Haymarket Books

Where is Marxism in International Relations? This groundbreaking work by a collective of Brazilian authors goes beyond dominant ideas in the field and looks to Marxist theory for an alternative perspective on International Relations.

Marxism and International Relations is divided into thematic sections, focusing on key themes such as Marx and Engels relevance for IR, Marxist thinkers as IR theorists, Marxist theories of imperialism, and Latin American dependency theory. By bringing a Marxist perspective to the study of International Relations, the book adds to the international intellectual effort to criticize and ultimately overcome capitalism.

Esta colección debut de poesía exige la abolición de la vigilancia policial y el encarcelamiento humano. En Diarios de Terrorista Christopher Soto usa el pronombre "nosotros" para enfatizar que la violencia policial no solo afecta a individuos, sino a comunidades enteras.

Su poética abre la imaginación hacia posibilidades de existencia más allá del status quo. Soto pregunta: "¿A quién llamamos terrorista y por qué?" Estos poemas, de surrealismo político, se mueven entre la vulnerabilidad desgarradora, el humor que hace reír a carcajadas y la irreverencia punk queer sin disculpas. Diarios de un Terrorista es innovador en su capacidad para hablar, desde una escala local hasta una global, sobre uno de los problemas más importantes de nuestro tiempo.

Esta colección debut de poesía exige la abolición de la vigilancia policial y el encarcelamiento humano. En Diarios de Terrorista Christopher Soto usa el pronombre "nosotros" para enfatizar que la violencia policial no solo afecta a individuos, sino a comunidades enteras.

Su poética abre la imaginación hacia posibilidades de existencia más allá del status quo. Soto pregunta: "¿A quién llamamos terrorista y por qué?" Estos poemas, de surrealismo político, se mueven entre la vulnerabilidad desgarradora, el humor que hace reír a carcajadas y la irreverencia punk queer sin disculpas. Diarios de un Terrorista es innovador en su capacidad para hablar, desde una escala local hasta una global, sobre uno de los problemas más importantes de nuestro tiempo.

Rooted in a Chicago-based street gang, the Young Lords grew into one of the most dynamic revolutionary community organizations of the late 1960s and early ’70s. 

In their field jackets and signature purple berets, using militant tactics like building takeovers and mass education, the Young Lords mobilized their community for liberation and against gentrification, poverty, racism, and police brutality. Forging a Rainbow Coalition with Fred Hampton and the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords expanded from their Chicago headquarters into the Puerto Rican and Latino barrios of New York City and elsewhere, demanding an end to the US occupation of Puerto Rico and self-determination for oppressed communities everywhere.

With a foreword by founder José "Cha Cha" Jiménez, written just before his passing, The Young Lords Speak tells the story of Chicago's Young Lords in their own words through articles, essays, interviews, and speeches. 

Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.

In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. Despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility; it is an inevitability.

The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation is obscured within a longer arc of history, its scale is seldom recognized.

While the white nationalist and authoritarian backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.

From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor documents the overlooked history and lasting influence of the International Socialists through the words of its members.

Founded at UC Berkeley in 1964 as a radical civil rights group, the International Socialist Club sparked the Free Speech Movement that same year, and its members and successor organizations would go on to help shape the course of both the Black freedom struggle and the rank-and-file labor insurgency of the 1970s. From its inception, the organization adhered to the tenets of “socialism from below”—the belief that revolutionary Marxism meant an expansion of democracy, not its curtailment at the hands of bureaucratic dictatorships that claimed to be building socialist societies. 

Following their success in the Bay Area, the ISC launched chapters across the country, forging an alliance with the Black Panthers to promote Huey P. Newton’s candidacy on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. In 1969, the ISC became the International Socialists, and much of its growing membership relocated to the Midwest to take industrial jobs. In their final years, among other important efforts, the IS created a majority-Black youth group known as the Red Tide, founded the seminal publication Labor Notes, and helped create Teamsters for a Democratic Union. 

From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor includes twenty-six original reflections by leading members—including renowned scholar-activists Nelson Lichtenstein and Nancy Holmstrom—offering invaluable insights into this influential but little-known organization. 

A provocative analysis of the deadly conflicts that devastated countries and communities far from Moscow and Washington.

Transforming battlegrounds in Africa, Asia, and Latin America into veritable wastelands, surrogate wars in the Cold War era left behind a legacy of collective trauma and social conflict that have persisted into the present. In this ambitious work, Alfred W. McCoy uses a bottom-up, outside-in approach to offer a new perspective on the longest, most consequential conflict in modern world history.

McCoy offers an intimate portrait of covert operatives and young antiwar protesters, humanizing the history of the Cold War—a history that has too often been told in terms of economic growth, nuclear arsenals, or diplomatic ententes.

By showing how otherwise ordinary individuals helped end a global conflict that threatened nuclear holocaust, McCoy offers important lessons for a younger generation facing climate change even as the great powers devote humanity’s scarce resources to a “new cold war.”

