Haymarket Books

“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests.
But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests.
Táíwò’s crucial intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Winner of the Palestine Book Awards 2024 Creative Award

A unique, stunning collection of images of Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and a testament to the vibrancy of Palestinian society prior to occupation.

This book tells the story, in both English and Arabic, of a land full of people—people with families, hopes, dreams, and a deep connection to their home—before Israel’s establishment in 1948, known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or “catastrophe.” Denying Palestinian existence has been a fundamental premise of Zionism, which has sought not only to hide this existence but also to erase its memory.

But existence leaves traces, and the imprint of the Palestine that was remains, even in the absence of those expelled from their lands. It appears in the ruins of a village whose name no longer appears in the maps, in the drawing of a lost landscape, in the lyrics of a song, or in the photographs from a family album.

Co-edited by Teresa Aranguren and Sandra Barrilaro and featuring a foreword by Mohammed El-Kurd, the photographs in this book are traces of that existence that have not been erased. They are testament not to nostalgia, but to the power of resistance.

A global account of the grassroots environmental movements on the frontlines of the climate crisis.
Environmentalism from Below takes readers inside the popular struggles for environmental liberation in the Global South. These communities—among the most vulnerable to but also least responsible for the climate crisis—have long been at the forefront of the fight to protect imperiled worlds. Today, as the world’s forests burn and our oceans acidify, grassroots movements are tenaciously defending the environmental commons and forging just and sustainable ways of living on Earth.
Scholar and activist Ashley Dawson constructs a gripping narrative of these movements of climate insurgents, from international solidarity organizations like La Via Campesina and Shack Dwellers International to local struggles in South Africa, Colombia, India, Nigeria, and beyond. Taking up the four critical challenges we face in a warming world—food, urban sustainability, energy transition, and conservation—Dawson shows how the unruly power of environmentalism from below is charting an alternative path forward, from challenging industrial agriculture through fights for food sovereignty and agroecology to resisting extractivism using mass nonviolent protest and sabotage.
An urgent, essential intervention, Environmentalism from Below offers a hopeful alternative to the gridlock of UN-based climate negotiations and the narrow nationalism of some Green New Deal efforts. As Dawson reminds us, the fight against ecocide is already being waged worldwide. Building on longstanding traditions of anticolonial struggle, environmentalism from below is a model for a people’s movement for climate justice—one that demands solidarity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New York Times Bestseller

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

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

“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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A deeply reported analysis of the connections between policing and capitalism, centering global lessons of revolt and resistance

Where do cops come from and what do they do? How did “modern policing” as we know it today come to be? What about the capitalist state necessitates policing? In this clear and comprehensive account of why and how the police—the linchpin of capitalism—function and exist, organizer and author brian bean presents a clear case for the abolition of policing and capitalism.

Their End Is Our Beginning traces the roots and development of policing in global capitalism through colonial rule, racist enslavement, and class oppression, along the way arguing how police power can be challenged and, ultimately, abolished. bean draws from extensive interviews with activists from Mexico to Ireland to Egypt, all of whom share compelling and knowledgeable perspectives on what it takes to—even if temporarily—take down the cops and build a thriving community-organized society, free from the police. The lessons they offer bring nuance to the meaning of “solidarity” and clarity to what “abolition” and “revolution” look like in practice.

Featuring illustrations by Chicago-based artist Charlie Aleck, Their End Is Our Beginning is an incendiary book that offers a socialist analysis of policing and the capitalist state, a vital discussion of the contours of abolition at large, and the revolutionary logic needed for liberation.

In What We Do with God, Daniella Toosie-Watson collapses the division among humans, the natural world, and the divine.

Toosie-Watson’s debut poetry collection meditates on the politics of mental health, pleasure, and the natural world. In this book, the everyday miracles of insects are studied, celebrated, and made sacrosanct. Prayer and pleasure are two sides of the same coin. Propriety has no bearing on sensual connection and exploration. The poet calls upon Puerto Rican, Iranian, and Russian inheritance to explore where, why, and how ancestral mysticism and Western pathology intersect and/or diverge. The speaker finds those questions mirrored back as they maneuver through the stark realities of the US mental health care system.

What We Do with God dives into the grotesque, the bestial, the surreal, as a means to defamiliarize abuse. Toosie-Watson’s debut poetry collection is a practice of reclamation.

With an unapologetic impiety to holiness and waywardness, What We Do with God invites readers to enter a world where care extends beyond ourselves and those closest to us to ecosystems holding the wider world together.

This gripping graphic novel tells the story of the 1891 Coal Creek War—one of the most significant yet overlooked labor and abolitionist uprisings in the history of the United States.

Told through the eyes of a young Welsh immigrant, Trouble! at Coal Creek is the epic story of a cross-racial struggle to abolish the system of convict-leasing in the mines. Austin Sauerbrei's evocative black-and-white illustrations and masterful storytelling show the personal battles and motivations that led thousands of miners to repeatedly take up arms against the powerful companies, their militias, and politicians.

Lured by coal companies’ promises of good pay, stability, and opportunity, the narrator’s father brought their family across the Atlantic Ocean for work in the mine. The job, however, was deadly, and life grew unbearable as the coal companies immiserated miners and their families. Meanwhile, slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, racist terror, and the birth of the Ku Klux Klan were still fresh memories for most. Coal companies relied increasingly on the forced labor of mostly Black prisoners who were loaned out from the state, an extremely profitable continuation of the old system of racist brutality. As Ida B. Wells noted at the time, "The Convict Lease System and Lynch Law are twin infamies which flourish hand in hand."

