its authoritarian counterfeit: Soviet-style state capitalism. Drawing on political theory, political economy, law, and culture, and using layered textual analysis, Neacşu exposes how language, ideology, and legal systems conspired to mislabel repression as revolution. Featuring rare visuals and sharp close readings, this book equips you to separate fact from fiction and rethink what justice, ownership, and power could truly mean.

A long overdue re-evaluation of the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party – the first since the Civil War – where the New Economic Policy era was launched.

The Tenth Party Congress of 1921 bears the distinction as the first of the six congresses under NEP. Often overlooked, the Tenth was also the last to see Lenin’s full participation. The congress thus provides a crucial vantage point from which to view Lenin’s intentions for the party and vision for the country as the new Soviet state began recovery following years of conflict.

Ten contributors offer new perspectives on this crucial event of the early Soviet period. Several ask, was the congress a real turning point? Some insist that for most of the main figures in the regime, it was just that. While most scholars agree that the congress laid the foundation for the party up to the end of the regime, the volume offers alternative interpretations of an event that helped establish the Soviet state and set the terms for control by the Communist party.

An innovative exploration of the complex interplay between mental processes, bodily reactions, and emotions.

Understanding how the mind works can provide insight into the meaning of various feelings and emotions. Rather than merely grasping empathy on an intellectual level, we can experience how it functions and emerges. By observing the mind, we can uncover how social assumptions and prejudices later filter these reactions. Contemplating the foundations of suffering or empathy can enrich our understanding of the emotional dimensions of how we perceive the world. Additionally, many psycho-social phenomena can be comprehended more deeply through critical-contemplative inquiry from a first-person perspective.

With over a dozen contributions from scholars across a range of disciplines, this book revisits Jürgen Habermas’s de­fining text on legal and political theory, Between Facts and Norms.

The contributors interrogate the prospects for Habermas’s optimistic defense of liberal democracy in our current age of straining global capitalism and menacing authoritarian populisms. The authors arrive at different conclusions, with some contributors engaging directly with his theory while others assessing it through the prisms of political economy, the media, policing, employment discrimination law, international relations theory, social movements, democratic institutions and the historical context of Between Facts and Norms.

A radical reappraisal of the life and work of Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to serve in the U.S. Congress.

Rankin has understandably been celebrated for improving government diversity. However, she did not fit in comfortably with that body’s chauvinistic routine, encountering hostility to her ideas, to her gender, and even to her presence during the two terms that she was able to serve. This book shows that she is better understood as a radical: a feminist, a pacifist, an advocate for the rights of the poor, a supporter of Irish nationalism, an American Civil Liberties Union leader, and a keen labor union ally.

Based on unprecedented research in Yiddish-language Jewish and overlooked Soviet archives, Without a Trace… recounts the tragic odyssey of Noah London, a leader of the Stalinist industrial revolution in the Donbass who became a secret dissident due to the Ukrainian famine.

John D. Holmes gives a vital insight into the nature of and origins of Stalinism and the causes of the “Great Terror,” the most mysterious episode of Soviet history. Through the lives of Noah and Miril London, Holmes tells the inside story of US and Soviet Communism, their similarities and parallels, and the Soviet bureaucracy in the Stalin era. The book shows how the revolution in Russia, twentieth-century Jewish history, US and Russian labor history and the evolution of Stalinism are intertwined threads. They link historical moments on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and around the world. The London story has much to say about the present-day world and prospects for the future, not least by shedding light on today’s war-torn Donbass.

A pioneering compilation of academic literature on the International Covenant on the Right to Development, featuring some of the leading experts on the subject.

The authors delve at length into the central enquiry on how and to what extent the Covenant will, as a binding instrument of international law, shape the global balance of power. Envisaged to be incorporated in the international bill of human rights, the analysis on the various component elements leads to the conclusive argument that, once in force, the Covenant on the Right to Development will have major implications for how the international order is structured and how development is henceforth pursued.

A critical reassessment of the history of the Russian Revolution – both the greatest revolution of our time and the most terrible bureaucratic counterrevolution.

We have before us the immeasurable historical laboratory of the Russian Revolution. The working class fought, won, seized power, and expropriated the capitalists: a remarkable anti-capitalist feat. But it was then politically expropriated by the bureaucracy—that “tissue of practical illusions” which became a “political class”, degenerated the character of the state into a bureaucratic one, and blocked the socialist transition. This experience is ours to grasp and draw radical conclusions from. Socialist transition is a social, economic, and political process, in which real workers’ power is essential to lead the way.

Class, Race, and the US South is a Festschrift celebrating the life and work of the labor militant and political scientist Michael Goldfield.

