Haymarket Books

The rise of capitalism to global dominance is still largely associated – by both laypeople and Marxist historians – with the industrial capitalism that made its decisive breakthrough in 18th century Britain. Jairus Banaji’s new work reaches back centuries and traverses vast distances to argue that this leap was preceded by a long era of distinct “commercial capitalism”, which reorganised labor and production on a world scale to a degree hitherto rarely appreciated.

Rather than a picture centred solely on Europe, we enter a diverse and vibrant world. Banaji reveals the cantons of Muslim merchants trading in Guangzhou since the eighth century, the 3,000 European traders recorded in Alexandria in 1216, the Genoese, Venetians and Spanish Jews battling for commercial dominance of Constantinople and later Istanbul. We are left with a rich and global portrait of a world constantly in motion, tied together and increasingly dominated by a pre-industrial capitalism. The rise of Europe to world domination, in this view, has nothing to do with any unique genius, but rather a distinct fusion of commercial capitalism with state power.

Making use of the theoretical tools of Marxist critical sociology, Ruy Braga proposes an innovative reading of the social history of Brazil—from Fordist populism to the Lulista hegemony—using the "politics of the precariat" as an analytical vector. Braga's analysis seeks to explain both economic and structural processes (peripheral Fordism, its crisis, the transition to financialised post-Fordism) and the subjective dimension of the proletariat suffering from precarity (the anxiety of the subordinate, the preoccupation of the worker, the plebeian or classist drive of the exploited). At the moment when the plebeian drive is once again stimulating strike activity in the country, underlined by the protests that have recently shaken Brazil, this book impels us to reflect on the limits of the current model of Brazilian development.

First published in Portuguese as A política do precariado: do populismo à hegemonia lulista by Boitempo Editorial in 2012.

In this important contribution to political theory, Massimo Modonesi develops the thesis that a Marxist theory of political action can be developed from the notion of antagonism, defined as a distinctive feature of struggle and of the political experience of insubordination. The author argues this central idea with close reference to the concept of class struggle. He advances a theoretical proposal based on the triad subalternity-antagonism-autonomy, as well as the uneven and combined character of the processes of political subjectification. At the center of this triad, the concept of antagonism stands out as a logical principle and the core of a Marxist theory of political action. At the same time, subalternism reappears frequently, as the counter-pole of antagonistic activation and autonomous practices, and as the root of what Antonio Gramsci calls 'passive revolutions'.

To the question of "what is art?", it is often simply responded that art is whatever is produced by the artist. For John Molyneux, this clearly circular answer is deeply unsatisfying. In a tour de force spanning renaissance Italy and the Dutch Republic to contemporary leading figures, The Dialectics of Art instead approaches its subject matter as a distinct field of creative human labour that emerges alongside and in opposition to the alienation and commodification brought about by capitalism. The pieces and individuals Molyneux examines -- from Michelangelo’s Slaves to Rembrandts Jewish Bride to the vast drip paintings of Jackson Pollock – are presented as embodying the social contradictions of their times, giving art an inherently political relevance.

In its relationship of creative and dialectical tension to prevailing social relationships and norms, such art points beyond the existing order of things, hinting at a potential future society not based on alienated labour in which creative production becomes the property and practice of all.

In Drums of War, Drums of Development, Jim Glassman analyses the geopolitical economy of industrial development in East and Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War era, showing how it was shaped by the collaborative planning of US and Asian elites. Challenging both neoliberal and neo-Weberian accounts of East Asian development, Glassman offers evidence that the growth of industry (the "East Asian miracle") was deeply affected by the geopolitics of war and military spending (the "East Asian massacres"). Thus, while Asian industrial development has been presented as providing models for emulation, Glassman cautions that this industrial dynamism was a product of Pacific ruling class manoeuvring which left a contradictory legacy of rapid growth, death, and ongoing challenges for development and democracy.

Leo Panitch, Sam Gindin, and Stephen Maher provide a newly updated and expanded primer for twenty-first century democratic socialists. The Socialist Challenge Today presents an essential historical, theoretical, and critical perspective for understanding the potential as well as the limits of three important recent phenomena: the Sanders electoral insurgency in the United States; the Syriza experience in Greece; and Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom. The renowned coauthors compellingly convey the importance of developing strategic and practical capacities to democratically transform state structures so as to render them fit for realizing collective democracy, social equality, sustainable ecology, and human solidarity.

In Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital, Marina Vishmidt offers a new perspective on one of the main categories of capitalist life in the historical present. Writing not under the shadow but in the spirit of Adorno's negative dialectic, her work pursues speculation through its contested terrains of philosophy, finance, and art, to arrive at the most detailed analysis that we now possess of the role of speculation in the shaping of subjectivity by value relations. Featuring detailed critical discussions of recent tendencies in the artistic representation of labour, and a brilliant reconstruction of the philosophical concept of the speculative from its origins in German Romanticism, Speculation as a Mode of Production is an essential, widescreen theorisation of capital's drive to self-expansion, and an urgent corrective to the narrow and one-sided periodisations to which it is most commonly subjected.

The rise of capitalism to global dominance is still largely associated – by both laypeople and Marxist historians – with the industrial capitalism that made its decisive breakthrough in 18th century Britain. Jairus Banaji’s new work reaches back centuries and traverses vast distances to argue that this leap was preceded by a long era of distinct “commercial capitalism”, which reorganised labor and production on a world scale to a degree hitherto rarely appreciated.

Rather than a picture centred solely on Europe, we enter a diverse and vibrant world. Banaji reveals the cantons of Muslim merchants trading in Guangzhou since the eighth century, the 3,000 European traders recorded in Alexandria in 1216, the Genoese, Venetians and Spanish Jews battling for commercial dominance of Constantinople and later Istanbul. We are left with a rich and global portrait of a world constantly in motion, tied together and increasingly dominated by a pre-industrial capitalism. The rise of Europe to world domination, in this view, has nothing to do with any unique genius, but rather a distinct fusion of commercial capitalism with state power.

In the first full-length biography of Alexander Bogdanov, James D. White traces the intellectual development of this key socialist thinker, situating his ideas in the context of the Russian revolutionary movement. This sweeping and informative volume examines the part Bogdanov played in the origins of Bolshevism, his role in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and his conflict with Lenin which lasted well after the revolution. The book goes on to examine Bogdanov's intellectually legacy—a legacy that, despite being deliberately obscured and distorted, was considerable and of lasting significance.

Bogdanov was an original and influential interpreter of Marx. He attained mastery of many spheres of knowledge, and employed this varied expertise in writing his chief theoretical work, Tectology, which anticipates modern systems theory.

Few documents have had more of an impact on the course of history as has the Communist Manifesto. From its famous opening lines—"A specter is haunting Europe: the specter of Communism"—to its final rallying cry—"Workers of the world unite!"—the words of Marx and Engels have moved millions to join in the struggle against capitalism. But they have also inspired a legion of critics, detractors, and even a few despots to intentionally distort their meanings so as to sow confusion and justify untold horrors.

According to Hal Draper, these mis-readings have, in part, been made possible by the enduring prevalence of translations from the original German that fail to accurately capture the intended meaning of certain key phrases. In this magisterial volume, Draper assembles the original German text, the first English translation, the officially authorized English translation—providing enlightening commentary throughout—as well as his own new translation of the pamphlet.

In most accounts of the origins of money we are offered pleasant tales in which it arises to the mutual benefit of all parties as a result of barter. In this groundbreaking study David McNally reveals the true story of money’s origins and development as one of violence and human bondage. Money’s emergence and its transformation are shown to be intimately connected to the buying and selling of slaves and the waging of war. Blood and Money demonstrates the ways that money has “internalized” its violent origins, making clear that it has become a concentrated force of social power and domination. Where Adam Smith observed that monetary wealth represents “command over labor,” this paradigm shifting book amends his view to define money as comprising the command over persons and their bodies.

In Marx on Capitalism, James Furner offers a new answer to the fundamental question of Marx and Marxism: can a thesis connecting capital, the state and classes with the desirability of socialism be developed from an analysis of the commodity? The Interaction-Recognition-Antinomy Thesis is anchored in a systematic retranslation of Marx's writings. It provides an antinomy-based strategy for grounding the value of social humanity in working-class agency, facilitates a dialectical derivation of political representation, and condemns capitalism as unjust without appeal to rights.