The miners of Coal Creek, however, set fire to the edifice of convict-leasing and inspired similar rebellions throughout the South. In this captivating graphic novel, Saurbrei brings their overlooked story to life for new generations of organizers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cessante causa, cessat effectus (when the cause ceases, the effect ceases) is applicable for every existing type of social pathology. Project for a Scientific Sociology takes this as a starting point to develop an operational overview of inter-individual behavior.

In this book, Joan Casser develops the research of Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, Russian neurologist Ivan Pavlov, Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler among others, to examine energy transference in society. Prediction, motion, operant conditioning, crime, punishment, security, and law-governed behavior are reviewed socio-logically. Casser commences with worked matter and ends with the state in this causal configuration of inter-individual behavior.

Domination, ecological crises and many other pathologies are intrinsic features of capitalism, not bugs that can be corrected. But is a better way of organizing society possible?

Marx called for a society where the ruling principle is “the full and free development of every individual”. Capitalism neither is nor can be such a society. But if we can imagine one, can we be confident it could be put into practice? The answer to both questions is an emphatic ‘Yes!’ This book makes the case for a workable model of republican socialism, a vision of socialism worth fighting for.

Transgressive City-Making and Governance delves into the pressing global issue of housing exclusion and forced evictions, using Lisbon as a case study.

Based on a 15-month engaged ethnography, the book critically examines council housing occupations and evictions, revealing how these practices challenge neoliberal urban governance and put forward alternative forms of urban citizenship. Exploring gendered, classed, and racialized dynamics, it sheds light on the transformative potential of housing occupations and the role of social movements in contesting systemic exclusion. It is essential reading for those interested in housing rights, social justice, and urban governance.

This volume offers critical insights into contemporary mass-market entertainment across various geographical and cultural contexts, blending theoretical reflections with empirical case studies.

The contributors examine cultural phenomena and objects from both Western and non-Western perspectives, analyzing representations, production, and consumption practices. By highlighting the interplay of identities, power dynamics, and digital transformations, this work deepens your understanding of entertainment as both a cultural phenomenon and an ideological apparatus. It emphasizes the need for ongoing critical engagement with mass-market entertainment in our rapidly changing world.

Contributors include: Stéfany Boisvert, Mélanie Bourdaa, Hélène Breda, Elena Cabanillas-Mallenco, Emek Çaylı, Omar Cerrillo Garnica, Vincenzo Cicchelli, Christiana Constantopoulou, Deepa Mary Francis, Aleena George, Charo Lacalle, Dimitra Laurence Larochelle, Céline Morin, Katharina Niemeyer, Eleonora Noia, Sylvie Octobre, Jimmyn Parc, Eléana Sanchez, Christine Thoër, Mónica Tovar-Vicente and Michele Varini.

The first of two volumes written “in and against development” tells the story of how of The Economics of Everything, or Economics Imperialism, became a dominant presence in development economics.

Today, economics imperialism sets the agenda in development studies, with the World Bank taking a leading, if contested, role. This volume examines how this happened, charting the evolution from the old or classic development economics through the new, newer and newest development economics. Drawing critically upon the Kuhnian notions of paradigm shifts, corresponding changes are contextualized materially, intellectually and policy-wise. Covering key issues such as famine, the developmental state, and trade and industrial policy, detailed attention is paid to the potential for alternatives for economics and economic policies.

South Africa’s post-apartheid transition has proven disastrous. But what caused this unfortunate trajectory?

Today, the country is marked by the emergence of a black elite of enriched capitalists who have benefitted from the globalization, neoliberalization and financialization of the economy in general, and from its Minerals-Energy and Financial Complex in particular. By contrast, inequalities, poverty and failing social provision have persisted. Recent attention has shifted to how this trajectory was initiated, with some suggesting a lack of available alternative policy options at the time of transition. The Political Economy of South Africa’s Post-apartheid Transition shows this to be false. In fact, a full range of progressive alternatives were rejected, leading to corresponding consequences from “state capture” to electoral defeat.

Development of Happiness in the Contemporary World challenges us to re-think how we measure success, showing that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is not enough to define progress.

This volume takes readers on a journey from traditional economic measures to groundbreaking models like Doughnut Economics, blending cutting-edge research with compelling examples. It uncovers how alternative frameworks better capture well-being, sustainability, and equity in today’s world. Featuring rare insights and fresh data, it connects economic theory with real-life solutions to global challenges. Whether you’re a policymaker, economist, or curious reader, this book equips you with the tools to rethink prosperity and create a happier, more sustainable future.

Contributors include: Nermin Akarçay, Merve Özcan Altan, Barış Çağirkan, Arif Bağbaşlioğlu, Necmettin Çelik, Gözde Ersöz, Eylül Kabakçi Günay, Gökmen Kantar, Gül Huyugüzel Kişla, Özge Kozal, Begüm Yurteri Kösedağli, Burcu Türkcan, Ulviye Tüfekçi Yaman, Meltem İnce Yenilmez, and Hakan Yildirim.

The Treachery of Realities targets the contemporary atmosphere of lies, post-truths, and alternative facts.

We have previously had little reason to think that humanity was about to have its dinosaur moment; we could be confident of surviving for millennia. It now seems that humanity's future might be a matter of decades given the variety of existential threats we face, from climate change and asteroids to robots and AI. We are not going to save ourselves driven by faith, belief, hopes, prayers, and wishes in an atmosphere of science deniers. What is required is an investment in a renewed and re-energized secular worldview, guided by the sociological imagination and opposed to conventional reasoning and action.