A hard-hitting exploration of how state policy displaces and isolates Black communities and how collective resistance creates spaces for working-class people of color to identify the true cause of conflict as capitalism and white supremacy

Marginalized communities often become understandably preoccupied with a city’s structured attempt to deem them disposable, making it difficult to see people experiencing the same suffering as potential comrades in struggle. Enemies are manufactured as the result of continued displacement, hyper-segregation, and dispossession. Under these impossible circumstances people are often quicker to punch each other before they identify the enemy as white supremacy and capitalism, creating a society where conflict is engineered.

Examining the long fight of Black people in Chicago to claim their humanity and thrive in a city while facing school closings, the destruction of public housing and oppressive law enforcement, Stovall argues that marginalized communities face unique structural challenges while being blamed for interpersonal conflict and labeled “violent” and deemed disposable. With a novel approach to the question of how state-sanctioned violence and abandonment impacts low-income communities, Engineered Conflict uses examples from Chicago’s recent history to shed light on the politics of disposability through housing instability, criminalization, and school closures. Looking at all three phenomena together allows readers to see how state policies designate some neighborhoods as unviable, where disinvestment furthers a rationale to contain members of these communities.

Looking at the many ways Black communities have resisted state violence and the work of local organizations to address marginalization, Engineered Conflict calls for a powerful movement against the displacement, disinvestment, and disposability of Chicago’s Black population.

Socialism is a yearning for justice, community, and the greater realization of human potential. Cornel West calls it, “the best accessible and reliable treatment we have of what socialism is, was, and should be.”

Understanding Socialism is a plainspoken text that disarms false narratives, confronts past failures, and offers a path to a fresh and modern understanding of socialism, by outlining what democracy in the workplace could look like.

Wolff not only explains what socialism is and has meant to its various proponents, he also looks at the transition from feudalism to capitalism as a model to help us visualize an evolution from our current socioeconomic state.

Understanding Socialism explores how socialist theory was used and applied to help shape the histories of countries such as Russia and China, and beyond. Wolff also analyzes the successes and defeats of those countries, the world's reactions to them, and how they offer important lessons for the building of a democratic, worker-controlled 21st-century socialism.

Richard D. Wolff masterfully explains why Karl Marx’s analysis of class struggle is fundamental to a proper understanding of capitalism and explores how to build a more sustainable democratic society.

Class struggle is everywhere, and it influences everything and everyone in our society. Marx is the person who first explained this struggle systematically. For Marx, capitalism signified not the end of history, but rather the latest phase of human development that leads ordinary people to rid themselves of “all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew."

Marx’s theories are deeply prescient and relevant in our efforts to understand and cope with the crises of our time. Every day, we see more evidence that the capitalist system is both undermining itself and those whose labor it depends on, as Marx predicted.

Understanding Marxism is an essential resource for looking at the power and usefulness of Marx’s criticism of the capitalist economic system—and how we can move beyond it to a truly sustainable and democratic society based on workers’ self-management.

A major work in the Black Communist tradition by worker-intellectual Harry Haywood, now in a new edition featuring a foreword by Dr. Rebecca Hall and an introduction by Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly.

In 1948, Harry Haywood, a leading member of the Communist Party USA, published Negro Liberation, a pathbreaking book that lays out his argument that the Black Belt South constitutes a distinct nation and an internal colony of U.S. imperialism. Applying a Marxist-Leninist lens to questions of nationalism, colonialism, and land distribution, Haywood lays out the dire stakes of Jim Crow violence and oppression and critiques the emptiness and insufficiency of liberal solutions. Along the way, he makes a powerful case for Black self-determination.

Framed by Rebecca Hall’s moving meditation on her father’s legacy and Charisse Burden-Stelly’s clear-eyed case for how Haywood reveals the contradiction between ruling-class politics and Black liberation today, this new edition of Negro Liberation is a must-read for anyone fighting against oppression.

“Why does capitalism fail us?” Richard D. Wolff walks readers through this pressing question in a brilliant takedown of an economic system that benefits the few at the great expense of the many.

Understanding Capitalism explores the different definitions of what capitalism is and is not, and dissolves the many myths that, Wolff argues, are designed to confuse and disorient us. Wolff doesn’t simply identify the crises and harms manufactured by capitalism, he details a path forward by outlining alternative economic models that combat the exploitation and oppression inherent in capitalism.

Capitalism oftentimes feels as permanent as the sky above. Understanding Capitalism shows that our current economic system is only as strong as the ordinary people who enable its existence, and that capitalism’s demise requires an organized, collective effort by those who can identify its vulnerabilities and limitations, but also understand that another world is indeed possible.

A revolutionary feminist case for child liberation, a utopian project that helps us imagine ways to build insurgent, collective forms of care. 