The book features original contributions from the most prominent contemporary historical-materialist social scientists and historians. The collection’s uniting theme is that class, race, and the South are the most important mainsprings of American society. Combining labor history, southern history, and theoretical critiques of mainstream conceptualizations of racism, this work emphasizes the working class as the primary driver of both reactionary and potentially revolutionary change.

A critical reassessment of the aspirations and reality of Rojava’s “revolutionary society”.

For social movements around the world, Rojava embodies the real possibility of a better society: the revolution began there in 2012. In the Kurdish-dominated regions, an autonomous self-administration has been established based on the values of grassroots democracy, gender equality and ecology. The “Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria” now controls about a third of Syria’s territory. It unites different ethnicities, religions and languages under its umbrella. Based on numerous interviews with people from all sectors of society – administration, education, military, medicine, etc. – in a mixture of reportage and analysis, Christopher Wimmer creates a polyphonic picture of the everyday life, hopes, and problems of the people on the ground.

Theories for Radical Change makes a strong case for the primacy of economic over extra-economic processes, and of production and production relations over other aspects of the economic realm.

The book explores how production relations of capitalism and imperialism fetter the development of the productive forces of nature and wage-labor and hinder the state’s ability to solve the problems produced by capitalism. It covers a wide range of political-economic issues including commodity production, class differentiation, fundamental traits of capitalist production (including its uneven and combined development), capitalist state, and the impoverishment of common people and their struggle against the capitalist mode of production.

A comprehensive account of the rise and fall of the Communist International, from its founding by Lenin after the Russian Revolution to its eventual collapse under Stalinism.

The Communist International (or ‘Comintern’) was launched in 1919 to promote worldwide extension of the 1917 workers’ and peasants’ revolution in Russia. During the Comintern’s first years under the leadership of V.I. Lenin, it proposed and tested strategic and tactical concepts that retain their value and continue to be studied. While the Communist International was soon to be deformed and destroyed by the rise of bureaucracy and authoritarianism associated with Stalinism, its perspective on the fight for international revolutionary change still presents a compelling vision, and is an inspiring example for millions throughout the world.

An investigation into the evolution of poverty reduction strategies in Brazil and Argentina over the past two decades, focusing on programs like Bolsa Família and Asignación Universal por Hijo.

In today’s Latin America, social policy is a battleground. At stake is not just poverty relief, but the very meaning of citizenship and whether transformation is still possible in times of austerity and conservative backlash. Through a critical and comparative lens, this book reveals how political agendas, institutional legacies, and economic crises have shaped—and undermined—social protection systems. It reveals the dilemmas faced by social policy in times of democratic erosion, economic crisis, and rising inequality across the Latin American region.

An illuminating analysis of how Buraku discrimination shaped nation-building in Japan and how resistance movements have challenged the ongoing domination of Buraku people.

Applying universal themes, this book analyzes the discrimination faced by and the (re)construction of the Buraku people during Japan’s modernization. State and capital have created the ongoing plight of the Buraku. This book demonstrates that Buraku discrimination has been a springboard for domination, both during and after Japan’s colonial rule in Asia and has been an important function of governance in Japan. Buraku discrimination is reproduced in both cities and towns, forcing many Buraku people to suffer silently. To combat this situation, there are Buraku resistance movements, studied in depth here.

This volume brings together leading political economists of India to provide an in-depth analysis of the political economy of globalized India.

The book explores how neoliberal policies have exacerbated inequalities, weakened democratic institutions, and undermined key pillars of sustainable development. Through a wide range of perspectives, the chapters examine critical issues such as the erosion of equitable growth, the decline of decent employment opportunities, the marginalization of distributive justice, the deepening of gender disparities, and the challenges to geopolitical stability. The contributors also address the impact of neoliberalism on social democracy, employment-driven industrial restructuring, and environmental sustainability, offering a vital resource for scholars, policymakers, and anyone concerned with India's developmental trajectory.

An exploration of the theory of Socio-Poiesis and how it converges with the ideas of a wide range of thinkers, from anthropologists to philosophers and psychoanalysts.

Socio-Poiesis is a neologism coined to integrate and intersect theory and practice across several branches of the humanities, including social sciences, psychoanalysis, practical wisdom, Eastern philosophies, ethics, household management, and political philosophy. This book traces how the theory intersects with the work of thinkers like Erich Fromm, Adam Schaff, Adam Blaner, Jacob Moreno, and Robin George Collingwood.

Volunteers for the Revolution tells the story of foreign combatants who fought heroically against fascism with the anti-Stalinist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) in the Spanish Civil War.

That thousands of members of the International Brigades fought against fascism during the Spanish Civil War is well known. Far less known—aside from the notable exception of George Orwell—is the presence of five hundred foreign combatants in the militias of the anti-Stalinist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM). This book provides, for the first time, an exhaustive study of these volunteers: their socio-political background, their participation in the Civil War and revolution, their role as victims of Stalinist slander and repression, and their fate during the Second World War and beyond.