The first book to comprehensively examine how the Black Panther Party has directly shaped the practices and ideas that have animated grassroots activism in the decades since its decline, Black Power Afterlives represents a major scholarly achievement as well as an important resource for today's activists. Through its focus on the enduring impact of the Black Panther Party, this volume expands the historiography of Black Power studies beyond the 1960s-70s and serves as a bridge between studies of the BPP during its organizational existence and studies of present-day Black activism, allowing today's readers and organizers to situate themselves in a long lineage of liberation movements.

Suicides, excessive overtime, and hostility and violence on the factory floor in China. Drawing on vivid testimonies from rural migrant workers, student interns, managers and trade union staff, Dying for an iPhone is a devastating expose of two of the world’s most powerful companies: Foxconn and Apple.

As the leading manufacturer of iPhones, iPads, and Kindles, and employing one million workers in China alone, Taiwanese-invested Foxconn’s drive to dominate global electronics manufacturing has aligned perfectly with China’s goal of becoming the world leader in technology. This book reveals the human cost of that ambition and what our demands for the newest and best technology means for workers.

Foxconn workers have repeatedly demonstrated their power to strike at key nodes of transnational production, challenge management and the Chinese state, and confront global tech behemoths. Dying for an iPhone allows us to assess the impact of global capitalism’s deepening crisis on workers.’ 

Giroux exposes the corporate forces at play and charts a clear-minded and inspired course of action out of the shadows of market-driven education policy. Championing the youth around the globe who have dared to resist the bartering of their future, he calls upon public intellectuals—as well as all people concerned about the future of democracy—to speak out and defend the university as a site of critical learning and democratic promise.

In this updated edition, Giroux puts all of this into the context of the Trump era, arguing that education remains a key battleground for the fight against authoritarianism.

This volume includes essential texts—many available here in English for the first time; some available for the first time in any language—by the influential revolutionary Marxist Henryk Grossman. This collection pulls from monographs, articles, essays, letters, and manuscript material to assemble Grossman's most important contributions on economic theory. The first in four volumes of Grossman's works, this collection provides the basis for a deeper understanding of his contribution to Marxist economic theory and the critique of bourgeois economics. Rick Kuhn's essential introduction explains the contexts in which the pieces were written and establishes their contemporary relevance.

In 2010 Greece entered a period of extreme austerity measures, but also of intense struggles and protests. Social and political crisis led to tectonic shifts in the political landscape and the rise to power of SYRIZA. Despite the impressive level of resistance expressed through the 2015 referendum, however, the Troika of the European Union (EU), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and European Common Bank (ECB) managed to impose the continuation of the same politics of austerity, privatisation, and neoliberal reform.

This social and political sequence poses important theoretical and analytical questions regarding capitalist crisis, public debt, European integration, political crisis, the new forms of protest and social movements, and the rise of neo-fascist parties. It also brings forward many pressing questions regarding radical left-wing strategy. The contributions in this volume attempt, from different perspectives, to deal with some of these theoretical and strategic questions using the Greek experience as a case study.

Contributors include: George Economakis, Stavros Mavroudeas, Ioannis Zisimopoulos, Alexios Anastasiadis, Maria Markaki, George Androulakis, Despina Paraskeva-Veloudogianni, Eirini Gaitanou, Alexandros Chrysis, Euclid Tsakalotos, Spyros Sakellaropoulos, Panagiotis Sotiris, Giannis Kouzis, Yiorgos Vassalos, Christos Laskos, Angelos Kontogiannis-Mandros.

In most accounts of the origins of money we are offered pleasant tales in which it arises to the mutual benefit of all parties as a result of barter. In this groundbreaking study David McNally reveals the true story of money’s origins and development as one of violence and human bondage. Money’s emergence and its transformation are shown to be intimately connected to the buying and selling of slaves and the waging of war. Blood and Money demonstrates the ways that money has “internalized” its violent origins, making clear that it has become a concentrated force of social power and domination. Where Adam Smith observed that monetary wealth represents “command over labor,” this paradigm shifting book amends his view to define money as comprising the command over persons and their bodies.

Again, Dangerous Visions: Essays in Cultural Materialism brings together twenty-six essays charting the development of Andrew Milner's distinctively Orwellian version of cultural materialism between 1981 and 2015. The essays address three substantive areas: the sociology of literature, cultural materialism and the cultural politics of the New Left, and utopian and science fiction studies. They are bookended by two conversations between Milner and his editor J.R. Burgmann, the first looking back retrospectively on the development of Milner's thought, the second looking forward prospectively towards the future of academia, the political left and science fiction.

A landmark literary anthology of poems, stories, and essays, Choice Words collects essential voices that renew our courage in the struggle to defend reproductive rights. Twenty years in the making, the book spans continents and centuries. This collection magnifies the voices of people reclaiming the sole authorship of their abortion experiences. These essays, poems, and prose are a testament to the profound political power of defying shame.

Contributors include Ai, Amy Tan, Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, Bobbie Louise Hawkins. Camonghne Felix, Carol Muske-Dukes, Diane di Prima, Dorothy Parker, Gloria Naylor, Gloria Steinem, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jean Rhys, Joyce Carol Oates, Judith Arcana, Kathy Acker, Langston Hughes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Lindy West, Lucille Clifton, Mahogany L. Browne, Margaret Atwood, Molly Peacock, Ntozake Shange, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Sharon Doubiago, Sharon Olds, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Sholeh Wolpe, Ursula Le Guin, and Vi Khi Nao.

Rosa Luxemburg, brilliant early 20th century German revolutionary, comes alive in a rich set of essays on her life, ideas, and lasting influence. The essays deal not only with her remarkable contributions to political, social and economic theory, but also touch on her vibrant personality and intimate friendships. This collection, the fruit of more than four decades of involvement with Luxemburg's work, simultaneously showcases her penetratingly intellectual, political and deeply humanistic qualities.

Few documents have had more of an impact on the course of history as has the Communist Manifesto. From its famous opening lines—"A specter is haunting Europe: the specter of Communism"—to its final rallying cry—"Workers of the world unite!"—the words of Marx and Engels have moved millions to join in the struggle against capitalism. But they have also inspired a legion of critics, detractors, and even a few despots to intentionally distort their meanings so as to sow confusion and justify untold horrors.

According to Hal Draper, these mis-readings have, in part, been made possible by the enduring prevalence of translations from the original German that fail to accurately capture the intended meaning of certain key phrases. In this magisterial volume, Draper assembles the original German text, the first English translation, the officially authorized English translation—providing enlightening commentary throughout—as well as his own new translation of the pamphlet.

The tragedy of American science is that its direction is determined by private profit rather than by the desire to improve the human condition. As a result, Conner argues, Big Science has been irredeemably corrupted by Big Money. This corruption threatens the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the medicines we take.

The Tragedy of American Science explores how the U.S. economy’s addiction to military spending distorts and deforms science by making it overwhelmingly subservient to military interests. The primary motive driving American science and technology has become the search for new and more efficient ways to kill people. This transforms science from the classic ideal of a creative force for the advancement of humankind into its destructive and antihuman opposite. That those trillions of dollars in resources and scientific talent are not devoted to solving the problems of poverty, disease, and environmental destruction is one of the greatest tragedies of our times.

While the underlying problems may appear intractable, Conner compellingly argues that replacing the current science-for-profit system with a science-for-human-needs system is not an impossible, utopian dream. But to get there, we’ll need to grapple with this important history.

This is a 10-pack of the City of Women poster, which includes an additional free display copy. Individual copies of the poster are also available under ISBN 9781642590197.

The iconic 20” x 20” “City of Women” map, updated for 2019 with dozens of new NYC icons including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cardi B, and all the All-Girl Robotics Teams of the Bronx.

“How does it impact our imaginations that so many places in so many cities are named after men and so few after women? What kind of landscape do we move through when streets and parks and statues and bridges are gendered—Astor Place, Lafayette Street, Madison Avenue, Lincoln Center, Washington Square, the Frick, Rockefeller Center, Penn Station, the Bronx, the Hudson—and it’s usually one gender, and not another? What kind of silence arises in places that so seldom speak of and to women? This map was made to sing the praises of the extraordinary women who have, since the beginning, been shapers and heroes of this city that has always been, secretly, a City of Women. And why not the subway? This is a history still emerging from underground, a reminder that it’s all connected, and that we get around.” —Rebecca Solnit

Cartography by Molly Roy. Design by Lia Tjandra. Adapted from the original NYC Subway Map. 

If the stories they tell about themselves are to be believed, all of the tech giants—Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon—were built from the ground up through hard work, a few good ideas, and the entrepreneurial daring to seize an opportunity when it presented itself.