We live in a world that is profoundly against children—evident in the genocide in Palestine, the fascist targeting of trans children, and the blatant disregard for the lives of migrant children crossing borders and oceans. It is a world in which climate catastrophe has become the new normal, in which children’s futures are by no means assured.

What we need, feminist writer and scholar Madeline Lane-McKinely argues, is a politics of solidarity with children, one that sees children as comrades in our struggle for a better future. Blending personal and political reflection with cultural analysis, Lane-McKinley examines the history of childhood as a system of private property in capitalism, showing how the idea of the child has been weaponized in the service of white supremacy and empire. She disentangles motherhood from the act of caregiving, tracing the possibilities of revolutionary mothering. And she critiques the parents’ rights movement and imagines what education might look like outside schools, considering how we might center children as we challenge the strictures of the nuclear family. 

Elegantly written and provocative, Solidarity with Children is a book for anyone who cares about children and the struggle for a better world.

The definitive history of the US labor movement’s complicity in Zionist settler colonialism, and a call for today’s labor militants to organize in solidarity with Palestinians.

US trade unionists are often told to keep quiet and remain neutral on Palestine because “Palestine has nothing to do with unions” and “weighing in” only distracts from struggles for better working conditions. 

No Neutrals There makes a timely and critical intervention against that pervasive sentiment by recounting the history of the US labor movement’s century-long involvement in the struggle for Palestine. Scholar Jeff Schuhrke convincingly demonstrates that unions in the United States have never been silent or neutral on the question of Palestine. In fact, they have played a key role—in the initial Zionist colonization of Palestine, the foundation of the Israeli state in 1948, supporting US foreign policy commitments to Israel, and the ongoing suppression of the Palestinian liberation movement.

In his compelling telling of this history, Schuhrke conclusively shows that US unions helped build and maintain the state of Israel, and also shines a light on important exceptions to this rule: instances of US labor solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle that point the way forward for today’s labor movement.

From leading abolitionist organizers, a much-needed intervention arguing that the systems that purport to protect children make our communities less safe for them.

Based on decades of shared organizing, study, and lived experience, the contributors to How to End Family Policing argue that the child welfare system cannot build genuine safety. Rather than the misleading language of “child welfare” and “child protective services,” scholars and activists use the term “family policing” to name the fact that these institutions and practices are neither neutral nor benign.

Black, Indigenous, and Latinx parents do not mistreat their children at higher rates than white parents. Yet 53 percent of all Black children in the United States will experience a child protective services investigation before the age of eighteen.

Offering first-person testimony, alternatives to family policing, and definitions of key concepts, this book is an urgent call to build flourishing communities.

With contributions from Corey B. Best, Annie Chambers, Noran Elzarka, Brianna Harvey, Shira Hassan, Shawn Koyano, jaboa lake, Elizabeth Ling, Leah Plasse, Margaret Prescod, zara raven, Ignacio G. Hutía Xeiti Rivera, Dorothy Roberts, Arneta Roger, Lisa Sangoi, jasmine Sankofa, Kylee Sunderlin, Jasmine Wali, E. Zimiles, and the editors.

A collection of bold and tender writing on June Jordan’s multidimensional legacy as a poet, healer, and activist.

This Unruly Witness was curated for people who see love as a life force, who seek a community that can sustain us, who know that “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” Celebrating the life and legacy of the poet activist June Jordan, this collection illuminates why we need Jordan more than ever.

Featuring a foreword by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, an afterword from Imani Perry, essays, poems, letters, and interviews from internationally acclaimed poets and thinkers such as Angela Davis, Pratibha Parmar, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Naomi Shihab Nye, Afaa M. Weaver, E. Ethelbert Miller, and many other people touched by Jordan’s work.

Written during a genocide, After Savagery reveals the ethical bankruptcy of “Western philosophy” and how it undergirds the erasure of the colonized.

The death toll in Gaza continues to rise―a cold, lifeless number representing entire communities crushed under the weight of settler colonialism.

What remains of the theories we use to understand our world? With lyrical and lucid fury, Hamid Dabashi exposes the racist roots of Western philosophy, demanding that readers overcome its pernicious phantom of relevance. Rather than perceiving “the West” as giving carte blanche to Israel, Dabashi insists that Israel must be understood as its quintessence.

If Israel is the West and the West is Israel, then Palestine is the world and the world is Palestine. Holding to glimmers from revolutionary works of literature and film, Dabashi argues, in grief and love, that the wretched of the earth need poetry after barbarism—and that Palestine is the site of a liberated imagination.

In this essential intervention, Venezuelan socialists analyze the origins and causes of their country’s crisis and offer a critique of the Maduro regime.

Venezuela in Crisis brings together a diverse array of Venezuelan thinkers and activists to grapple with the question of how and why the aspirations for what Hugo Chavez deemed “socialism in the twenty-first century” gave way to the deepest economic collapse in all of South America. While recognizing the devastating impact of sanctions, this collection’s authors reject the simplistic view that all would be well if not for US meddling. Rather, they argue that from governmental mismanagement to rising repression, the regime of Nicolás Maduro deserves a significant share of the blame for Venezuela’s ongoing crisis. 