Poetics of Value proposes the survival of fugitive temporalities as a methodology for Marxism, exceeding the temporal forms of both value and its Marxist criticism.

Throughout value-form theory, the present is understood as a homogenizing form of subsumption, determining all lives in its commodification of time. Elliot C. Mason employs the “fugitive” imaginary of black studies to locate other temporalities that antagonize the present. Through close readings of four contemporary poets, Mason finds an exposure to social temporalities that exceed the productive time of value.

The reasons for South Africa’s full and rapid post-apartheid embrace of neoliberal economic policy remain controversial. Drawing on the author’s own participation in policy debates, this volume shows that alternative paths were either dismissed or never even considered.

Explanations for policy failings have to be sought in determinants such as globalization, financialization, capital flight, corporate restructuring and Black Economic Empowerment. The text offers extensive surveys of relevant literature including the developmental state, industrial and social policy, privatization, trade policy, the Harvard School, comparative experience and the deficiencies in the country’s National Development Plan and New Growth Path.

How China’s banking sector powered the world’s most dramatic economic transformation.

“Red” Banks: The Contribution of Chinese Banks to the Economic Rise of China (1980-2020) opens the vault, revealing how policy banks, state-owned giants, and daring joint-stock institutions fueled China’s rise from 1980 to 2020. The book explores unpublished financial records and financed reforms to Belt and Road mega-projects. How did China’s banks sidestep the pitfalls of Western systems? What made their approach to infrastructure and manufacturing uniquely explosive? This study bridges gaps in global finance research, challenging conventional narratives and exposing the symbiotic relationship between state strategy and real economic growth.

A new English edition of Alexander Shlyapnikov’s memoirs, showing how a working-class provincial youth from a religious dissenter family became a Marxist revolutionary.

These translations by Barbara C. Allen include Shlyapnikov’s memoirs about his childhood and youth, as well as his reflections on the history of the 1905 Revolution in Russia. The book comprises a brief published autobiography, an unpublished memoir of Shlyapnikov’s childhood, a short fictional piece based on his early experience of factory work, a published historical survey of the 1905 Revolution in Russia, and three article-length published memoir-histories about his early activities in the revolutionary underground and his leadership of a revolutionary organisation in the town of Murom.

This edited volume develops a theoretical framework for understanding how regimes of dispossession affect urban societies across the global south.

The book’s main arguments are built on a survey of the nearly two-hundred-year history of global dispossession studies and solid empirical evidence from three continents—Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and seven countries— Bangladesh, Brazil, Honduras, India, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Uganda. Eighteen scholars bring diverse perspectives and realities on urban dispossession. These varied contributions allow us to better understand how urban actors organize dispossession and govern the urban dispossessed, how the urban dispossessed arrange, experience and resist dispossession, and how urban dispossession contributes to creating/expanding capitalist systems or transforming urban societies in the global south.

The volume will appeal to students, scholars, planners, and practitioners across various social scientific disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, urban studies, political economy, international relations, political science, economics, gender studies, and geography.

Contributors are: Shapan Adnan, Orlando Alves dos Santos Junior, Fred Bidandi, David L. Brunsma, Tarcyla Fidalgo Ribeiro, Lakshmi Jahnavi, Marie Kolling, Ana Maria Kumarasamy, Barbara Lipietz, Lipon Mondal, Adrian Murray, John Nagle, Victor Udemezue Onyebueke, Taísa Sanches, Karen Spring, Susan Spronk, Luanda Vannuchi and Julian Walker.

Written under conditions of tsarist censorship, Basic Elements of the Historical View of Nature offers a powerful defense of historical materialism.

At first, the book appears to be a dispassionate account of nature, life, the psyche, and society, based on the most up-to-date science. But in fact, it has a Marxist goal: to defend the idea of historical materialism. After developing a thoroughly materialist, determinist view of reality, Bogdanov explains how forms of social labor determine the forms of human ideology. Cognition from the Historical Point of View explains the causal connections between labor, forms of cognition, and ideological constructs. Finally, The Science of Social Consciousness, written after the relaxation of censorship, presents a history of European ideological development from an explicitly Marxist point of view.

The Privilege of Servitude presents a detailed and up-to-date portrait of today’s working class.

Ricardo Antunes examines the main trends in new labor relations, where precariousness, outsourcing, and deregulation have become the rule rather than the exception. He offers an in-depth analysis of the rise of the new service proletariat and contemporary forms of digital labor, while also exploring changes in labor relations globally—with a particular focus on Brazil’s recent history, from the period of redemocratization to the Bolsonaro years.

A lively account of discussions between the young Bertolt Brecht and the Marxian Political Economist Fritz Sternberg, published in English here for the first time.