With searing wit and blistering commentary Bit Tyrants provides an urgent corrective to this froth of board room marketing copy that is so often passed off as analysis. For fans of corporate fairy-tales there are no shortage of official histories that celebrate the innovative genius of Steve Jobs, liberal commentators who fall over themselves to laude Bill Gates's selfless philanthropy, or politicians who will tell us to listen to Mark Zuckerberg for advice on how to protect our democracy from foreign influence.

In this highly unauthorized account of the Big Five's origins, Rob Larson sets the record straight, and in the process shreds every focus-grouped bromide about corporate benevolence he could get his hands on. Those readers unwilling to smile and nod as every day we become more dependent on our phones and apps to do our chores, our jobs, and our socializing can take heart as Larson provides us with maps to all the shallow graves, skeleton filled closets, and invective laced emails Big Tech left behind on its ascent to power. His withering analysis will help readers crack the code of the economic dynamics that allowed these companies to become near-monopolies very early on, and, with a little bit of luck, his calls for digital socialism might just inspire a viral movement for online revolution.

The Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade has generated a critical urgency for this landmark literary anthology of poems, stories, and essays. Choice Words collects essential voices that renew our courage in the struggle to defend reproductive rights. Twenty years in the making, the book spans continents and centuries. This collection magnifies the voices of people reclaiming the sole authorship of their abortion experiences. These essays, poems, and prose are a testament to the profound political power of defying shame.

Contributors include Ai, Amy Tan, Anne Sexton, Audre Lorde, Bobbie Louise Hawkins. Camonghne Felix, Carol Muske-Dukes, Diane di Prima, Dorothy Parker, Gloria Naylor, Gloria Steinem, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jean Rhys, Joyce Carol Oates, Judith Arcana, Kathy Acker, Langston Hughes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Lindy West, Lucille Clifton, Mahogany L. Browne, Margaret Atwood, Molly Peacock, Ntozake Shange, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Sharon Doubiago, Sharon Olds, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Sholeh Wolpe, Ursula Le Guin, and Vi Khi Nao.

Giroux exposes the corporate forces at play and charts a clear-minded and inspired course of action out of the shadows of market-driven education policy. Championing the youth around the globe who have dared to resist the bartering of their future, he calls upon public intellectuals—as well as all people concerned about the future of democracy—to speak out and defend the university as a site of critical learning and democratic promise.

In this updated edition, Giroux puts all of this into the context of the Trump era, arguing that education remains a key battleground for the fight against authoritarianism.

Rosa Luxemburg, brilliant early 20th century German revolutionary, comes alive in a rich set of essays on her life, ideas, and lasting influence. The essays deal not only with her remarkable contributions to political, social and economic theory, but also touch on her vibrant personality and intimate friendships. This collection, the fruit of more than four decades of involvement with Luxemburg's work, simultaneously showcases her penetratingly intellectual, political and deeply humanistic qualities.

“Can I kick it?”
“Yes you can!”
—A Tribe Called Quest

Situated squarely in the oral traditions of hip-hop and BreakBeat Poetry, Idris Goodwin’s work bridges the divide between the reader and the poet. Combining the tongue-in-cheek and the irreverent with the melancholy and incisive, Goodwin’s poetry samples and re-purposes pop-culture—from Back to the Future to Prince, Missy Elliot to Dominique Wilkins—in order to reflect and remix the stories we tell ourselves and each other in order to live.

2020 Book of the Year • International Labor History Association
Honorable Mention • Philip Taft Labor History Prize

This rich history details the bitter, deep-rooted conflict between industrial behemoth International Harvester and the uniquely radical Farm Equipment Workers union. The Long Deep Grudge makes clear that class warfare has been, and remains, integral to the American experience, providing up-close-and-personal and long-view perspectives from both sides of the battle lines.

International Harvester – and the McCormick family that largely controlled it – garnered a reputation for bare-knuckled union-busting in the 1880s, but in the 20th century also pioneered sophisticated union-avoidance techniques that have since become standard corporate practice. On the other side the militant Farm Equipment Workers union, connected to the Communist Party, mounted a vociferous challenge to the cooperative ethos that came to define the American labor movement after World War II.

This evocative account, stretching back to the nineteenth century and carried through to the present, reads like a novel. Biographical sketches of McCormick family members, union officials and rank-and-file workers are woven into the narrative, along with anarchists, jazz musicians, Wall Street financiers, civil rights crusaders, and mob lawyers. It touches on pivotal moments and movements as wide-ranging as the Haymarket "riot," the Flint sit-down strikes, the Memorial Day Massacre, the McCarthy-era anti-communist purges, and America's late 20th-century industrial decline.

Both Harvester and the FE are now gone, but this largely forgotten clash helps explain the crisis of yawning inequality now facing US workers, and provides alternative models from the past that can instruct and inspire those engaged in radical, working class struggles today.

This poignant play, written by current and formerly incarcerated authors, uses gripping truths and soulful dialogue to reveal the human cost of America’s for-profit justice system. The story follows Omar, pulled back into the prison system after trying to lift his family out of poverty, who struggles to maintain a sense of humanity while fighting to keep his loved ones close.

According to NJ.com, “From institutionalized racism to addiction to the prison-industrial complex, this is a play about a great many large, pressing social challenges, but at its core it is a play about one family and its struggles to remain united as their world steadily crumbles. Impactful, warm, and unrelenting, this play that began as an experiment turns out to be an excellent examination of the human cost of a harsh and inhospitable world.”

For every print copy of Caged purchased from Haymarket Books through June 1, Haymarket will donate a copy of the book to prisoners and their families working with the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons Consortium (NJ-STEP). 

All profits from the book will go to a prison re-entry fund run by The Second Presbyterian Church of Elizabeth, New Jersey to help the playwrights secure housing and continue their schooling upon release.

Eugene V. Debs exploded upon the national scene in 1894 as the leader of a sensational strike by his American Railway Union (ARU) against the Pullman Parlor Car Company—a job stoppage which paralyzed the country's transportation network for nearly two weeks. On January 1, 1897, the polarizing public figure Debs declared his allegiance to international socialism, emerging as the most widely recognized socialist in America. He would thereafter tour the country relentlessly, speaking to large audiences and writing hundreds of articles on political and economic themes over the ensuing three decades.

Debs almost singlehandedly established a new political party, the Social Democracy of America, in the summer of 1897, building upon the remnants of the depleted ARU. The organization advanced a double agenda, seeking to promote both electoral politics and the construction of socialist colonies on the frontier—a dual focus which led to internal tensions and a bitter split. In 1898 Debs cast his lot with Milwaukee publisher Victor L. Berger in a new organization dedicated to political action, the Social Democratic Party of America.

After a split of the older and larger Socialist Labor Party of America in 1899, protracted unity discussions between the Debs group and an organized body of former SLP dissidents ensued. This unity effort was marked by Debs's first run for president of the United States on a joint Social Democratic ticket in November 1900. After heated on-again off-again negotiation between the two groups, a marriage was finally brokered in the summer of 1901 and the Socialist Party of America was launched. The party would soon grow to become the third biggest in American politics, with Debs enthusiastically heading the Socialist ticket in 1904 in the second of his five runs for the presidency.

In Righteous Gentiles: Religion, Identity, and Myth in John Hagee's Christians United for Israel, Sean Durbin offers a critical analysis of America's largest Pro-Israel organization, Christians United for Israel, along with its critics and collaborators. Although many observers focus on Christian Zionism's influence on American foreign policy, or whether or not Christian Zionism is 'truly' religious, Righteous Gentiles takes a different approach.

Through his creative and critical analysis of Christian Zionists' rhetoric and mythmaking strategies, Durbin demonstrates how they represent their identities and political activities as authentically religious. At the same time, Durbin examines the role that Jews and the state of Israel play as vehicles or empty signifiers through which Christian Zionist truth claims are represented as manifestly real.

If the stories they tell about themselves are to be believed, all of the tech giants—Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon—were built from the ground up through hard work, a few good ideas, and the entrepreneurial daring to seize an opportunity when it presented itself.

With searing wit and blistering commentary Bit Tyrants provides an urgent corrective to this froth of board room marketing copy that is so often passed off as analysis. For fans of corporate fairy-tales there are no shortage of official histories that celebrate the innovative genius of Steve Jobs, liberal commentators who fall over themselves to laude Bill Gates's selfless philanthropy, or politicians who will tell us to listen to Mark Zuckerberg for advice on how to protect our democracy from foreign influence.