With chapters focused on the Maduro government’s economic policies, its continuities and breaks from the Chávez era, its erosion of democratic processes in the country, and its doubling down on extractivism, Venezuela in Crisis is an indispensable guide for international solidarity activists and for anyone looking for a nuanced understanding of Venezuela’s crisis.

Writing from an anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-authoritarian perspective, this volume never loses sight of the need to stand with the Venezuelan people rather than their government—even when it claims to be struggling to build socialism. 

A story of struggle and perseverance from an Eastern Kentucky woman who answered Florence Reese's timeless question, "Which side are you on?" by organizing her people with love and solidarity.

In Song for a Hard-Hit People, activist and organizer Beth Howard shares her stories of life in Appalachian Kentucky, where her family struggled with coal bosses, cops, and the cruel tragedies of working-class life. Her dad, sometimes violent and abusive, often compassionate and inspiring, was an itinerant worker in the region’s coal industry who inspired her unrepentant rebelliousness. The women in her life contended with ever-present male chauvinism, modeling a kind of feminism Beth didn’t yet have the language for.

These complex men and women shaped Beth’s sense of justice and solidarity, and taught her from an early age about the inextricable bonds working-class people share, despite our differences. She began to learn the powerful history of white Appalachians fighting alongside Black and Brown people, pushing back against billionaires who gain power by using racism to divide them. Today, Beth is a leading organizer in the fight for working-class antiracism, part of a long tradition of Appalachian organizers and movements who put solidarity into practice.

Beth’s story is particular but not uncommon. Too many of us face the same struggle for the basic necessities of life: somewhere decent to live, good food to eat, health care that doesn't break the bank, jobs that don't kill us. As she reminds us, we haven’t got a chance—unless we organize.

In the best of storytelling traditions, Beth's prose is at once heart-breaking and inspiring, insightful and provocative, and filled to the brim with courageous humanity.

This striking collection of more than 200 full-color infographics is a vivid portrait of Israeli settler colonialism and the Palestinian struggle for freedom.

As a new generation of movement-builders seek to understand Israel’s brutal, illegal occupation of Palestine, Visualizing Impact’s vivid and informative graphics reveal deep truths about the decades-long Palestinian struggle for freedom.

The infographics present more than just data: colorful, accessible, and thoughtfully arranged, the oppression they document in stark detail dovetails with stories of perseverance and strength. From the history of Zionist settlement to the depopulation of Palestinian villages; from the construction of an apartheid wall to the destruction of olive trees; from hunger strikes to mass protests to boycotts, Visualizing Palestine’s graphics are powerful, comprehensive, and demand our attention.

A powerful collection of testimonies from Palestinians facing genocide and displacement in Gaza with hope and resistance.

Displaced in Gaza aims to raise global awareness of how violent displacement has impacted the lives of Palestinians—students, mothers, fathers, grandparents, children, educators, and those who already survived the Nakba of 1948. In Gaza, 2.3 million Palestinians have been subjected to starvation, mass destruction, and targeted killing. Yet they endure.

This book is a commitment to the longstanding Palestinian tradition of storytelling, documenting both the horror of the genocide and the resilience of the Palestinian people. The stories in this collection are not merely accounts of suffering, they are assertions of humanity, resistance, hope, and the unbreakable bond that ties Palestinians to their homeland.

Displaced in Gaza is a collaboration between the American Friends Service Committee and the Hashim Sani Center for Palestine Studies at Universiti Malaya.

A hard-hitting exploration of how state policy displaces and isolates Black communities and how collective resistance creates spaces for working-class people of color to identify the true cause of conflict as capitalism and white supremacy

Marginalized communities often become understandably preoccupied with a city’s structured attempt to deem them disposable, making it difficult to see people experiencing the same suffering as potential comrades in struggle. Enemies are manufactured as the result of continued displacement, hyper-segregation, and dispossession. Under these impossible circumstances people are often quicker to punch each other before they identify the enemy as white supremacy and capitalism, creating a society where conflict is engineered.

Examining the long fight of Black people in Chicago to claim their humanity and thrive in a city while facing school closings, the destruction of public housing and oppressive law enforcement, Stovall argues that marginalized communities face unique structural challenges while being blamed for interpersonal conflict and labeled “violent” and deemed disposable. With a novel approach to the question of how state-sanctioned violence and abandonment impacts low-income communities, Engineered Conflict uses examples from Chicago’s recent history to shed light on the politics of disposability through housing instability, criminalization, and school closures. Looking at all three phenomena together allows readers to see how state policies designate some neighborhoods as unviable, where disinvestment furthers a rationale to contain members of these communities.

Looking at the many ways Black communities have resisted state violence and the work of local organizations to address marginalization, Engineered Conflict calls for a powerful movement against the displacement, disinvestment, and disposability of Chicago’s Black population.