Rationality and the Poet casts a new light on the development of Brecht’s politics and the relationship between society and drama that informed his art. Set in the late Weimer Republic, these reminiscences chart the rise and fall of the friendship between the poet and the theoretician, from their initial encounters and Brecht’s induction into Marxist political economy to their increasing tensions over the Soviet Union.

Sternberg charted an independent position between the Second and Third Internationals and remains a largely undiscovered theorist of the period spanning the end of the First World War to the Cold War. This volume presents a selection of his writings from the period of his most intensive friendship with Brecht, highlighting the versatile and independent socialist cast of Sternberg’s mind.

The second volume in Lucien Sève’s Thinking with Marx Today series explores Marx’s revolution in anthropology.

Instead of abstract “man,” Marx argued that there is an ensemble of societal relations that underpins social formations of various kinds as well as a variety of forms of individuality. Sève deftly analyzes the philosophical preconditions and the fundamental concepts of this anthropology. This is followed by critiques of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and contemporary primatology coupled with borrowings from Freud, Politzer, Vygotsky, and contemporary literature on biography. The book’s aim, then, is nothing less than to outline a science of human individuality.

A new account of the political and private life of Ernst Meyer, one of the most important figures of the German Communist Party in the Weimar Republic.

Mayer was a founding member of the Spartacus League, a member of the KPD Centre after the First World War and party chairman in 1921–22. A passionate defender of the necessity of inner-party democracy against the “ultra-left” leadership around Ruth Fischer and later the Thälmann Central Committee, as well as a supporter of revolutionary realpolitik. Meyer played a significant role in the development of the communist united front strategy and, as a critic of Stalin, argued against the disastrous thesis of “social fascism”. Despite this, Meyer has largely been forgotten. Here, Florian Wilde traces for the first time the political and private life and work of this disciple of Rosa Luxemburg, highlighting the strategic debates within the KPD and the alternatives to its Stalinization, inherent in the development of the party.

A radical reinterpretation of the historically oppressed “black racialized underclass” in South Africa and Brazil.

The book explores how South Africa’s and Brazil’s social policy architectures have been shaped by transhistorical trajectories of hierarchical citizenships. Phiri provides two interventions to scholarship, one on “the epistemic question” and the second on “the social question”, by offering a critique of a racialized neoliberal global political economy that permeates the two countries’ social policies. In doing so, he addresses several important questions. First, can social policy resolve the residuals and contradictions of transhistorical inequalities that have become systemic features of these aspirant democracies that aim to forge a new social contract under hierarchical racialized neoliberal capitalism? Second, given the fact that both South Africa’s and Brazil’s socio-political formations are enmeshed in histories of imperial violence, and a hierarchical racialized global political economy carved through Trans-Atlantic slavery, what paradigmatic and theoretical tools can be deployed to think about social policy as reparations? Third, which institutions will create conducive conditions for the flourishing and political aesthetics for those racialized as black? Phiri concludes by defining “social policy as reparations” through a process of “worldmaking”.

A call to action to defend immigrants and push back against the unprecedented rise of migrant incarceration

How to Close a Camp is a polemic and political field guide for dismantling the immigrant detention system in the United States. Grounded in concrete victories of local communities and directly impacted people and drawing on interviews with dozens of veterans of the immigrant rights movement, award-winning journalist and translator John Washington distills strategies from successful campaigns that have closed camps, blocked or slowed new ones from opening, and chipped away at the carceral infrastructure. 

The stakes couldn’t be higher: through conversations with the most impacted—the people currently or historically caged in the camps—Washington describes the cruel impacts of the exploding budget for ICE, the rapid militarization of American streets under the guise of immigration enforcement, and the surge in detention beds. 

But since the inception of immigrant detention in the United States, there has always been a line of resistance: from the early Chinese targeted and detained in the 19th century, the Mexicans and Japanese rounded up in the mid-20th century, and the rise of family detention under Obama, those inside and out have coalesced, stood up, fought back, and often won their freedom. Despite the decades-long growth of immigrant detention, victories have been won in individual cases, as well as at the municipal, state, and national levels. Recognizing and learning from these victories is the only way to stave off increasing xenophobic and authoritarian violence.

How to Close a Camp outlines how to confront the current wave of oppression. It is a call not only to combat the camp, but to build something better in its place.

A sharp, timely, and theoretically innovative account of the role of generative AI in transforming the political, visual, and imaginative landscape of our contemporary world

The authoritarian Right is using generative AI to blur the boundary between fiction and forecast, anticipating and normalizing acts of colonial erasure and destruction. Speculative Violence traces generative AI’s ability to shape actions and beliefs in the present by seizing and rendering our imagination of the future through seamless aesthetics. With its signature photorealistic style, AI helps normalize possible worlds rooted in erasure, domination, and exclusion, presenting them as natural and legitimate beneath their glossy synthetic surface. 