Marxism was a powerful force in French political and intellectual life throughout the twentieth century. Modern French Marxism tells the story of how it dominated the battle of ideas.

Michael Kelly takes readers from Marxism’s early beginnings to its peak in the 1970s. He follows conceptual debates on the materialist dialectic, explores Marxism as a system of thought, and conveys the ambition of the men and women of letters who sought to change the world. This second edition is augmented with essays on how Marxist thinkers grappled with religion, everyday life, the Cold War, and other leading intellectual movements.

A groundbreaking reassessment of the legacy of the enigmatic Shah Ismail.

Seyed Javad Miri presents Shah Ismail not merely as a historical figure but as a mystic, poet, and thinker who profoundly influenced Iranian and global intellectual landscapes. Through critical approaches to knowledge, language, and social theory, the book unearths the marginalized Gnostic tradition of Khatai, revealing its enduring significance. By challenging Eurocentric and nationalist historiographies, Miri invites readers to rethink the intersections of Irfan, governance, and cultural identity.

The first book-length examination of the theses developed by Louis Althusser and his collaborators on the processes of class-based educational formation and the function of schools.

Drawing largely on unpublished writings that have been overlooked by scholars of both Althusser and critical pedagogy, Knowledge, Ideology, Reproduction reveals that, for Althusser and the Groupe Spinoza, educational formation and the position of knowledge are central, decisive issues in understanding the real forces driving the mechanisms of social reproduction. This perspective enables a critical interrogation of knowledge transmission and opens up new possibilities for transformative educational practices.

Third Camp Socialism collects Phyllis and Julius Jacobson’s major writings on civil rights, Stalinism, the Cold War, and the New York Intellectuals.

The Jacobsons advanced a militant, small-d democratic perspective on the landmark events of their era, from the New Deal and World War II to sixties protests and the War on Terror. Today, they are best remembered for founding New Politics and defending a third camp perspective that resists capitalism as well as all varieties of “progressive” authoritarianism. This volume makes a powerful case for revisiting the Jacobsons’ contributions to socialist thought.

A sharp and comprehensive critique of the postworkerist school of autonomist Marxism.

Motivations for Refusal develops a critical account of how the affective politics of capital and class are formed and contested in contemporary arrangements of work. Drawing on value critique and class composition analysis, he challenges core assumptions of postworkerism and related theories of affective labor, while retaining their core insights. Moving beyond the limits of postworkerism, the book analyses how the integration of the affective sciences into management and workplace technologies constitutes a terrain of contestation in conditions of immaterial production. Motivations for Refusal explores how affective politics emerge in the contestation between labor and capital in their affective modes.

The second of two volumes written “in and against development” meticulously criticizes the World Bank’s scholarship and assesses alternative approaches to development studies.

Long self-proclaimed as “Knowledge Bank”, the World Bank is as active as criticized in its endeavors across scholarship, ideology and policy in practice, serving US interests in the age of globalization, neoliberalism and financialization. Its analytical framing draws upon economics imperialism in general, and its evolution through three phases. Corresponding phases of new, newer and newest development economics are identified, with the World Bank taking a leading role in each, with implications for the expanding scope of development economics and its contestations with development studies.

Bohemian Bolsheviks is a sharp reminder that historical narrative not only shapes our sense of the terrain under our feet, but the horizon in front of us. Marxist political alignment engages a welter of intimate and biographical factors enriching the record of a varied history of fiction, poetry, literary criticism, and other intellectual practices. In this book, Alan Ward sets out to explore a field of study which is marked by the enduring paradoxes of modernity. The rubric “Bohemian Bolsheviks” perfectly captures Wald’s sustained fascination with persistent contradictions between the image of Left political commitment and the actuality of experience, especially in relation to cultural work and cultural workers.

Notebooks for the Grandchildren is an indispensable resource for anyone seeking to understand what went wrong after the great Russian Revolution of 1917.

Through the eyes of young Ukrainians like himself, who came of age fighting for the Revolution but were murdered in the late 1930s, Mikhail Baitalsky recounts the Revolution’s hopes—and its tragic unraveling under Stalin. He narrates how Stalin rose to power and carried out the “political counterrevolution” that silenced so many. Arrested three times by the Stalin regime, Baitalsky survived to tell the story of what happened.

Artists and Radicalism in Germany, 1890-1933 traces the evolution of the German applied arts movement from 1890 through the interwar period, offering a fresh perspective on the role of radicalism and avant-garde labor in the history of modern art.

The book reveals how reforms in artistic and vocational education intersected with the professional politics of radical artists and the nature of intellectual labor. Challenging conventional views, Nikos Pegioudis reinterprets the conflict between modern art's advocates and opponents, arguing that professional politics—not merely political ideologies—shaped the historical avant-garde. In doing so, Artists and Radicalism casts new light on German modern art and its interpreters.

Towards Justice seeks to address the tensions of global social misrecognition and injustice.

The book is based on a critique of liberal and libertarian contradictions with their conflictual consequences, and analyses of critical social theories and perspectives from the Global South (Latin America, Africa, and Asia), as well as the Global North. Hrubec deals with the dispute over particular and universal norms on local, regional, and global levels, extra-territorial social recognition of the global poor, strategic socialism, threats of global hegemony, authoritarianism, and war in light of various conflicts.

Forgiveness is necessary in the long fight for a just world—but it is only possible after the oppressed are victorious.

For too long, revolutionary social movements have reconciled to defeat. We must start winning again. Forgiveness is a crucial strategy for remaking the world, to secure and sustain victories, to turn one-time enemies into friends.