“Why does capitalism fail us?” Richard D. Wolff walks readers through this pressing question in a brilliant takedown of an economic system that benefits the few at the great expense of the many.

Understanding Capitalism explores the different definitions of what capitalism is and is not, and dissolves the many myths that, Wolff argues, are designed to confuse and disorient us. Wolff doesn’t simply identify the crises and harms manufactured by capitalism, he details a path forward by outlining alternative economic models that combat the exploitation and oppression inherent in capitalism.

Capitalism oftentimes feels as permanent as the sky above. Understanding Capitalism shows that our current economic system is only as strong as the ordinary people who enable its existence, and that capitalism’s demise requires an organized, collective effort by those who can identify its vulnerabilities and limitations, but also understand that another world is indeed possible.

A major work in the Black Communist tradition by worker-intellectual Harry Haywood, now in a new edition featuring a foreword by Dr. Rebecca Hall and an introduction by Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly.

In 1948, Harry Haywood, a leading member of the Communist Party USA, published Negro Liberation, a pathbreaking book that lays out his argument that the Black Belt South constitutes a distinct nation and an internal colony of U.S. imperialism. Applying a Marxist-Leninist lens to questions of nationalism, colonialism, and land distribution, Haywood lays out the dire stakes of Jim Crow violence and oppression and critiques the emptiness and insufficiency of liberal solutions. Along the way, he makes a powerful case for Black self-determination.

Framed by Rebecca Hall’s moving meditation on her father’s legacy and Charisse Burden-Stelly’s clear-eyed case for how Haywood reveals the contradiction between ruling-class politics and Black liberation today, this new edition of Negro Liberation is a must-read for anyone fighting against oppression.

From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor documents the overlooked history and lasting influence of the International Socialists through the words of its members.

Founded at UC Berkeley in 1964 as a radical civil rights group, the International Socialist Club sparked the Free Speech Movement that same year, and its members and successor organizations would go on to help shape the course of both the Black freedom struggle and the rank-and-file labor insurgency of the 1970s. From its inception, the organization adhered to the tenets of “socialism from below”—the belief that revolutionary Marxism meant an expansion of democracy, not its curtailment at the hands of bureaucratic dictatorships that claimed to be building socialist societies. 

Following their success in the Bay Area, the ISC launched chapters across the country, forging an alliance with the Black Panthers to promote Huey P. Newton’s candidacy on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. In 1969, the ISC became the International Socialists, and much of its growing membership relocated to the Midwest to take industrial jobs. In their final years, among other important efforts, the IS created a majority-Black youth group known as the Red Tide, founded the seminal publication Labor Notes, and helped create Teamsters for a Democratic Union. 

From the Free Speech Movement to the Factory Floor includes twenty-six original reflections by leading members—including renowned scholar-activists Nelson Lichtenstein and Nancy Holmstrom—offering invaluable insights into this influential but little-known organization. 

Rebecca Solnit offers a thrilling account of the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural change over the past three quarters of a century.

In this sequel to her enduring bestseller Hope in the Dark, Solnit surveys a world that has changed dramatically since the year 1960. Despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history, change is not a possibility; it is an inevitability.

The changes amount to nothing less than dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. In this rising worldview, interconnection is a core idea and value. But because the transformation is obscured within a longer arc of history, its scale is seldom recognized.

While the white nationalist and authoritarian backlash drives individualism and isolation, this new world embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas, pointing toward a more interconnected, relational world.

From leading abolitionist organizers, a much-needed intervention arguing that the systems that purport to protect children make our communities less safe for them.

Based on decades of shared organizing, study, and lived experience, the contributors to How to End Family Policing argue that the child welfare system cannot build genuine safety. Rather than the misleading language of “child welfare” and “child protective services,” scholars and activists use the term “family policing” to name the fact that these institutions and practices are neither neutral nor benign.

Black, Indigenous, and Latinx parents do not mistreat their children at higher rates than white parents. Yet 53 percent of all Black children in the United States will experience a child protective services investigation before the age of eighteen.

Offering first-person testimony, alternatives to family policing, and definitions of key concepts, this book is an urgent call to build flourishing communities.

With contributions from Corey B. Best, Annie Chambers, Noran Elzarka, Brianna Harvey, Shira Hassan, Shawn Koyano, jaboa lake, Elizabeth Ling, Leah Plasse, Margaret Prescod, zara raven, Ignacio G. Hutía Xeiti Rivera, Dorothy Roberts, Arneta Roger, Lisa Sangoi, jasmine Sankofa, Kylee Sunderlin, Jasmine Wali, E. Zimiles, and the editors.

Socialism is a yearning for justice, community, and the greater realization of human potential. Cornel West calls it, “the best accessible and reliable treatment we have of what socialism is, was, and should be.”