Media studies scholar Donatella Della Ratta calls this phenomenon speculative violence: a form of harm that doesn’t rely on overtly visible brutality but works through polished AI-generated images that make exclusion, domination, or the removal of entire communities seem normal. 

The “Gaza Riviera” visuals popularized by President Trump in early 2025 are a stark example: shimmering beaches and luxury resorts presented with no trace of the genocidal erasure such a future would require. Yet these visuals do more than simply imagine a future; they make that world thinkable, acceptable, even desirable. By giving visual form to the future, they influence belief in the present, making harmful agendas appear reasonable and transforming vision itself into a tool of politics.

Drawing on examples from the post-October 7 Israeli-Palestinian conflict and from the global far right, Speculative Violence elucidates the function of generative AI in the context of a tech industry where resurgent faith-based narratives intersect with abiding military ambition, showing how AI has become a key tool for fueling authoritarian visions and normalizing exclusionary fantasies.

A leading political philosopher dissects the far right’s appeal through the lens of Bolsonarismo, tracing its roots to the social, cultural, and economic disintegration caused by the crisis of neoliberalism. 

In 2022, Brazilians defeated the far right at the polls—and, in 2025, the country’s high court jailed its leader, former president Jair Bolsonaro, for plotting a coup. But for four years, Bolsonaro led the nation and the popular, far-right movement that bore his name. Anatomy of Disintegration is about how Bolsonaro came to power and was defeated, but it is also about much more: it offers a perspective on the global rise of the far right as seen from one of the largest countries in the Global South. What explains the far right’s appeal, in Brazil, in the US, and across the world? What is so attractive about its message and the future it offers, one that valorizes individualism, glorifies trolls, con artists, and conspiracy theorists, and imagines a world in which punishment and political violence are celebrated? 

Through sharp analyses of the social composition of the far right, the affective conditions that underpin it, and the mainstream’s inability to respond to it, Rodrigo Nunes argues that the far right’s power comes not from some mysterious “outside” source, but from the unresolved conflicts produced by neoliberalism and the failed promises of contemporary capitalism. What emerges, then, is a portrait of a world in disintegration, beset by climate collapse, rampant inequality, and the proliferation of sacrifice zones for the poor and protected enclaves for the rich. It is essential that we understand the forces that are trying to accelerate that process––and how the left might effectively fight back.

A new edition of this classic collection of essays from June Jordan’s influential poetry workshops, designed to bring poetry back to the people, featuring a foreword by Hanif Abdurraqib and an introduction by Samiya Bashir

First published in 1995, June Jordan's Poetry for the People describes how to build a grassroots poetry program in your classroom, living room, or local cafe. This peek at student work and instant classics by influential poets such as US poet laureate Joy Harjo will inspire people young and old to become practicing poets.

Poetry for the People celebrates explorative poetry as a communal, oral art form. With clear strategies for how to critique poems and facilitate a poetry workshop discussion, this easy-to-use, timely reference is perfect for self-taught writers, groups of friends and teachers of poetry at any level from colleges to public libraries, university writers' centers to community-based workshops from prisons to bookstores.

The book features essays by Adrienne Rich and Joy Harjo, as well as interviews with June’s contemporaries Ntozake Shange, Leroy Quintana, Alfred Arteaga, Janice Gould, Dan Bellm, and Marilyn Chin, who comment on the canon. It also includes bibliographies of multicultural poetry, gay and lesbian poetry, deaf poetry, and poetry for and by children. June Jordan's Poetry for the People testifies to the group spirit that made her poetry workshops so powerful.

In Williams’ memoir in essays, award-winning poet and performer Saul Williams vividly recalls the most dramatic moments of his political awakening 

Songs My Mother Taught Me is the amusing, wise revelation of an American writer journeying around an often strange and always exciting world. Williams’ wanderlust leads him to Brazil, Haiti, Palestine, and many other nations in times of imperialist conflict and genocide. He meets and brings to life the famous and the humble, from history and real encounters, from Paul Robeson to artists in Brazilian bars.

Along the way, Williams comes to understand that all art can be propaganda and builds a case for why the artist must not only speak up but also choose sides.

The radical artists of the Vanguard Series offer new poetry and prose to answer the question: “What does poetry have to do with politics?” 

Healing Justice & Our Call to Practice by Tanuja Jagernauth is a zine that explores healing justice as a political, cultural, and spiritual strategy for addressing trauma, violence, grief, and burnout in our communities and movements. Rooted in ancestral traditions of care, it reminds us that the personal is political and that collective healing is essential to building resilient, just, and liberated futures.