With deep political commitment and lucid moral clarity, D.K. Renton makes the case for forgiveness, but of a particularly unruly sort. Tracing the tragic abuse of Eleanor Marx and Jane Wells, the mistakes of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the courage of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the redemption of televangelist Tammy Faye, Renton urges us to forgive, but only after tearing down the citadels of the rich.

Revolutionary Forgiveness merges history with philosophy, infuses politics with ethics, and connects collective struggle with the individual’s search for justice to demand a future for all—when the oppressed will be magnanimous in power, and even former oppressors will be free.

Every December in downtown St. Louis, the city’s upper crust gathers for a garish costume party that doubles as a debutante’s ball, a ceremony in which the daughters of high society are paraded toward a cloaked figure in the center of the room who will select one young woman as the “Queen.” Known as the Veiled Prophet’s Ball, at first glance the event is easy to dismiss as outdated and clownish. But the truth is that the Veiled Prophet Society has functioned as a space of solidarity for the city’s “fathers,” the wealthy men at the head of businesses, banks, and whole industries who come together to break strikes, quash protests, and enforce racial hierarchies.

Devin Thomas O’Shea’s The Veiled Prophet is the definitive history of the Veiled Prophet Society in all its violence and pageantry, offering a colorful alternate history of this Midwestern city through the lens of labor politics, racial inequality, and capital accumulation. O’Shea follows the Veiled Prophet Society from its origins in the wake of the 1877 railroad workers’ strike, the height of its, and St. Louis’s, influence during the 1904 World’s Fair, and the unexpected places its members exerted influence across the globe, from Rhodesia and Vietnam to the halls of power in Washington, DC.

Yet the power wielded by the Veiled Prophet has not gone uncontested. Orphans armed with simple pea-shooters rose up against the secret society in the late 19th century. Communists organized against them in the 1930s. And civil rights icons and renegade debutantes defied this shadowy band of ruling class elites in the 1960s. The most recent challenge to the Veiled Prophet’s influence was The Ferguson uprising of 2014. Now, as the fight for the soul and streets of St. Louis is as charged as ever, it’s critical that we understand and expose the long sordid history of this powerful masked society, and its ongoing impact on the ordinary people living in the city.

A riveting and moving memoir, portraying the intense struggle for freedom in South Africa.

Apartheid in South Africa was arbitrary and ferocious―its end is widely celebrated. Yet, the monumental difficulties faced by the anti-apartheid movement and the sacrifices made by individuals have been hidden in the broad sweep of time.

Beloved journalist Lionel Morrison brings this history to life again, honouring his forgotten comrades. He shares memories as a defendant alongside Nelson Mandela in the Treason Trials, being forced to leave South Africa, meeting leaders of the non-aligned movement, the heady days of Third World nationalism, fighting subtle racism in Britain, and much more. With sharp intellect and warm humour, Morrison’s stories reveal the intimate experience of grand geopolitical shifts―and how politics is lived.

Completed by Liz Morrison after her husband’s death, Footprints is an ode to community, truth, and resistance.

We live in a moment of interlocking and compounding crises that many commentators have aptly termed the ‘polycrisis.’  Rampant inequality. Unchecked climate change. A global pandemic. And now, seething international divisions and the escalatory spiral of war and state violence. As the world moves toward the end of the 2020s, each of the pieces of this mosaic are becoming impossible to ignore, but how do they all fit together? And where is it all heading?

To answer these questions, economist and marxist commentator Michael Roberts draws on his forty-plus years of experience working in various financial institutions in the City of London to provide an empirically grounded and wide ranging appraisal of the global situation. 

Roberts takes readers on a tour of the contemporary global economy, first by turning back to the Great Recession of 2008, and then offering a granular look at the economic priorities and contradictions of every region of the world. His analysis unearths the fault lines left behind by our most recent financial meltdown and how they fuel the economic engines driving the ecological crisis and resurgence of inter-imperial conflict.

What emerges from this accounting of the polycrisis is the inescapable fact that capitalism’s rapacious drive toward profit over and against any geopolitical boundaries or plenary limits threatens both humanity and the planet. 

A riveting and moving memoir, portraying the intense struggle for freedom in South Africa.

Apartheid in South Africa was arbitrary and ferocious―its end is widely celebrated. Yet, the monumental difficulties faced by the anti-apartheid movement and the sacrifices made by individuals have been hidden in the broad sweep of time.

Beloved journalist Lionel Morrison brings this history to life again, honouring his forgotten comrades. He shares memories as a defendant alongside Nelson Mandela in the Treason Trials, being forced to leave South Africa, meeting leaders of the non-aligned movement, the heady days of Third World nationalism, fighting subtle racism in Britain, and much more. With sharp intellect and warm humour, Morrison’s stories reveal the intimate experience of grand geopolitical shifts―and how politics is lived.

Completed by Liz Morrison after her husband’s death, Footprints is an ode to community, truth, and resistance.

From the author of Enemy Feminisms and Abolish the Family, a fierce critique of femmephobia within feminism, and a vision of a life-giving femme feminism for all.

For two centuries, feminists have tried to be respectable and serious. In Femmephilia, Sophie Lewis makes the case for the vital political importance of “femmeness”: a femininity that is self-consciously artificial, a femininity whose erotic and political appetites are considered unacceptable and unnatural. Being femme is a kind of work that merits love and respect—but femmes instead face criticism from antagonists and feminist allies alike. 