Understanding Socialism is a plainspoken text that disarms false narratives, confronts past failures, and offers a path to a fresh and modern understanding of socialism, by outlining what democracy in the workplace could look like.

Wolff not only explains what socialism is and has meant to its various proponents, he also looks at the transition from feudalism to capitalism as a model to help us visualize an evolution from our current socioeconomic state.

Understanding Socialism explores how socialist theory was used and applied to help shape the histories of countries such as Russia and China, and beyond. Wolff also analyzes the successes and defeats of those countries, the world's reactions to them, and how they offer important lessons for the building of a democratic, worker-controlled 21st-century socialism.

A collection of bold and tender writing on June Jordan’s multidimensional legacy as a poet, healer, and activist.

This Unruly Witness was curated for people who see love as a life force, who seek a community that can sustain us, who know that “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” Celebrating the life and legacy of the poet activist June Jordan, this collection illuminates why we need Jordan more than ever.

Featuring a foreword by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, an afterword from Imani Perry, essays, poems, letters, and interviews from internationally acclaimed poets and thinkers such as Angela Davis, Pratibha Parmar, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Naomi Shihab Nye, Afaa M. Weaver, E. Ethelbert Miller, and many other people touched by Jordan’s work.

Richard D. Wolff masterfully explains why Karl Marx’s analysis of class struggle is fundamental to a proper understanding of capitalism and explores how to build a more sustainable democratic society.

Class struggle is everywhere, and it influences everything and everyone in our society. Marx is the person who first explained this struggle systematically. For Marx, capitalism signified not the end of history, but rather the latest phase of human development that leads ordinary people to rid themselves of “all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew."

Marx’s theories are deeply prescient and relevant in our efforts to understand and cope with the crises of our time. Every day, we see more evidence that the capitalist system is both undermining itself and those whose labor it depends on, as Marx predicted.

Understanding Marxism is an essential resource for looking at the power and usefulness of Marx’s criticism of the capitalist economic system—and how we can move beyond it to a truly sustainable and democratic society based on workers’ self-management.

A revolutionary feminist case for child liberation, a utopian project that helps us imagine ways to build insurgent, collective forms of care. 

We live in a world that is profoundly against children—evident in the genocide in Palestine, the fascist targeting of trans children, and the blatant disregard for the lives of migrant children crossing borders and oceans. It is a world in which climate catastrophe has become the new normal, in which children’s futures are by no means assured.

What we need, feminist writer and scholar Madeline Lane-McKinely argues, is a politics of solidarity with children, one that sees children as comrades in our struggle for a better future. Blending personal and political reflection with cultural analysis, Lane-McKinley examines the history of childhood as a system of private property in capitalism, showing how the idea of the child has been weaponized in the service of white supremacy and empire. She disentangles motherhood from the act of caregiving, tracing the possibilities of revolutionary mothering. And she critiques the parents’ rights movement and imagines what education might look like outside schools, considering how we might center children as we challenge the strictures of the nuclear family. 

Elegantly written and provocative, Solidarity with Children is a book for anyone who cares about children and the struggle for a better world.

The definitive history of the US labor movement’s complicity in Zionist settler colonialism, and a call for today’s labor militants to organize in solidarity with Palestinians.

US trade unionists are often told to keep quiet and remain neutral on Palestine because “Palestine has nothing to do with unions” and “weighing in” only distracts from struggles for better working conditions. 

No Neutrals There makes a timely and critical intervention against that pervasive sentiment by recounting the history of the US labor movement’s century-long involvement in the struggle for Palestine. Scholar Jeff Schuhrke convincingly demonstrates that unions in the United States have never been silent or neutral on the question of Palestine. In fact, they have played a key role—in the initial Zionist colonization of Palestine, the foundation of the Israeli state in 1948, supporting US foreign policy commitments to Israel, and the ongoing suppression of the Palestinian liberation movement.

In his compelling telling of this history, Schuhrke conclusively shows that US unions helped build and maintain the state of Israel, and also shines a light on important exceptions to this rule: instances of US labor solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle that point the way forward for today’s labor movement.

In this essential intervention, Venezuelan socialists analyze the origins and causes of their country’s crisis and offer a critique of the Maduro regime.

Venezuela in Crisis brings together a diverse array of Venezuelan thinkers and activists to grapple with the question of how and why the aspirations for what Hugo Chavez deemed “socialism in the twenty-first century” gave way to the deepest economic collapse in all of South America. While recognizing the devastating impact of sanctions, this collection’s authors reject the simplistic view that all would be well if not for US meddling. Rather, they argue that from governmental mismanagement to rising repression, the regime of Nicolás Maduro deserves a significant share of the blame for Venezuela’s ongoing crisis. 

With chapters focused on the Maduro government’s economic policies, its continuities and breaks from the Chávez era, its erosion of democratic processes in the country, and its doubling down on extractivism, Venezuela in Crisis is an indispensable guide for international solidarity activists and for anyone looking for a nuanced understanding of Venezuela’s crisis.