In this highly unauthorized account of the Big Five's origins, Rob Larson sets the record straight, and in the process shreds every focus-grouped bromide about corporate benevolence he could get his hands on. Those readers unwilling to smile and nod as every day we become more dependent on our phones and apps to do our chores, our jobs, and our socializing can take heart as Larson provides us with maps to all the shallow graves, skeleton filled closets, and invective laced emails Big Tech left behind on its ascent to power. His withering analysis will help readers crack the code of the economic dynamics that allowed these companies to become near-monopolies very early on, and, with a little bit of luck, his calls for digital socialism might just inspire a viral movement for online revolution.

Part theory, part op-ed, The Game is Not a Game, is an affecting, sobering and unflinching examination of the good and evil of the sports industry. Both liberating and provocative, Jackson explores the role sports play in American society and also the hypocritical standards, which the athletes that play them are often judged. The Game is Not a Game is not intended to be a “safe space.” It breaks the typical sports literary format and rules, challenging accepted ideology, and pushing the comfort zones and boundaries of mainstream sports media. Chapters explore “America’s Miseducation of LeBron James;” “The Disrespect of Serena Williams’ G.O.A.T.ness;” the duplicity of the NFL with the plight of Colin Kaepernick; the cultural bias of analytics; the power of social activism verses the power and politics of professional sports ownership− from the perspective of a writer considered one of the leading voices of social, political and racial activism in sports media.

Theory as Critique, while discussing many central issues of Marxian theory, has two main emphases: First, as the title suggests, it takes seriously Capital’s claim to be a critique of economic theory, rather than a contribution to political economy. Understanding what this means, it shows, goes far to unravelling many difficulties traditionally found in Marx’s book, from the nature of his theory of class to the 'transformation problem'. Secondly, Mattick’s volume carefully explores how to bridge the gap between the extreme abstraction of Marx’s ideas and the complex reality that they are intended to help us understand.

Against the usual argument heard most frequently on the left, that there is no subject for a radical politics together with its form of political mobilization, Tom Brass asserts that there is - but in the absence of a radical leftist project, this subject has in the past transferred, and in many instances is still transferring, his/her support to the radical politics on offer from the other end of the ideological spectrum. The combination of, on the one hand, a globally expanding industrial reserve army, generating ever more intense competition in the labour markets of capitalism, and, on the other, the endorsement by many on the left not of class but rather of non-class identities espoused by the 'new' populist postmodernism, has fuelled what can only be described as a perfect political storm.

“Can I kick it?”
“Yes you can!”
—A Tribe Called Quest

Situated squarely in the oral traditions of hip-hop and BreakBeat Poetry, Idris Goodwin’s work bridges the divide between the reader and the poet. Combining the tongue-in-cheek and the irreverent with the melancholy and incisive, Goodwin’s poetry samples and re-purposes pop-culture—from Back to the Future to Prince, Missy Elliot to Dominique Wilkins—in order to reflect and remix the stories we tell ourselves and each other in order to live.

Everything Must Go is an illustrated collection of poems in the spirit of a graphic novel, a collaboration between poet Kevin Coval and illustrator Langston Allston. The book celebrates Chicago’s Wicker Park in the late 1990’s, Coval’s home as a young artist, the ancestral neighborhood of his forebears, and a vibrant enclave populated by colorful characters. Allston’s illustrations honor the neighborhood as it once was, before gentrification remade it. The book excavates and mourns that which has been lost in transition and serves as a template for understanding the process of displacement and reinvention currently reshaping American cities.

Developmentalist Cities addresses the missing urban story in research on East Asian developmentalism and the missing developmentalist story in studies of East Asian urbanization. It does so by promoting interdisciplinary research into the subject of urban developmentalism: a term that editors Jamie Doucette and Bae-Gyoon Park use to highlight the particular nature of the urban as a site of and for developmentalist intervention. The contributors to this volume deepen this concept by examining the legacy of how Cold War and post-Cold War geopolitical economy, spaces of exception (from special zones to industrial districts), and diverse forms of expertise have helped produce urban space in East Asia.

Contributors: Carolyn Cartier, Christina Kim Chilcote, Young Jin Choi, Jamie Doucette, Eli Friedman, Jim Glassman, Heidi Gottfried, Laam Hae, Jinn-yuh Hsu, Iam Chong Ip, Jin-Bum Jang, Soo-Hyun Kim, Jana M. Kleibert, Kah Wee Lee, Seung-Ook Lee, Christina Moon, Bae-Gyoon Park, Hyun Bang Shin.

Focusing on the processes of accumulation, concentration and centralisation of capital, this book explains the transnationalisation of capital and its impact on Latin America and Brazil. The first chapter addresses the logic of these processes from a Marxian perspective. The second chapter shows how this movement of capital expands into some Latin American countries, and how it subsequently retracts in the 1990s process of global centralisation. The third chapter evaluates Latin American strategies to attract capital by taking a subordinate position to capital's global movement. The last two chapters focus on Brazil's development strategy in the face of the alternating expansion and contraction of capital, and point out the vulnerability of Latin American countries when their development is subordinate to transnational capital. First published in Portuguese as Subordinação consentida: capital multinacional no processo de acumulação da América Latina e Brasil by Annablume Editora/Fapesp in 2006.

WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD

Powerhouse, world-renowned LGBTQ poet and spoken-word artist Staceyann Chin curates the first full-length collection of her poems.

Crossfire collects Staceyann Chin's empowering, feminist-LGBTQ-Caribbean, activist-driven poetry for the first time in a single book.

According to The New York Times, Chin is “sassy, rageful and sometimes softly self-mocking.” The Advocate says that her poems, “combine hilarious one-liners with a refusal to conform” and note “Chin is out to confront more than just the straight world.”

Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz was an extraordinary figure on the Polish political scene at the turn of the 20th century. A Marxist and patriot, academic and politician, Kelles-Krauz was most known for his efforts to reconcile the needs of the nation with international socialism. This volume, however, offers a selection of his writings centered on the history of ideas, published for the first time in English. Kelles-Krauz’s works, while Marxist at heart, linked ideas stemming from the concepts of German idealists, French positivists, as well as contemporary sociologists who offered a bridge between research on individuals and the workings of social systems. Kelles-Krauz, however, repeatedly transcended Marxist tenets, focusing on the construction of traditions, social norms, and the social role of art.

This edited volume was first published in Polish as Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz: Marksizm a socjologia. Wybór pism by Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego in 2014. This current work has been revised and translated into English.

Michael Bennett is a Super Bowl Champion, a three-time Pro Bowl defensive end, a fearless activist, a feminist, an organizer, and a change maker. He's also one of the most humorous athletes on the planet, and he wants to make you uncomfortable. Bennett adds his voice to discussions of racism and police violence, Black athletes and their relationship to powerful institutions like the NCAA and the NFL, the role of protest in history, and the responsibilities of athletes as role models to speak out against injustice. Following in the footsteps of activist-athletes from Muhammad Ali to Colin Kaepernick, Bennett demonstrates his outspoken leadership both on and off the field. Written with award-winning sportswriter and author Dave Zirin, Things That Make White People Uncomfortable is a sports book for young people who want to make a difference, a memoir, and a book as hilarious and engaging as it is illuminating.

Marx's Philosophy of Revolution in Permanence for Our Day, a selection of writings by the Marxist-Humanist philosopher and revolutionary Raya Dunayevskaya, brings out the contemporary urgency of Marx's work as a philosophy of revolution in permanence. This volume argues that dialectics permeates the totality of Marx's body of ideas and activities. Major themes include Marx's transformation of the Hegelian dialectic; the inseparability of Marx's economics, humanism, and dialectic; the battle of ideas with post-Marx Marxism, beginning with Engels; Black liberation, internationalism, and women's liberation; today's burning question of the relationship between spontaneity, organization, and philosophy; the emergence of counter-revolution from within the revolution; and the problem of what happens after the revolution.

U.S. Trotskyism 1928-1965 Part III: Resurgence is the third volume in a documentary trilogy on a revolutionary socialist split-off from the U.S. Communist Party, reflecting Leon Trotsky's confrontation with Stalinism in the global communist movement. Spanning 1954 to 1965, this volume surveys the Cold War era, the civil rights and Black liberation movements, the "third wave" of feminism, and other social and cultural developments of the 1950s and 1960s. Documenting responses to a variety of anti-colonial and revolutionary insurgencies, the content of this volume is also shaped by the crisis and decline of Stalinism. Attention is given to internal debates and splits, but also to the partial reunification of the international Trotskyist movement (the Fourth International), as well as substantial contributions to the study of history and the development of Marxist theory. Scholars and activists will find much of interest in these primary sources.

New feminist essays for the #MeToo era from the international best-selling author of Men Explain Things to Me.