Where neoliberal women’s empowerment has failed to combat the eruption of right-wing, anti-trans, and anti-feminist attacks, Lewis argues that femmephilia can help us imagine a radical future. In essays on the high femme genius of Marilyn Monroe and trans yearning in the myth of Apollo and Daphne; on tradwives and girlbosses, reluctant heterosexuals, lesbian separatists, and anti-work cats; and on a mother on strike from maternity and a poet who mothered against motherhood, Femmephilia offers a new logic of liberation for all feminized people. 

From the author of Enemy Feminisms and Abolish the Family, a fierce critique of femmephobia within feminism, and a vision of a life-giving femme feminism for all.

For two centuries, feminists have tried to be respectable and serious. In Femmephilia, Sophie Lewis makes the case for the vital political importance of “femmeness”: a femininity that is self-consciously artificial, a femininity whose erotic and political appetites are considered unacceptable and unnatural. Being femme is a kind of work that merits love and respect—but femmes instead face criticism from antagonists and feminist allies alike. 

Where neoliberal women’s empowerment has failed to combat the eruption of right-wing, anti-trans, and anti-feminist attacks, Lewis argues that femmephilia can help us imagine a radical future. In essays on the high femme genius of Marilyn Monroe and trans yearning in the myth of Apollo and Daphne; on tradwives and girlbosses, reluctant heterosexuals, lesbian separatists, and anti-work cats; and on a mother on strike from maternity and a poet who mothered against motherhood, Femmephilia offers a new logic of liberation for all feminized people. 

Forgiveness is necessary in the long fight for a just world—but it is only possible after the oppressed are victorious.

For too long, revolutionary social movements have reconciled to defeat. We must start winning again. Forgiveness is a crucial strategy for remaking the world, to secure and sustain victories, to turn one-time enemies into friends.

With deep political commitment and lucid moral clarity, D.K. Renton makes the case for forgiveness, but of a particularly unruly sort. Tracing the tragic abuse of Eleanor Marx and Jane Wells, the mistakes of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the courage of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the redemption of televangelist Tammy Faye, Renton urges us to forgive, but only after tearing down the citadels of the rich.

Revolutionary Forgiveness merges history with philosophy, infuses politics with ethics, and connects collective struggle with the individual’s search for justice to demand a future for all—when the oppressed will be magnanimous in power, and even former oppressors will be free.

A collection of lyrical and experimental poems, Mermaid Theory redefines the page to visually and textually enact the struggles and celebrations of Arab-American femininity.

In her second full-length collection, Maya Salameh offers a profound exploration of Arab-American identity, weaving together themes of myth, science, and cultural heritage. Salameh’s innovative poetic forms blur the lines between ancient myth and psychological scholarship.

Mermaid Theory boldly reimagines Arab-American womanhood in the modern military age, deploying psychological evaluation forms, ritual incantations, and other texts as visual lyric poems to deepen the reader’s engagement. Salameh transcends simple narratives of shame or violence to offer a nuanced portrayal of identity, exploring both the privileges and heartbreaks of diasporic exile. Her multilingual poetry bridges Arabic and English, enriching the poems’ sonic texture. 

A collection of lyrical and experimental poems, Mermaid Theory redefines the page to visually and textually enact the struggles and celebrations of Arab-American femininity.

In her second full-length collection, Maya Salameh offers a profound exploration of Arab-American identity, weaving together themes of myth, science, and cultural heritage. Salameh’s innovative poetic forms blur the lines between ancient myth and psychological scholarship.

Mermaid Theory boldly reimagines Arab-American womanhood in the modern military age, deploying psychological evaluation forms, ritual incantations, and other texts as visual lyric poems to deepen the reader’s engagement. Salameh transcends simple narratives of shame or violence to offer a nuanced portrayal of identity, exploring both the privileges and heartbreaks of diasporic exile. Her multilingual poetry bridges Arabic and English, enriching the poems’ sonic texture. 

We live in a moment of interlocking and compounding crises that many commentators have aptly termed the ‘polycrisis.’  Rampant inequality. Unchecked climate change. A global pandemic. And now, seething international divisions and the escalatory spiral of war and state violence. As the world moves toward the end of the 2020s, each of the pieces of this mosaic are becoming impossible to ignore, but how do they all fit together? And where is it all heading?

To answer these questions, economist and marxist commentator Michael Roberts draws on his forty-plus years of experience working in various financial institutions in the City of London to provide an empirically grounded and wide ranging appraisal of the global situation. 

Roberts takes readers on a tour of the contemporary global economy, first by turning back to the Great Recession of 2008, and then offering a granular look at the economic priorities and contradictions of every region of the world. His analysis unearths the fault lines left behind by our most recent financial meltdown and how they fuel the economic engines driving the ecological crisis and resurgence of inter-imperial conflict.

What emerges from this accounting of the polycrisis is the inescapable fact that capitalism’s rapacious drive toward profit over and against any geopolitical boundaries or plenary limits threatens both humanity and the planet. 

Offering a bold critique of the limitations of the reparations and land back movements, When We Are Kin envisions a Black and Indigenous future rooted in real solidarity, a future that exists beyond the confines of the liberal imagination.

Current advocates of reparations for slavery and land back often fail to scrutinize racial capitalism and settler colonialism, instead accepting that their destinies will be forever tied to US empire. But as scholar Kyle T. Mays insists in When We Are Kin, we can and should demand a kind of repair that goes beyond a white supremacist idea of what justice can be.