Writing from an anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-authoritarian perspective, this volume never loses sight of the need to stand with the Venezuelan people rather than their government—even when it claims to be struggling to build socialism. 

Written during a genocide, After Savagery reveals the ethical bankruptcy of “Western philosophy” and how it undergirds the erasure of the colonized.

The death toll in Gaza continues to rise―a cold, lifeless number representing entire communities crushed under the weight of settler colonialism.

What remains of the theories we use to understand our world? With lyrical and lucid fury, Hamid Dabashi exposes the racist roots of Western philosophy, demanding that readers overcome its pernicious phantom of relevance. Rather than perceiving “the West” as giving carte blanche to Israel, Dabashi insists that Israel must be understood as its quintessence.

If Israel is the West and the West is Israel, then Palestine is the world and the world is Palestine. Holding to glimmers from revolutionary works of literature and film, Dabashi argues, in grief and love, that the wretched of the earth need poetry after barbarism—and that Palestine is the site of a liberated imagination.

A longtime educator explores how the study of Black history challenges our understanding of race, nation, and the stories we tell about who we are.

Black history is under attack from powerful forces that seek to excise it from classrooms, libraries, and the popular imagination. Yet its opponents fail to understand a simple truth: the best education makes us uncomfortable. It challenges our assumptions, helps us see larger forces at work, and gives us glimpses of alternate futures.

In Black History Is for Everyone, Brian Jones offers a meditation on the power of Black history, using his own experiences as a lifelong learner and classroom teacher to question everything—from the radicalism of the American Revolution to the meaning of “race” and “nation.”

With warmth and immersive storytelling, Jones encourages us to delve deeper into our collective history, explores how curiosity about our world is essential—and reminds us that with stakes so high, the effort is worth it.

In this series of personal, political, and literary essays, Nation writer and veteran activist Wen Stephenson traces his search for resolve and solidarity in the face of the advancing climate crisis and widening political abyss.

After three decades of failed international efforts to avoid catastrophic climate change, progressive visions of a better world are now increasingly circumscribed by ecological and social breakdown. The geophysical forces unleashed by carbon-fueled global heating have converged with forms of political nihilism not seen since the rise of fascism in the 20th century. For many, despair has become the only honest response.

Born of his own struggle, Learning to Live in the Dark is Stephenson’s argument for resolve in the face of an intellectual, moral, and spiritual abyss.  In essays that reach back to the ideas of mid 20th-century thinkers Hannah Arendt, Vaçlav Havel, Simone Weil, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon—and back to Thoreau and Dostoevsky in the 19th century—Stephenson finds a constant among these iconic figures—a resolute embrace of universal human solidarity in dark times.   

Engaging with contemporary writers along the way—including William T. Vollmann, Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, Andreas Malm, China Miéville, and Jane Hirshfield—Stephenson charts a personal and political journey from the horrors of Trump’s first presidency; through a renewed political engagement via the Green New Deal and his ongoing commitment to escalated nonviolent direct action; to a moral reckoning in the depths of the COVID pandemic and on up to the U.S.-sponsored genocide in Gaza. Throughout, Stephenson poses a question that resonates for many on the left today: If nothing short of revolution can salvage the possibility of a better world, and yet if a viable revolutionary-left politics is nowhere on the horizon, then what does a life of radical commitment look like in the shadow of catastrophes that will not wait?

Learning to Live in the Dark answers not with fatalism or any cost-free hope, but with something sturdier: a resolve and solidarity as real as the dark itself.

Rooted in a Chicago-based street gang, the Young Lords grew into one of the most dynamic revolutionary community organizations of the late 1960s and early ’70s. 

In their field jackets and signature purple berets, using militant tactics like building takeovers and mass education, the Young Lords mobilized their community for liberation and against gentrification, poverty, racism, and police brutality. Forging a Rainbow Coalition with Fred Hampton and the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords expanded from their Chicago headquarters into the Puerto Rican and Latino barrios of New York City and elsewhere, demanding an end to the US occupation of Puerto Rico and self-determination for oppressed communities everywhere.

With a foreword by founder José "Cha Cha" Jiménez, written just before his passing, The Young Lords Speak tells the story of Chicago's Young Lords in their own words through articles, essays, interviews, and speeches. 

Like A Hammer is an anthology of poems that unearths the shared traumas produced by America’s incarceration system.

These powerful poems of witness seek to address the oppressive systems that make up the US prison-industrial complex, revealing cracks in a criminal punishment system that too often appears unchangeable. The impacts of that system reverberate through lives and across generations. The poets gathered here aim to foreground the real experiences of people touched by the system, to upend dominant narratives, shine light on injustice, and act as a fulcrum around which to organize communities in support of change.

Like A Hammer explores how art and imagination can serve as vehicles for endurance, offering us the hope to envision a better future.