Who gets to shape the narrative of our times? The current moment is a battle royale over that foundational power, one in which women, people of color, non-straight people are telling other versions, and white people and men and particularly white men are trying to hang onto the old versions and their own centrality. In Whose Story Is This?  Rebecca Solnit appraises what's emerging and why it matters and what the obstacles are.

Syria has been at the center of world news since 2011, following the beginnings of a popular uprising in the country and its subsequent violent and murderous repression by the Assad regime. Eight years on, Joseph Daher analyzes the resilience of the regime and the failings of the uprising, while also taking a closer look at the counter revolutionary processes that have been undermining the uprising from without and within.

Joseph Daher is the author of Hezbollah: The Political Economy of the Party of God, and founder of the blog Syria Freedom Forever.

When Workers Shot Back: Class Conflict from 1877 to 1921 explores one of the most tumultuous times in United States history. Self-organized workers recomposed their power by devising new strategies and tactics to disrupt the capitalist economy and extract concessions. Mine, railroad, steel, and iron workers pursued a strategy of tension that sometimes erupted into militant class conflict and general strikes in which workers took over and ran a number of cities. Turning conventional wisdom on its head, When Workers Shot Back argues that the escalation of working-class conflict drives rather than reacts to the consolidation and reorganisation of capital and economic and political reform of the state. Studying the class composition of this period illustrates why workers escalated the intensity of their tactics, even using tactical violence, to extract concessions and reforms when all other efforts to do so were blocked, co-opted or repressed.

This volume contains the proceedings and resolutions from three expanded meetings of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (Comintern) held in 1922–1923, while Lenin was still alive. At these 'mini-congresses', Communist leaders from around the world debated out major strategic questions and initiatives, from united front policy to the fight against fascism.

The material in this book – much of it appearing in English for the first time – is an essential source for understanding the world revolutionary movement in Lenin’s time, as well as the subsequent evolution of the Comintern. It is an important supplement to the widely acclaimed series of volumes edited by John Riddell containing the record of the Comintern’s first four world congresses.

Beyond France's own national historiography, the French Revolution was a fundamental point of reference for the nineteenth-century socialist movement. While Karl Marx never wrote his planned history of the Revolution, beginning in the 1880s the German and Austrian social-democrats did embark on such a project. This was an important moment for both Marxism and the historiography of the French Revolution. Yet it has not previously been the object of any overall study. The French Revolution and Social Democracy studies both the social-democratic readings of the foundational revolutionary event and the place of this history in militant culture, as seen in sources from party educationals to leaflets and workers' calendars.

First published in 2012 as La Révolution française et la social-démocratie. Transmissions et usages politiques de l'histoire en Allemagne et Autriche, 1889-1934 by Presses Universitaires de Rennes in 2012.

Middle East Studies after September 11: Neo-Orientalism, American Hegemony and Academia will show the long-term implications of current approaches to Middle East scholarship on the internal transformation of Middle Eastern societies. It describes the complex relationship between American academia and state government: a relationship which has influenced and restructured the state, society and politics in the Middle East as well as in the United States. It engages the disciplines of Sociology, Political Science, Anthropology, History and International Studies, while maintaining the epistemological, methodological, and ontological insights of a sociological approach to the Middle East.

Contributors are: Beyazit H. Akman, Mahmoud Arghavan, Dunya D. Cakir, Emanuela C. Del Re, Babak Elahi, Manuela E. B. Giolfo, Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, Merve Kavakci, Tugrul Keskin, Seyed Mohammd Marandi, Ameena Al-Rasheed Nayel, Staci Gem Scheiwiller, Francesco L. Sinatora, Zeinab Ghasemi Tari

As a new generation discovers socialism, this important text by American Marxist Hal Draper makes the case that genuine liberation can only come from the self-activity of workers.

Draper outlines the important distinction in the socialist movement between those who looked for freedom to be handed down from above and those who saw the revolutionary struggle as being led by ordinary people from below for their own liberation.

The late Hal Draper was the author of the five-volume study of Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution (Monthly Review Press).

Syria has been at the center of world news since 2011, following the beginnings of a popular uprising in the country and its subsequent violent and murderous repression by the Assad regime. Eight years on, Joseph Daher analyzes the resilience of the regime and the failings of the uprising, while also taking a closer look at the counter revolutionary processes that have been undermining the uprising from without and within.

Joseph Daher is the author of Hezbollah: The Political Economy of the Party of God, and founder of the blog Syria Freedom Forever.

For figures ranging from Karl Marx to the luminaries of the Frankfurt School, the 'Jewish Question' — a set of problems related to emancipation and anti-Semitism, cultural assimilation and Zionism — raised significant controversies within Marxist theory. Renowned scholar Enzo Traverso carefully reconstructs this intellectual debate that runs over more than a century, discussing both its generative aspects and its blind alleys. In The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate, Traverso explores the causes and the forms of the encounter that took place, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the Holocaust, between the intelligentsia of a cosmopolitan minority and the most radical ideological current of Western modernity.

This is the second edition, completely rewritten and updated, of a book already translated into many languages (originally published in French, then translated into English, German, Spanish, Japanese, and Turkish).

Tim Davenport and David Walters have extracted the essential core of Debs’s life work, illustrating his intellectual journey from conservative editor of the magazine of a racially segregated railway brotherhood to his role as the public face and outstanding voice of social revolution in early twentieth-century America. Well over 1,000 Debs documents will be republished as part of this monumental project, the vast majority seeing print again for the first time since the date of their original publication.

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) was a trade unionist, magazine editor, and public orator widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of American socialism.

In Social-Imperialism in Britain Neil Redfern examines the relationship between British labour and British capital in the two world wars of the twentieth century. He argues that the Second World War, the so-called 'People's War,' was an imperialist war no less than the First. He further argues that in both wars labour and capital entered into a social-imperialist contract in which labour would be rewarded for its support for war with such social and political reforms as votes for women and a health service, culminating in the 'welfare state' constructed after the Second World War. Concentrating on Lancashire, he examines the complex interaction between military successes and reverses, elite war aims, labour unrest and popular demands for reform.

The eighteen months between June 2016 and the end of 2017 saw the victory of Leave in Britain’s EU referendum, the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, and unprecedented support for Marine Le Pen of the Front National in her campaign for the same office in France. Nearly a decade after the great financial crash, it is these figures and the alarmingly confident and radical version of right-wing politics they represent that have gained the initiative over a moribund center and a still weak left.

But what exactly does this new reality represent? While some argue that we are hurtling towards fascism in a replay of the 1930s, and others insist there is little substantial change from “politics as usual,” Renton takes a different and more nuanced view. In country after country, under the clouds of economic austerity and post-9/11 Islamophobia, we have seen a convergence between traditional conservatives, the authoritarian far-right, and previously marginal fascists. The result is a new, still emergent, and deeply troubling form of right-wing radicalism, at once more moderate than classical fascism in its political strategy, yet indulgent of the racism of its most extreme components.

"Socialism" is a word that is now habitually taken to refer to a particular social system that prevailed in different parts of the globe during the twentieth century. This system was defined primarily by single-party rule with public (mainly state) ownership of the means of production along with a centrally planned economy. Its material base was generalised commodity production. The spokespersons of this system claim that this socialism was derived from Marx.

Paresh Chattopadhyay's Socialism and Commodity Production argues the falsity of this claim. On the basis of a comprehensive study of Marx's own texts, as well as a detailed engagement with a wide variety of theorists of socialist economics, it shows that Marx's socialism constituted an "Association" of free individuals in which private ownership, the commodity, wage labor and the state have no place.

As a new generation discovers socialism, this important text by American Marxist Hal Draper makes the case that genuine liberation can only come from the self-activity of workers.

Draper outlines the important distinction in the socialist movement between those who looked for freedom to be handed down from above and those who saw the revolutionary struggle as being led by ordinary people from below for their own liberation.

The late Hal Draper was the author of the five-volume study of Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution (Monthly Review Press).

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in Marx’s Capital inspired, in particular, by the crisis of 2008–9 and the period of slow growth that has followed. Marx was capitalism’s greatest critic and his work retains its relevance 150 years after its initial publication. Here, Choonara breaks down the thousand page text, making it inviting and accessible for the reader. A Reader’s Guide to Capital is an essential tool for students, activists, and others looking to read this classic text today.

Joseph Choonara teaches international political economy at King’s College London. He is the author of Unravelling Capitalism, a columnist for Socialist Review, and an editorial board member of International Socialism.