In a series of short essays, Mays traces the history of alliances between Black and Indigenous movements; outlines the limitations of certain demands for reparations, including cash payments, that do not fundamentally critique racial-settler capitalism; and interrogates contemporary land back initiatives that displace Black residents. Along the way, he asks, What does solidarity look like between Black and Indigenous peoples in the United States? Can we find ways to co-belong and co-resist on Turtle Island?

Drawing on the Anishinaabe philosophy of mino-bimaadiziwin (the good life), Mays argues that we can resist as kin only when we center the land in building our collective futures.

Offering a bold critique of the limitations of the reparations and land back movements, When We Are Kin envisions a Black and Indigenous future rooted in real solidarity, a future that exists beyond the confines of the liberal imagination.

Current advocates of reparations for slavery and land back often fail to scrutinize racial capitalism and settler colonialism, instead accepting that their destinies will be forever tied to US empire. But as scholar Kyle T. Mays insists in When We Are Kin, we can and should demand a kind of repair that goes beyond a white supremacist idea of what justice can be.

In a series of short essays, Mays traces the history of alliances between Black and Indigenous movements; outlines the limitations of certain demands for reparations, including cash payments, that do not fundamentally critique racial-settler capitalism; and interrogates contemporary land back initiatives that displace Black residents. Along the way, he asks, What does solidarity look like between Black and Indigenous peoples in the United States? Can we find ways to co-belong and co-resist on Turtle Island?

Drawing on the Anishinaabe philosophy of mino-bimaadiziwin (the good life), Mays argues that we can resist as kin only when we center the land in building our collective futures.

In this captivating account of two of the most corrupt and blood-soaked chapters in Chicago law enforcement history, award-winning lawyer and author of The Torture Machine Flint Taylor draws on his vast experience to guide readers through the sordid world of prosecutorial misconduct and police violence

This compelling follow-up to his exposé of systemic police torture within the CPD looks at the roles of Cook County prosecutors and Democratic machine politicians in covering up both those widespread abuses, and the political assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. This story begins with a focus on then rising political star Edward V. Hanrahan, who, in his position as state’s attorney, authorized the notorious police raid on Hampton’s apartment and then vociferously orchestrated a cover-up that took more than a decade to completely unravel. Taylor shows how Hanrahan’s racist political strategy would ultimately lead to his own political downfall following the efforts of a Black-led movement.

Taylor traces the ways that Hanrahan’s legacy was continued and brought to bear on the case of Jackie Wilson, a victim of police torture wrongfully incarcerated for thirty-six years, thanks in large part to the same style of racist prosecutorial misconduct. Drawing on unique insights gained from his position as one of the leading lawyers in opposition, Taylor deftly guides readers through the numerous twists and turns of Wilson’s forty-year effort that not only won an innocent man his freedom but also resulted in the criminal indictment of a Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney who played an important role in this shameful history.

Leading readers through this saga, Taylor asks whether there can be such a thing as effective progressive prosecutors dedicated to fair and equal justice in such an inherently unjust and systemically racist legal system.

In this captivating account of two of the most corrupt and blood-soaked chapters in Chicago law enforcement history, award-winning lawyer and author of The Torture Machine Flint Taylor draws on his vast experience to guide readers through the sordid world of prosecutorial misconduct and police violence

This compelling follow-up to his exposé of systemic police torture within the CPD looks at the roles of Cook County prosecutors and Democratic machine politicians in covering up both those widespread abuses, and the political assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. This story begins with a focus on then rising political star Edward V. Hanrahan, who, in his position as state’s attorney, authorized the notorious police raid on Hampton’s apartment and then vociferously orchestrated a cover-up that took more than a decade to completely unravel. Taylor shows how Hanrahan’s racist political strategy would ultimately lead to his own political downfall following the efforts of a Black-led movement.

Taylor traces the ways that Hanrahan’s legacy was continued and brought to bear on the case of Jackie Wilson, a victim of police torture wrongfully incarcerated for thirty-six years, thanks in large part to the same style of racist prosecutorial misconduct. Drawing on unique insights gained from his position as one of the leading lawyers in opposition, Taylor deftly guides readers through the numerous twists and turns of Wilson’s forty-year effort that not only won an innocent man his freedom but also resulted in the criminal indictment of a Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney who played an important role in this shameful history.

Leading readers through this saga, Taylor asks whether there can be such a thing as effective progressive prosecutors dedicated to fair and equal justice in such an inherently unjust and systemically racist legal system.

“Hope, courage, and insurrection have crossed bodies, territories, and all borders.”—from Revolutions of Our Times

This urgent declaration advances an internationalism from below, focused on people and movements rather than states, as agents of our collective liberation. Revolutions of Our Times draws on the experience of uprisings taking place across the globe over the past two decades and sets out a vision for revolutionary internationalism.

From continent to continent, from our exile, in our travels and in our struggles, we have found each other. In the clash of street battles, gestures seen and then replicated in different countries, words echoed across languages, we have recognized each other.  We belong to a single transnational struggle—and we stand against an internationally organized elite. We know that if we remain isolated, we will achieve nothing.

The bitterness of our defeats, and our refusal to accept them as final, has engendered the desire to get to know each other. We have begun to weave a network of planetary connections from frontlines to popular assemblies, from feminist strikes to resistance committees, from occupied roundabouts to occupied forests, and have discovered a common sensibility.

“Hope, courage, and insurrection have crossed bodies, territories, and all borders.”—from Revolutions of Our Times

This urgent declaration advances an internationalism from below, focused on people and movements rather than states, as agents of our collective liberation. Revolutions of Our Times draws on the experience of uprisings taking place across the globe over the past two decades and sets out a vision for revolutionary internationalism.