Drawing on global anti-colonial movements, Noura Erakat and John Reynolds demonstrate that justice in Palestine cannot be realized without confronting the problem of Zionism

For over one hundred years, Palestinians have struggled for liberation in their homeland. Confronting Zionism takes direct analytical aim at the ideology and institutional structures animating Israel’s brutal rule over Palestinian lives.

With cutting precision and comprehensive evidence, Noura Erakat and John Reynolds argue that Zionism as an ideology is inherently settler colonial, racially supremacist, and ultimately genocidal. Tracing the history of the establishment of Israel, the development of its apartheid institutions, and the damning failure of the Oslo Peace Process, Confronting Zionism provides the concept and tools for understanding the horrors unfolding in Palestine today.

As legal scholars, Erakat and Reynolds also provide a clear-eyed assessment of the role of international law, in a world where its usefulness is increasingly in question. At this crucial historical juncture, Confronting Zionism uplifts the Palestinian intellectual tradition to argue that decolonization predicated on restitution, reparation, and the return of refugees remains the only just way forward.

An interdisciplinary exploration of how Puerto Ricans imagine repair, recovery, and decolonial futures amid disaster, austerity, and colonial constraint

In the wake of hurricanes, earthquakes, and fiscal collapse, Puerto Ricans have confronted the limits of state-led reconstruction and the rise of post-disaster speculation. At the same time, they have forged new community-based experiments in self-governance, collective care, and imaginative practice. Post-Disaster Futures brings together scholars, artists, and activists to examine how disaster recovery can both reinforce existing hierarchies of power and open pathways toward transformation.

Moving between the archipelago and its diaspora, the volume traces a collective effort to rethink what repair means when the very institutions of recovery and governance perpetuate the damage they claim to fix. Through essays, interviews, poetry, and conversations, contributors explore themes ranging from energy justice and housing displacement to memory, migration, and artistic practice. They show how the ruins of colonial modernity—its failed infrastructures and broken promises—can be sources of solidarity  and imagination.

Contributors include: Elizabeth Aranda, Alvin Padilla–Babilonia, Raúl Santiago Bartolomei, Yarimar Bonilla. Mikey Cordero, Rafael V. Capó García, Mercedes Trelles Hernández, Mónica A. Jiménez, Natalia Lassalle–Morillo, Marcelo López–Dinardi, Bettina Pérez Martínez, Edgardo, Miranda–Rodríguez, Sarah Molinari, Ed Morales, Juan Carlos Rodríguez Rivera, Erika P. Rodríguez, Michael Rodríguez–Muñiz, Isabel Guzzardo Tamargo, Ana Teresa Toro, Fernando Tormos–Aponte, Érika Fontánez Torres.

The new issue of S&F Online brings together timely contributions within the emergent intersection of abolition feminism and social reproduction at a moment when carcerality continues to proliferate under new guises.

This framework makes visible the carceral state’s imbrication in the maintenance of everyday life while insisting on the long genealogy of feminist struggles that have always understood abolition as a reproductive question.

Guest editors Sarah Haley and Emily Thuma gather these contributions to examine how gendered, racialized, and classed forms of life are both sustained and constrained by carceral systems, and how abolitionist praxis reimagines and rebuilds the reproduction of the social otherwise. Abolition feminism here operates as analytic and an ethic: a refusal of state violence with a commitment to building alternative infrastructures of care, safety, and survival.

Radical Mothering was born out of the everyday lives of Mothers of the Kidnapped (part of the MAMAS Collective in Chicago), a group of primarily Black and Latiné working-class people who care for and defend incarcerated survivors of torture and frame-ups by the Chicago police. The more we center and politicize the collective practices of mother-activists, the closer we move toward a world without cages, without disposability, without state violence.

Created for people committed to ending the violence of police and prisons—but relevant to all liberation movements—this book affirms the everyday lives of those who persevere in love and struggle in the face of carceral violence and the pain it inflicts. The stories of these grassroots visionaries are at once steadfast, resourceful, and revelatory. A living toolkit for teaching and organizing, illustrations throughout the book provide readers with accessible entry points into the framework of Radical Mothering, supporting its application in real-life educational, organizational, and community contexts.

An invaluable guide to understanding the relationship between globalization, transnationalization and the development of social inequality.

Global Inequality addresses challenges in the transition to a multi-centered world. The contributions by international experts from different continents and different disciplines bring together current research on global inequality and social classes, covering a wide variety of thematic and spatial foci. This also includes a comparison of analyses of inequality in a global context. By bringing together analyses of inequalities in income, wealth, education, political influence, labor conditions, and socio-ecological inequalities, among others, the volume provides deeper insights into the ways in which global social inequalities are changing yet being reproduced in many ways in the twenty-first century. It calls for a discussion on the global dimensions of unequal power relations.