In this updated and expanded edition of Invisible Leviathan, Murray E.G. Smith critically explores and makes significant contributions to the debate surrounding Karl Marx's 'capitalist law of value' and its corollary, the law of the falling rate of profit. A powerful case is presented that capitalism has exhausted its potential to contribute to human progress. Humanity confronts a fateful choice: to allow this obsolescent system—which necessarily measures 'wealth' in terms of 'abstract social labour' and money profit—to destroy human civilisation; or to make the leap toward a global, egalitarian-socialist society in which the satisfaction of human need is the starting-point and the all-round development of each and every human individual the goal of the socio-economic life process.

First published in 1994 as Invisible Leviathan: The Marxist Critique of Market Despotism Beyond Postmodernism by University of Toronto Press. This second and revised edition includes a new Foreword by Michael Roberts, and a Preface to the Second Edition.

CBSD Description:

Evald Ilyenkov is a unique figure among the many Soviet thinkers that have recently been introduced to English-speaking readers. Although a thoroughly academic philosopher (both in the choice of his subject matter and in his institutional locations), Ilyenkov's ideas are communicated in a manner not often found in academic discourse. The texts presented here are not exhaustive of Ilyenkov's extensive engagement with Hegel and dialectics, but they are representative of the main themes and interests which pervade his writing on that subject. It is hoped that this collection will continue to draw interest to the Soviet engagement with Hegel and dialectics.

The dominant view of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is of a movement led by prominent men like Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Despite the demonstrations of female workers for ‘bread and herrings’, which sparked the February Revolution, in most historical accounts of this momentous period, women are too often relegated to the footnotes. Judy Cox argues that women were essential to the success of the revolution and to the development of the Bolshevik Party. With biographical sketches of famous female revolutionaries like Alexandra Kollontai and less well-known figures like Elena Stasova and Larissa Reisner, The Women’s Revolution tells the inspiring story of how Russian women threw off centuries of oppression to strike, organize, liberate themselves and ultimately try to build a new world based on equality and freedom for all.

Judy Cox is a longstanding socialist and campaigner. She lives and works in Tower Hamlets, East London, where she is a primary school teacher. She is currently researching the activities of working-class women in nineteenth-century radical movements. She has written on Rosa Luxembourg, Robin Hood, William Blake, and Marx’s theory of alienation.

“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.

On 20th August 1940 Trotsky's life was brutally ended when a Stalinist agent brought an ice pick crashing down on his head. Among the works left unfinished was the second part of his biography of Stalin.

Trotsky's Stalin is unique in Marxist literature in that it attempts to explain some of the most decisive events of the 20th century, not just in terms of epoch-making economic and social transformations, but in the individual psychology of one of the protagonists in a great historical drama. It is a fascinating study of the way in which the peculiar character of an individual, his personal traits and psychology, interacts with great events.

How did it come about that Stalin, who began his political life as a revolutionary and a Bolshevik, ended as a tyrant and a monster? Drawing on a mass of carefully assembled material from his personal archives and many other sources, Trotsky provides the answer to this question.

In the present edition we have brought together all the material that was available from the Trotsky archives in English and supplemented it with additional material translated from Russian. It is the most complete version of the book that has ever been published.

In 1920 V.I. Lenin, the famed leader of the Russian Revolution, called on the Communist International to open a second front against the imperialist powers by fighting alongside nationalist and peasant movements in the colonies. Eighteen months later, leaders of fledgling East Asian communist parties and other revolutionaries gathered in Moscow to plan the way forward. The Congress of the Toilers of the Far East profoundly influenced the strategy of Communist Parties throughout the colonial world. But inter-party alliances were fragile and risky. East Asian Communist Parties suffered serious defeats in the years following the Congress until WWII revived their fortunes. This edited and annotated edition of the Congress minutes will be of interest to scholars and general readers alike.

Tim Davenport and David Walters have extracted the essential core of Debs’s life work, illustrating his intellectual journey from conservative editor of the magazine of a racially segregated railway brotherhood to his role as the public face and outstanding voice of social revolution in early twentieth-century America. Well over 1,000 Debs documents will be republished as part of this monumental project, the vast majority seeing print again for the first time since the date of their original publication.

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) was a trade unionist, magazine editor, and public orator widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of American socialism.

Crises and Hegemonic Transitions reworks the concept of hegemony at the international level and analyses its relation to world market crises. Returning to the critical edition of Gramsci's Quaderni and maintaining that the author's work is permeated by Marx's Capital and the law of value, Fusaro argues that imperialist states strive to construct hegemonic relations through the use of domination, leadership, coercion, and consensus, in order to secure capital accumulation, and that economic crises have only the potential to provoke crises of hegemony. Tracing the vicissitudes of US hegemony from the interwar period to the present and assessing the Great Depression's and the Great Recession's impact, Fusaro provides a novel way to interpret past and present developments within the world economy.

Two years after Hurricane Maria hit, Puerto Ricans are still reeling from its effects and aftereffects. Aftershocks collects poems, essays and photos from survivors of Hurricane Maria detailing their determination to persevere. 

The concept of "aftershocks" is used in the context of earthquakes to describe the jolts felt after the initial quake, but no disaster is a singular event. Aftershocks of Disaster examines the lasting effects of hurricane Maria, not just the effects of the wind or the rain, but delving into what followed: state failure, social abandonment, capitalization on human misery, and the collective trauma produced by the botched response.

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in Marx’s Capital inspired, in particular, by the crisis of 2008–9 and the period of slow growth that has followed. Marx was capitalism’s greatest critic and his work retains its relevance 150 years after its initial publication. Here, Choonara breaks down the thousand page text, making it inviting and accessible for the reader. A Reader’s Guide to Capital is an essential tool for students, activists, and others looking to read this classic text today.

Joseph Choonara teaches international political economy at King’s College London. He is the author of Unravelling Capitalism, a columnist for Socialist Review, and an editorial board member of International Socialism.

Two years after Hurricane Maria hit, Puerto Ricans are still reeling from its effects and aftereffects. Aftershocks collects poems, essays and photos from survivors of Hurricane Maria detailing their determination to persevere. 

The concept of "aftershocks" is used in the context of earthquakes to describe the jolts felt after the initial quake, but no disaster is a singular event. Aftershocks of Disaster examines the lasting effects of hurricane Maria, not just the effects of the wind or the rain, but delving into what followed: state failure, social abandonment, capitalization on human misery, and the collective trauma produced by the botched response.

Spread out over many years and many different publications, the late author and activist Marta Russell wrote a number of groundbreaking and insightful essays on the nature of disability and oppression under capitalism. In this volume, Russell’s various essays are brought together in one place in order to provide a useful and expansive resource to those interested in better understanding the ways in which the modern phenomenon of disability is shaped by capitalist economic and social relations. The essays range in analysis from the theoretical to the topical, including but not limited to: the emergence of disability as a “human category” rooted in the rise of industrial capitalism and the transformation of the conditions of work, family, and society corresponding thereto; a critique of the shortcomings of a purely “civil rights approach” to addressing the persistence of disability oppression in the economic sphere, with a particular focus on the legacy of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990; an examination of the changing position of disabled people within the overall system of capitalist production utilizing the Marxist economic concepts of the reserve army of the unemployed, the labor theory of value, and the exploitation of wage-labor; the effects of neoliberal capitalist policies on the living conditions and social position of disabled people as it pertains to welfare, income assistance, health care, and other social security programs; imperialism and war as a factor in the further oppression and immiseration of disabled people within the United States and globally; and the need to build unity against the divisive tendencies which hide the common economic interest shared between disabled people and the often highly-exploited direct care workers who provide services to the former.

“Camonghne Felix is a brilliant writer, thinker, imaginer, builder—a young leader who shifts and opens the possibilities for a more just, better lit world, with each step, each word, each question.” —Kathy Engel

This is about what grows through the wreckage. This is an anthem of survival and a look at what might come after. A view of what floats and what, ultimately, sustains.

Build Yourself a Boat redefines the language of collective and individual trauma through lyric and memory.

Camonghne Felix is a poet, political strategist, media junkie, and cultural worker. She received an MA in arts politics from NYU, an MFA from Bard College, and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and Poets House. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the author of the chapbook Yolk and was listed by Black Youth Project as a “Black Girl from the Future You Should Know.”

Susan Buck-Morss asks: What does revolution look like today? How will the idea of revolution survive the inadequacy of the formula, “progress = modernization through industrialization,” to which it has owed its political life?

Socialism plus computer technology, citizen resistance plus a global agenda of concerns, revolutionary commitment to practices that are socially experimental and inclusive of difference—these are new forces being mobilized to make another future possible.