Contributors include: Hanif Abdurraqib, Rhionna Anderson, Brian Batchelor, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Marina Bueno, Cody Bruce, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Natalie Diaz, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Nikky Finney, Kennedy A. Gisege, Gustavo Guerra, Jessica Hill, Vicki Hicks, Randall Horton, Sandra Jackson, Catherine LaFleur, Ada Limón, Sarah Lynn Maatsch, Christopher Malec, Eduardo Martinez, John Murillo, Angel Nafis, Kenneth Nadeau, Leeann Parker, James Pearl, Christina Pernini, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Patrick Rosal, Nicole Sealey, Evie Shockley, Patricia Smith, Sin á Tes Souhaits, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Erica "Ewok" Walker, Candace Williams, and SHE>i

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

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

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

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

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

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

From a star of the climate justice movement, a fresh, radical perspective for real climate action and “an indispensable toolkit for a new generation of activists” (Naomi Klein). 

For too long, representations of climate action in the mainstream media have been white-washed, green-washed and diluted to be made compatible with capitalism. In It’s Not That Radical, Loach addresses head-on the issues at the root of the climate crisis.

As Loach shows, we are living in an economic system which pursues profit above all else; harmful, oppressive systems that heavily contribute to the climate crisis, and environmental consequences that have been toned down to the masses. Tackling the climate crisis requires us to visit the roots of poverty, capitalist exploitation, police brutality, and legal injustice. Climate justice offers the real possibility of huge leaps towards racial equality and collective liberation as it aims to dismantle the very foundations of these issues.

Written with candor and hope, It's Not That Radical will galvanize readers to take action, offering a practical and transformative appraisal of our circumstances to help mobilize a majority for the future of our planet.

From Mariame Kaba, New York Times-bestselling author of We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, and social worker Jane Ball comes a powerful book showing the harm that prisons cause and exploring alternatives, gorgeously illustrated by Olly Costello.

Prisons, they do no good.
They do not help. 
They do not teach.

On a moonlit road, tucked away from prying eyes, a child sees a prison complex—cinder blocks, watch towers, barbed wire. Page by page, we come to see the prison as a child sees it. 

Prisons hurt people and leave them lonely, without loved ones to comfort them or lend a listening ear.

As dandelion stars float up in the air, this dreamscape becomes a hope-scape, where love transcends the prison walls. All the families and friends of the people in the prison march and protest in beautiful song, march together to a new way and a new dawn—in this case a cooperative housing and community center, next to a neighborhood greenhouse for restoration and healing. A new world, where connection and repair are fundamental, and even tangible, as people around a table quilt messages, “I hear you. I’m sorry for what I did. How can I make it better?”

In Prisons Must Fall, Mariame Kaba, a longtime activist, together with co-author Jane Ball, present solutions that do not involve incarceration, such as meeting people’s basic needs, restorative justice, and community support—seeds for a safe world. Illustrator Olly Costello provides textured images of a global majority community and a grey, monotone backdrop that is overtaken by joyful colors. A gentle but effective addition to all social justice bookshelves and libraries. Discussion questions included.

Perfect for:

• Parents, teachers, and librarians looking for books on the prison industrial complex and prison reform
• Kids who are interested in fairness and social justice
• Readers who love exceptional and sophisticated illustration

From a star of the climate justice movement, a fresh, radical perspective for real climate action and “an indispensable toolkit for a new generation of activists” (Naomi Klein). 

For too long, representations of climate action in the mainstream media have been white-washed, green-washed and diluted to be made compatible with capitalism. In It’s Not That Radical, Loach addresses head-on the issues at the root of the climate crisis.

As Loach shows, we are living in an economic system which pursues profit above all else; harmful, oppressive systems that heavily contribute to the climate crisis, and environmental consequences that have been toned down to the masses. Tackling the climate crisis requires us to visit the roots of poverty, capitalist exploitation, police brutality, and legal injustice. Climate justice offers the real possibility of huge leaps towards racial equality and collective liberation as it aims to dismantle the very foundations of these issues.

Written with candor and hope, It's Not That Radical will galvanize readers to take action, offering a practical and transformative appraisal of our circumstances to help mobilize a majority for the future of our planet.

Challenging mainstream nation-centred theories of economic development, Nicolás Grinberg examines the capitalist development in Brazil and South Korea.

Starting from their modes of participation in the international division of labour and its production of surplus value on a global scale, he does not consider these as resulting simply from the economic policies of nation states and their associated political institutions; nor from local class-struggle dynamics or geopolitical developments. Rather, drawing on key insights from Marx's critique of political economy, he begins by recognising that capitalist development is global in terms of its economic dynamics and historical trends, and national only in its political and institutional forms of realisation. State-mediated patterns of economic development and institutional change in Brazil and Korea, as well as the intra- and inter-state political processes through which these have come about, are then considered mediations in the conformation and reproduction of the nationally differentiated, uneven process of capital's valorisation on a global scale.