From continent to continent, from our exile, in our travels and in our struggles, we have found each other. In the clash of street battles, gestures seen and then replicated in different countries, words echoed across languages, we have recognized each other.  We belong to a single transnational struggle—and we stand against an internationally organized elite. We know that if we remain isolated, we will achieve nothing.

The bitterness of our defeats, and our refusal to accept them as final, has engendered the desire to get to know each other. We have begun to weave a network of planetary connections from frontlines to popular assemblies, from feminist strikes to resistance committees, from occupied roundabouts to occupied forests, and have discovered a common sensibility.

New York Times Bestseller

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

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

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

An unorthodox, irreverent, and battle-tested strategy for workers ready to leverage the power we already have.

We know how our workplaces should be, but they’re changing for the worse. We know how we want the world to be, too, but billionaires are doing their best to make things fall apart. 

Unions of Our Own provides a radical, step-by-step framework for workers who want to fight for the better workplaces they’ve always envisioned—and dream of bigger changes, too. In a world teeming with union-busters and bad bosses, Daniel Gross reveals the eight building blocks needed to build a sustainable labor union that can actually stand up for workers’ needs.

Cookie-cutter organizing methods and traditional models are often ineffective. It takes something more: it takes you and your coworkers. From first conversations with those coworkers to the actualization of real, collective power, Unions of Our Own will offer a potent antidote to the idea that change is impossible.

Through practical tools and real-world examples, Unions of Our Own is an actionable, inspiring, and confidence-boosting handbook on how to win the workplace—and the world—you deserve.

An unorthodox, irreverent, and battle-tested strategy for workers ready to leverage the power we already have.

We know how our workplaces should be, but they’re changing for the worse. We know how we want the world to be, too, but billionaires are doing their best to make things fall apart. 

Unions of Our Own provides a radical, step-by-step framework for workers who want to fight for the better workplaces they’ve always envisioned—and dream of bigger changes, too. In a world teeming with union-busters and bad bosses, Daniel Gross reveals the eight building blocks needed to build a sustainable labor union that can actually stand up for workers’ needs.

Cookie-cutter organizing methods and traditional models are often ineffective. It takes something more: it takes you and your coworkers. From first conversations with those coworkers to the actualization of real, collective power, Unions of Our Own will offer a potent antidote to the idea that change is impossible.

Through practical tools and real-world examples, Unions of Our Own is an actionable, inspiring, and confidence-boosting handbook on how to win the workplace—and the world—you deserve.

A collection of essays from the Stop Cop City movement on the fight for police abolition and for a liveable planet for all, with gripping reporting from activists on the ground and rousing articles from renowned radical academics

The Stop Cop City movement is a decentralized effort to stop the construction of a $120 million police training facility and the destruction of 170 acres of the Weelaunee Forest outside of Atlanta, Georgia. This is the first collection of essays bringing together organizers and activists who have been involved in the years-long struggle to Stop Cop City. Connecting movements for environmental justice, police abolition, and Indigenous sovereignty, this expansive collection highlights the strategy, tactics, and ideologies that transformed a local collective action into a powerful international movement.

Featuring the voices of forest defenders, environmental justice advocates, political prisoners, Indigenous activists, abolitionists, educators, legal scholars, and academics, these wide-ranging essays explore the history of the intersectional movement, the diverse tactics embraced by activists, tributes to Tortuguita, the 26-year-old queer Indigenous forest defender murdered by Georgia State Patrol troopers, and the intense police and legal repression faced by organizers. Making critical connections between oppression and resistance at home and abroad, the movement to Stop Cop City has expanded to a fight against a Cop World.

Amid the brazen attacks of Trump’s first 100 days in office, courts have played a leading role in resistance to the authoritarian onslaught.This issue—the first in Boston Review’s 50th anniversary year—warns against relying on them to defend democracy and lays out a better response to the crisis we face.

Leading a forum, political scientist Lisa L. Miller argues that liberal hopes in checks and balances are badly misplaced. Far from a safeguard of democracy, America’s constitutional order has always been at odds with it. Doubling down on it, even at this moment, will only make things worse.

Trump does not represent a majority of Americans, Miller stresses. From health care to the minimum wage, most people want much more from government. But time and again, powerful elites exploit the system to block desperately needed reforms and protect the status quo. Too many checks and balances are what got us here, breeding discontent with the system. And only broad-based mass movements can get us beyond it.

Forum respondents include historian Lily Geismer, organizers Eric Blanc and Kelly Hayes, journalist Maya Schenwar, sociologist Gianpaolo Baiocchi, and legal scholars Marcus Gadson, Aziz Huq, and Samuel Moyn.

Also in the issue, Judith Levine reports on mutual aid as resistance, Troy Nahumko writes from Spain on the global right’s war on memory, and Debbie Nathan traces the insidious history of the national security exception fueling Trump’s deportation machine.

Plus, Benjamin Balthaser examines Jewish dissent from Zionism and American liberalism’s identity crisis. Emily Baughan chronicles the demise of Liverpool’s working class, a harbinger of workers’ obsolescence in the United States and elsewhere. Vietnam veteran and activist David Cortright draws lessons from the antiwar movement for opposing Trumpism. Alex Gourevitch vigorously defends the right to protest on campus. And in a special archival feature for our anniversary year, John Ganz reflects on G. M. Tamás’s essay “On Post-Fascism,” originally published in our Summer 2000 issue—among “the most prescient and insightful political texts,” Ganz says, “of the new century.”