In a moving account that includes over 100 photos and images, many in color,, Revolution Today celebrates the new political subjects that are organizing thousands of grassroots movements to fight racial and gender violence, state-led terrorism, and capitalist exploitation of people and the planet worldwide. The twenty-first century has already witnessed unprecedented popular mobilizations. Unencumbered by old dogmas, mobilizations of opposition are not only happening, they are gaining support and developing a global consciousness in the process. They are themselves a chain of signifiers, creating solidarity across language, religion, ethnicity, gender, and every other difference.

Trans-local solidarities exist. They came first. The right-wing authoritarianism and anti-immigrant upsurge that has followed is a reaction against the amazing visual power of millions of citizens occupying public space in defiance of state power.

We cannot know how to act politically without seeing others act. This book provides photographic evidence of that fact, while making us aware of how much of the new revolutionary vernacular we already share.

August Nimtz uncovers attempts to chart a course between plain opportunism and anarchist rejections of the electoral arena. Instead, electoral campaigns are seen as crucial for developing political education and organization, and as a key way to measure your forces and communicate with the wider population. As radical left reformist projects, exemplified by Sanders and Corbyn, once again become a political force and the left has to think about what it means to run for office in a capitalist state, it's a good time to look back at how the left has historically conducted such debates.

Eugene V. Debs exploded upon the national scene in 1894 as the leader of a sensational strike by his American Railway Union (ARU) against the Pullman Parlor Car Company—a job stoppage which paralyzed the country's transportation network for nearly two weeks. On January 1, 1897, the polarizing public figure Debs declared his allegiance to international socialism, emerging as the most widely recognized socialist in America. He would thereafter tour the country relentlessly, speaking to large audiences and writing hundreds of articles on political and economic themes over the ensuing three decades.

Debs almost singlehandedly established a new political party, the Social Democracy of America, in the summer of 1897, building upon the remnants of the depleted ARU. The organization advanced a double agenda, seeking to promote both electoral politics and the construction of socialist colonies on the frontier—a dual focus which led to internal tensions and a bitter split. In 1898 Debs cast his lot with Milwaukee publisher Victor L. Berger in a new organization dedicated to political action, the Social Democratic Party of America.

After a split of the older and larger Socialist Labor Party of America in 1899, protracted unity discussions between the Debs group and an organized body of former SLP dissidents ensued. This unity effort was marked by Debs's first run for president of the United States on a joint Social Democratic ticket in November 1900. After heated on-again off-again negotiation between the two groups, a marriage was finally brokered in the summer of 1901 and the Socialist Party of America was launched. The party would soon grow to become the third biggest in American politics, with Debs enthusiastically heading the Socialist ticket in 1904 in the second of his five runs for the presidency.

“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.

2020 Book of the Year • International Labor History Association

Honorable Mention • Philip Taft Labor History Prize

This rich history details the bitter, deep-rooted conflict between industrial behemoth International Harvester and the uniquely radical Farm Equipment Workers union. The Long Deep Grudge makes clear that class warfare has been, and remains, integral to the American experience, providing up-close-and-personal and long-view perspectives from both sides of the battle lines.

International Harvester – and the McCormick family that largely controlled it – garnered a reputation for bare-knuckled union-busting in the 1880s, but in the 20th century also pioneered sophisticated union-avoidance techniques that have since become standard corporate practice. On the other side the militant Farm Equipment Workers union, connected to the Communist Party, mounted a vociferous challenge to the cooperative ethos that came to define the American labor movement after World War II.

This evocative account, stretching back to the nineteenth century and carried through to the present, reads like a novel. Biographical sketches of McCormick family members, union officials and rank-and-file workers are woven into the narrative, along with anarchists, jazz musicians, Wall Street financiers, civil rights crusaders, and mob lawyers. It touches on pivotal moments and movements as wide-ranging as the Haymarket "riot," the Flint sit-down strikes, the Memorial Day Massacre, the McCarthy-era anti-communist purges, and America's late 20th-century industrial decline.

Both Harvester and the FE are now gone, but this largely forgotten clash helps explain the crisis of yawning inequality now facing US workers, and provides alternative models from the past that can instruct and inspire those engaged in radical, working class struggles today.

NPR Best Books of 2019
Chicago Tribune Best Books of 2019
Chicago Review of Books Best Poetry Book of 2019
O Magazine Best Books by Women of Summer 2019
The Millions Must-Read Poetry of June 2019
LitHub Most Anticipated Reads of Summer 2019
The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots comprising the nation’s Red Summer, has shaped the last century but is not widely discussed. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event—which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries—through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present.

A MOMENT ON THE CLOCK OF THE WORLD is an invitation to consider how we make the world, together. It collects the voices of people who respond to this invitation with their living lives and prolific work: artists, social justice practitioners, cultural critics and public intellectuals — Cornel West, Taylor Mac, Alisa Solomon, Robin D.G. Kelley and Laura Flanders among them — whose own inquiries intersected with that of the award-winning Foundry Theatre across its 25-year history.

Notions of collaboration, art, community, space, prefigurative politics, metrics, and Time animate a conversation about the ways that artists and social justice workers build a more equitable world, and the historic challenges of their doing so together.

A MOMENT ON THE CLOCK OF THE WORLD follows The Foundry’s long-standing tradition for creating provocative relationships between form and content. Its layout divides each page into two discrete horizontal sections; the top two-thirds contain each contributor’s chapter, while the bottom of the pages throughout the book hold a history of The Foundry’s inquiry by the company’s founder. There is no prescribed way to read this book. Rather, it is designed to invite the reader to discover and gather shared themes and ideas in any number of ways. 

The title of the book recalls renowned social activist and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs’s legendary — and for some, incendiary — call for a new kind of activism: “Now is the time on the clock of the world to grow our souls.” This book gathers together hard-won insights of its “moment.” It’s a moment on the continuum of ever in the (r)evolutionary human project of making the world.

Katherine Franke makes a powerful case for reparations for Black Americans by amplifying the stories of formerly enslaved people and calling for repair of the damage caused by the legacy of American slavery. Repair invites readers to explore the historical context for reparations, offering a detailed account of the circumstances that surrounded the emancipation of enslaved Black people in two unique contexts, the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Davis Bend, Mississippi, Jefferson Davis’s former plantation. Through these two critical historical examples, Franke unpacks intergenerational, systemic racism and white privilege at the heart of American society and argues that reparations for slavery are necessary, overdue and possible.

Katherine Franke is one of the nation’s leading scholars writing on law, racial justice, and African American history. Her first book was Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality. She is the Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University and chair of the board of Trustees of the Center for Constitutional Rights. 

A MOMENT ON THE CLOCK OF THE WORLD is an invitation to consider how we make the world, together. It collects the voices of people who respond to this invitation with their living lives and prolific work: artists, social justice practitioners, cultural critics and public intellectuals — Cornel West, Taylor Mac, Alisa Solomon, Robin D.G. Kelley and Laura Flanders among them — whose own inquiries intersected with that of the award-winning Foundry Theatre across its 25-year history.

Notions of collaboration, art, community, space, prefigurative politics, metrics, and Time animate a conversation about the ways that artists and social justice workers build a more equitable world, and the historic challenges of their doing so together.

A MOMENT ON THE CLOCK OF THE WORLD follows The Foundry’s long-standing tradition for creating provocative relationships between form and content. Its layout divides each page into two discrete horizontal sections; the top two-thirds contain each contributor’s chapter, while the bottom of the pages throughout the book hold a history of The Foundry’s inquiry by the company’s founder. There is no prescribed way to read this book. Rather, it is designed to invite the reader to discover and gather shared themes and ideas in any number of ways. 

The title of the book recalls renowned social activist and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs’s legendary — and for some, incendiary — call for a new kind of activism: “Now is the time on the clock of the world to grow our souls.” This book gathers together hard-won insights of its “moment.” It’s a moment on the continuum of ever in the (r)evolutionary human project of making the world.

“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.

They are a mass migration of thousands, yet each one travels alone. 

Solito, Solita (Alone, Alone), shortlisted for the 2019 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America, is an urgent collection of oral histories that tells—in their own words—the story of young refugees fleeing countries in Central America and traveling for hundreds of miles to seek safety and protection in the United States.

Fifteen narrators describe why they fled their homes, what happened on their dangerous journeys through Mexico, how they crossed the borders, and for some, their ongoing struggles to survive in the United States. In an era of fear, xenophobia, and outright lies, these stories amplify the compelling voices of migrant youth. What can they teach us about abuse and abandonment, bravery and resilience, hypocrisy and hope? They bring us into their hearts and onto streets filled with the lure of freedom and fraught with violence. From fending off kidnappers with knives and being locked in freezing holding cells to tearful reunions with parents, Solito, Solita’s narrators bring to light the experiences of young people struggling for a better life across the border.