A succinct analysis of the process of super-exploitation in the present-day context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Drawing upon methodological insights from Hungarian Marxist István Mészáros, Brazilian Marxist Ruy Mauro Marini, and others, Adrián Sotelo Valencia demonstrates the pivotal importance of analyzing second order mediations as he builds an innovative, expanded model of structural dependency. The result is a more holistic, dialectical grasp of the contradictory dynamics of contemporary imperialism where Capital globally deploys technology for automation in an unsustainable drive for profit that displaces labor and increasingly threatens the reproduction of the global labor force. Empirical evidence presented throughout this work serves to reinforce its powerful, updated articulation of Marxist Dependency Theory.

Driving Productivity reconstructs the industrial histories of the American and German automotive industries, offering a fresh perspective on their development.

From the Fordist assembly line to Japanese lean production and Industry 4.0, Anthony J. Knowles critically examines major technical developments within the historical dynamics of capitalism. Both countries face the pressure to automate, transform labor, and increase efficiency, yet their responses differ due to divergent paradigms of integrating business, labor, and government. The book makes a strong case that improving productivity is a never-ending process that becomes a compulsory social imperative that industries must respond to but that is nevertheless responded to differently between countries.

Hellworld examines the megastructures of global capitalism, asking how revolutionary subjectivity might emerge within and against capital’s domesticating force.

Central to this inquiry is the planetary factory: the global value chains connecting disparate industrial territories, the rise of China, the fragmentation of global trade, and, above all, the simultaneous deagrarianization and deindustrialization of labor. These structural shifts are linked to subjective forces, exploring how social divisions shape resistance. Through an analysis of uprisings in Hong Kong, Thailand, Sudan, and beyond, Hellworld considers whether this system—inescapable as it seems—can, perhaps, be destroyed.

This issue features a forum led by Lea Ypi on the real crisis fueling the war on immigrants, with responses from Paulina Ochoa Espejo, Daniel Denvir, T. Alexander Aleinikoff, Chandran Kukathas, Ayelet Shachar, and Dara Lind.

Also in this issue:

• Panashe Chigumadzi on the language of “apartheid” and “settler colonialism” in political resistance, from South Africa to Israel
• Aaron Labaree on the moral filmmaking of the late Marcel Ophuls
• Honora Spicer on the history of Fort Bliss, the site of the largest immigration detention center in U.S. history
• Emily Baughan on the broken care economy, reviewing books by Emily Callaci, Gabriel Winant, and Premilla Nadasen
• Lorna Finlayson on the anti-gender backlash, reviewing books by Judith Butler, Sophie Lewis, and Andrea Dworkin

Plus columns by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò and David Austin Walsh; essays by Joan Wallach Scott, Lily Hu, Eric Reinhart, and Joseph Margulies; and a special 50th anniversary archive feature with introductions from Wajahat Ali, Elaine Scarry, Becca Rothfeld, Samuel Moyn, David Adler, and Greg Grandin.

Humans in the Cyber Loop addresses the evolving role of humans in cyberspace, analyzing how digital interactions and advancements both shape and are shaped by societal, economic, and political factors.

The book systematically explores social cybersecurity, the impact of disinformation on democratic processes, the influence of social media on public opinion, and the implications of algorithmic decision-making to demonstrate the importance of building societal resilience to cyberattacks and to better understand specific needs and challenges in this domain.

Asian Canada is Burning invites us to trouble the mobilization of “anti-Asian hate” in the aftermath of COVID-19 pandemic.

Bringing together activists, organizers, academic, and artists, this book explores the historical and contemporary conditions that make theorizing “Asian Canadian” feasible. Grounded in a transnational queer and feminist lens, this book also aims to envision possible futures and solidarities. Ultimately, this collection is concerned with moments and places of tensions, confrontations, relations, and solidarity. We offer stories of insurgent encounters as people who identify as “Asian” navigate and implicate settler colonial nation-state to make new dreams, histories and intimacies.

In the early 19th century, a new social collective emerged out of impoverished artisans, urban rabble, wandering rural lower classes, bankrupt aristocrats and precarious intellectuals, one that would soon be called the proletariat. But this did not yet exist as a unified, homogeneous class with affiliated political parties. The motley appearance, the dreams and longings of these figures, torn from all economic certainties, found new forms of narration in romantic novellas, reportages, social-statistical studies, and monthly bulletins.

But soon enough, these disorderly, violent, nostalgic, errant, and utopian figures were denigrated as reactionary and anarchic by the heads of the labour movement, since they did not fit into their grand linear vision of progress. In The Poetry of Class, Patrick Eiden-Offe tells the story of this nascent class, tracing the making of the proletariat in Vörmarz Germany (1815–1848) through the writings of figures like Ludwig Tieck, Moses Hess, Wilhelm Weitling, Georg Weerth, Friedrich Engels, Louise Otto-Peters, Ernst Willkomm, and Georg Büchner, and in so doing, revealing a striking similarity to the disorderly classes of today.