This collection includes the story of Adrián, from Guatemala City, whose mother was shot to death before his eyes. He refused to join a gang, rode across Mexico atop cargo trains, crossed the US border as a minor, and was handcuffed and thrown into ICE detention on his eighteenth birthday. We hear the story of Rosa, a Salvadoran mother fighting to save her life as well as her daughter’s after death squads threatened her family. Together they trekked through the jungles on the border between Guatemala and Mexico, where masked men assaulted them. We also meet Gabriel, who after surviving sexual abuse starting at the age of eight fled to the United States, and through study, legal support and work, is now attending UC Berkeley.

Download the corresponding lesson plans on the Voice of Witness website.

Crossfire collects Staceyann Chin's empowering, feminist-LGBTQ-Caribbean, activist-driven poetry for the first time in a single book. According to The New York Times, Chin is “sassy, rageful and sometimes softly self-mocking.” The Advocate says that her poems, “combine hilarious one-liners with a refusal to conform” and note “Chin is out to confront more than just the straight world.”

Everything Must Go is an illustrated collection of poems in the spirit of a graphic novel, a collaboration between poet Kevin Coval and illustrator Langston Allston.

The book celebrates Chicago's Wicker Park in the late 1990's, Coval's home as a young artist, the ancestral neighborhood of his forebears, and a vibrant enclave populated by colorful characters. Allston's illustrations honor the neighborhood as it once was, before gentrification remade it.

The book excavates and mourns that which has been lost in transition and serves as a template for understanding the process of displacement and reinvention currently reshaping American cities.

“Camonghne Felix is a brilliant writer, thinker, imaginer, builder—a young leader who shifts and opens the possibilities for a more just, better lit world, with each step, each word, each question.” —Kathy Engel

This is about what grows through the wreckage. This is an anthem of survival and a look at what might come after. A view of what floats and what, ultimately, sustains.

Build Yourself a Boat redefines the language of collective and individual trauma through lyric and memory.

Camonghne Felix is a poet, political strategist, media junkie, and cultural worker. She received an MA in arts politics from NYU, an MFA from Bard College, and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and Poets House. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the author of the chapbook Yolk and was listed by Black Youth Project as a “Black Girl from the Future You Should Know.”

Fascism’s ascent to power across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s marks one of the greatest historical defeats of the left in all of history. Yet, this catastrophic de- feat was resisted at every turn by Marxists who tried, unsuccessfully, to push the mass communist and social democratic parties to organize an opposition to the rising movements of violent reaction. Their devastating failure paved the way for the gas chamber, decades of ruthless dictatorship, and war.

This important volume offers the most complete selection of Marxist writings on fascism from this period in any language and provides invaluable lessons for contemporary readers concerned with today’s far-right.

New feminist essays for the #MeToo era from the international best-selling author of Men Explain Things to Me.

Who gets to shape the narrative of our times? The current moment is a battle royale over that foundational power, one in which women, people of color, non-straight people are telling other versions, and white people and men and particularly white men are trying to hang onto the old versions and their own centrality. In Whose Story Is This?  Rebecca Solnit appraises what's emerging and why it matters and what the obstacles are.

NPR Best Books of 2019
Chicago Tribune Best Books of 2019
Chicago Review of Books Best Poetry Book of 2019
O Magazine Best Books by Women of Summer 2019
The Millions Must-Read Poetry of June 2019
LitHub Most Anticipated Reads of Summer 2019
The Chicago Race Riot of 1919, the most intense of the riots comprising the nation’s Red Summer, has shaped the last century but is not widely discussed. In 1919, award-winning poet Eve L. Ewing explores the story of this event—which lasted eight days and resulted in thirty-eight deaths and almost 500 injuries—through poems recounting the stories of everyday people trying to survive and thrive in the city. Ewing uses speculative and Afrofuturist lenses to recast history, and illuminates the thin line between the past and the present.

In Yellow Earth, John Sayles introduces an epic cast of characters, weaving together narratives of competing agendas and worldviews with lyrical dexterity, insight, and wit.
When rich layers of shale oil are discovered beneath the town of Yellow Earth, all hell breaks loose. Locals, oil workers, service workers, politicians, law enforcement, and get-rich-quick opportunists—along with an earnest wildlife biologist—commingle and collide as the population of the town triples overnight. Harleigh Killdeer, chairman of the tribal business council of the neighboring Three Nations reservation, entertains visions of "sovereignty by the barrel" and joins forces with a fast-talking entrepreneur. From casino dealers to activists and high school kids, everyone in the region is swept up in the unsparing wave of an oil boom.
Sayles’s masterful storytelling draws an arc from the earliest exploitation of this land and its people all the way to twenty-first-century privatization schemes. Through the intertwining lives of its characters, Yellow Earth lays bare how the profit motive erodes human relationships, as well as our living planet. The fate of Yellow Earth serves as a parable for our times.

Rather than treating concepts and their application in a static and iconic manner, Concepts in Action provides us with examples of the active and creative use of concepts for constructing and generating new knowledge. Examples of theoretic constructions and topics discussed refers to the function of theory in mainstream sociology; concepts enabling us to expand the range of interpretations; a critical view and approach to general concepts of culture, nature and consumption; concepts dealing with organization, institutions and actors; and examples of travelling concepts such as class, gender, race and social recognition. Concepts in Action follows on the earlier Theory in Action (2016) as part of a three volume project broadening our understanding of the interplay of theory and methods. The forthcoming third volume will focus on the strategy of constructing and analyzing the object in social science. This volume is highly relevant for researchers and students interested in theoretical construction in the social sciences.

Contributors are: Göran Ahrne, Mette Andersson, Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen, Anne Britt Flemmen, Antje Gimmler, Willy Guneriussen, Roar Hagen,
Raimund Hasse, Håkon Leiulfsrud, Willy Martinussen, John Scott, Peter Sohlberg, Pål Strandbakken, Richard Swedberg and Erik Olin Wright.

Mikhail Lifshitz is a major forgotten figure in the tradition of Marxist philosophy and art history. A significant influence on Lukács, and the dedicatee of his The Young Hegel, as well as an unsurpassed scholar of Marx and Engels’s writings on art and a lifelong controversialist, Lifshitz’s work dealt with topics as various as the philosophy of Marx and the pop aesthetics of Andy Warhol. The Crisis of Ugliness (originally published in Russian by Iskusstvo, 1968), published here in English for the first time, presented with a detailed introduction by its translator David Riff, is a compact broadside against modernism in the visual arts that resists the dogmatic complacencies of Stalinist aesthetics. Its reentry into English debates on the history of Soviet aesthetics promises to re-orient our sense of the basic coordinates of a Marxist art theory.

For almost 150 years, scholars have been debating how to interpret Marx’s seminal work Capital while they had access to just some of Marx’s economic manuscripts. This changed in 2013 with the publication of all the known economic writings of Marx and Engels in the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA). One can now reconstruct the lines of intellectual development, and one can also explore in detail how Friedrich Engels went about compiling volumes II and III of Capital from the vast legacy of manuscripts that Marx left behind after his death in 1883. It should be possible, now, to develop a more comprehensive and accurate picture of Marx as an economic theoretician. This volume of essays aims to initiate this process.

Contributors are: Christopher J. Arthur, Matthias Bohlender, Timm Graßmann, Jorge Grespan, Gerald Hubmann, Heinz D. Kurz, Marcel van der Linden, Kenji Mori, Fred Moseley, Lucia Pradella, Geert Reuten, Regina Roth, and Carl-Erich Vollgraf.

Edward W. Said discusses the centrality of popular resistance to his understanding of culture, history, and social change. He reveals his thoughts on the war on terrorism, the war in Afghanistan, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and lays out a compelling vision for a secular, democratic future in the Middle East—and globally.
 

Edward W. Said’s books include Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, Covering Islam, Culture and Imperialism, and The Politics of Dispossession. He has also published a memoir, Out of Place.
 

David Barsamian is the producer of the critically acclaimed program Alternative Radio.

Patricia Frazier’s Graphite is an ode to her grandmother and childhood home, the Ida B. Wells Projects, both which the poet lost to city- and state-sanctioned discrimination. The chapbook investigates loss and gentrification, particularly their effects on black young people from Chicago, whose political movement, resilience, and ability to make celebration after pain, drive these poems.