André Nassif is an Associate Professor at Fluminense Federal University, Brazil, specializing in Macroeconomics, Economic Development, and International Economics. A former BNDES economist, he has taught globally and published widely in academic journals and edited volumes.

To revive the fortunes of socialism we must articulate a credible and attractive alternative. The Constitution of Socialism takes a decisive step in this direction.

Offering an original synthesis of socialism and republicanism, the book discusses how society can move beyond capitalism. It outlines an institutional and political framework for a socialist future, in which collective decision-making about the use and allocation of resources directly responds to social interests. Through institutional design, this study explores the feasibility criteria of post-capitalism and sketches the contours and features of a viable model of socialism.

A critical reassessment of the life and work of the path-breaking economic historian Werner Sombart.

Sombart is perhaps best known as the inventor of the concept of Spätkapitalismus (Late Capitalism) and a follower (for some time) of Hitler’s National Socialism. Yet he is still a forgotten major figure in German social science. As the author of a widely-read exposition on socialism and social movements (trade unions), the monumental Der moderne Kapitalismus, and a controversial monograph on the role of the Jews in the birth of capitalism, he is shown in this book in the broader context of the disputes in the first decades of the 20th century involving Marxists, German Jews and his friend Max Weber.

The Capital / Logic Debate is the first of two volumes on how Marx used Hegel's Logic in his Capital.

Andy Blunden reviews the current literature on the topic with detailed reviews of the contribution of 10 authors, representing the spectrum of approaches. Finding that present-day writers fail to understand the Logic and misrepresent Capital as a work of Logic, Blunden focuses on the passage in the Logic entitled "The Idea of the True," which is ignored by every writer in the present-day debate.

A new collection of essays on two of the most important communist philosophers of our time: Alain Badiou and Toni Negri.

From the “red years” that followed the social explosion of May ’68 into the first decades of the twenty-first century, Badiou and Negri never abandoned their commitment to a militant politics of equality. Meanwhile, they produced two of the most imposing and consequential bodies of philosophical writing in the communist tradition. Alberto Toscano’s essays tackle multiple dimensions of their work—from ontology to biopolitics, from art to violence, from the theory of capitalism to the challenge of counter-revolution. But all of them are also efforts to explore and answer a single question: What does it mean to be a communist in philosophy?

First published in 1969, this classic account of the emergence of the British Communist Party has stood the test of time. Today, it remains indispensable reading for anyone interested in socialist history in Britain.

Walter Kendall has been widely praised for his rich contextualisation of the events and forensic examination of both the national and international factors influencing the nativity of the British Communist Party. His book imaginatively recuperates and critically evaluates the politics of the party’s predecessors, notably the British Socialist Party and the Socialist Labour Party, the radical upsurge of 1910–14, the wartime shop-steward’s movement, the resonance of the Russian Revolution, and the role of the Comintern in shaping British Communism. Vivid portraits of the human actors — H M Hyndman, John Maclean, Arthur MacManus and Theodore Rothstein — illuminate the text. John McIlroy has provided a detailed Introduction to this republication.

Literature and Revolution in Modern China sets out to rescue Lu Xun from the distortion of his legacy by the Chinese Communist literary establishment, Mao Zedong, and Stalinism.

The book reconstructs Lu Xun’s literary theory and political position within its historical context, considering Trotsky’s literary theory and his relationship with the Chinese Trotskyists and the Chinese Communist Party. In doing so, Nagahori Yuzo corrects errors and shortcomings in conventional studies of Lu Xun. At the same time, the book aims to show how Lu Xun was used by the Chinese Communists and Mao Zedong for political purposes, beginning in the Yan’an years and culminating during the Cultural Revolution.

Beyond the Tricolour explores the history of internationalism through individuals and political organizations who took practical action in defense of internationalist principles.

Birchall looks at committed internationalists who argued against nationalism, racism and war but have too often been neglected by mainstream history. The book focuses on the context of French history, and the French socialist and working-class movement in particular. Beginning from the defense of Dreyfus against anti-Semitism, it covers antimilitarism before 1914, opposition to the First World War, the advent of Communism, then the rise of Stalinism, fraternization with German soldiers during the Nazi occupation, and support for national independence in Indochina and Algeria.

A new English translation of Isaak Illich Rubin’s classic Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value.

First published in the Soviet Union in 1923, Rubin’s book sparked a fierce value controversy with contemporary Soviet economists during the late 1920s. As such, the present translation is conceived as a variorum edition, including all the essential supplementary materials related to this foundational work in Marx’s value theory, published here in English for the first time. In addition to Rubin’s main work, this edition includes his four most important related publications, as well as ten debate articles written and published by his contemporary proponents and opponents.