A new introduction to the groundbreaking work of one of Latin America’s major Marxist thinkers, Alberto Flores Galindo (1949-1990).

Written by two specialists in Peruvian history, this book introduces English readers to his life and work. Flores Galindo wrote several important books on Andean utopianism, José Carlos Mariátegui, subaltern Lima, and more. He also participated in fiery debates on the left about Marxism, democracy, and socialism. In this book, authors cover many of his major topics and contributions, including Peru's rupture with Spanish colonialism, his role as a Marxist public intellectual, his relationship with the Cuban Revolution, the Shining Path and human rights, and his passion for literature.

Populism has become a contested and controversial word in contemporary politics. But what does “populism” really mean?

Despite its relatively short history, the term follows a rather volatile trajectory in terms of its historical development and presence as a political practice. When we look at its political and moral impact, one can see that despite its often strict national commitments and narratives, populism is rather a global political phenomenon. As embodiment of anti-establishment narratives, polarizing attitudes, and emancipatory appeal, we can follow its occurrence from Central and Eastern Europe, Latin America, the USA and UK, the Middle East, all the way to China and India. 

This edited volume helps fill a gap in the existing literature on Critical Theory (broadly construed) and populism, focusing on the multiple dimensions of historical and contemporary contexts for today’s rising populist movements and their often – but not necessarily – hostile relations towards cosmopolitanism, globalization, environmentalism, and general notions of inclusion and justice.

Contributors include: Emília Barna, Ronald Beiner, Dustin J. Byrd, Samir Gandesha, Carlos Antonio Giovinazzo Júnior, Mlado Ivanovic, Yonathan Listik, Grigoris Markou, Jeremiah Morelock, Felipe Ziotti Narita, Ágnes Patakfalvi- Czirják, Maria Cristina Dancham Simões and Hassan Zaheer.

In Germany, a liberal concept of racism is advocated by anti-discrimination agencies and the radical left alike. The Diversity of Exploitation sets out to break this consensus.

The liberal discourse on racism rarely addresses the connection between class and race. But there exists a Marxist tradition of racism research which focuses on how these categories are related. The contributors in this collection seek to draw on that tradition. At the same time, the book offers a political intervention in the current debate on structural and institutional racism, whether in the labor market or in the police force. It presents alternatives to liberal antiracism by introducing a Marxist concept of racism in theory and practice.

Contributors include: Celia Bouali, Sebastian Friedrich, Christian Frings, Fabian Georgi, Lea Pilone, Daniele Puccio, Eleonora Roldán Mendívil, Bafta Sarbo, and Hannah Vögele.

A revelatory overview of the reforms and changes that transformed China under Xi Jinping’s administration between 2012 and 2022.

China under Xi Jinping focuses on the impact of Xi’s rule on China’s political system, with special attention given to the features that distinguish Xi from his predecessors. The authors discuss, among others, the Xi Jinping Thought and the nature of his leadership, factors contributing to China's economic success, the future of the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s response to challenges in terms of security, climate policy, energy transition, pandemics, as well as its ambition to become a global superpower in domains such as space exploration and sports. The volume also analyzes the influence that Xi Jinping’s government has exerted on the Chinese state, society, and culture, concentrating on areas such as healthcare, education, politics regarding religion, the evolution of Chinese nationalism, the developments in Chinese cinema, music, language, and even political humor.

To understand what characterizes Xi as a politician and how his time in office is reflected in today’s China, experts on China-related matters comment on five dimensions including political, economic, social, cultural, and foreign policy issues. This publication is bound to spark the readers interest in and increase their awareness concerning the developments in the People's Republic of China under Xi Jinping.

A groundbreaking analysis of the relationship between politics, policies, and criminalization.

This anthology scrutinizes the impact of law, society, politics, and penal populism on criminalization across legal systems, advocating for a reassessment of criminal law's scope. Criminalization delves into the prevalence of resorting to criminalization for social issues, urging for a critical review. Additionally, the book examines the normative foundations of criminalization, addressing 'over'-criminalization and exploring its empirical and normative aspects. The contributors also consider the roles of prosecutorial and judicial discretion, as well as State preventive powers, in over-criminalization. 

Any reader—whether scholar, policymaker, or citizen—will gain insights into the expansion of criminal laws and their consequences, making it a valuable resource for understanding the dynamics of law, politics, and power in criminal justice.

Contributors include: Naveed Mehmood, Chirag Balyan, Shruti Bedi, Shubhangni Jain, Charles Khamala, Sébastien Lafrance, Sidharth Luthra, David McCallum, Garima Pal, Daria Ponomareva, Alok Prasanna, Yogesh Pratap Singh, and Ekkehard Strauss.

Today, we are living in a new social order: the (in)visibilization society.

How and why is this society making so many human beingss and the environment invisible, while simultaneously developing and expanding the practices, means, and structures to make them supposedly more "visible"? And what future(s) await(s) this society? This book offers a new sociological analysis of contemporary societies by exploring some of their core contradictions and resulting socio-ecological (dis)illusions and crises, together with the related conflicts between the (in)visible — now taking place within and between analog and digital spaces.

An in-depth investigation into the political economy of natural resource extraction in the Global South across the spheres production and social reproduction.

Building on a fieldwork which stretched over six years, Coşku Çelik shows that natural resource extraction in the agrarian South is a multi-dimensional development strategy, whose holistic analysis necessitates attention to (i) the significance of the natural resource in question for macro development plans and global value chains, (ii) the formation of the classes of extractive labour across production and social reproduction, (iii) gender division of labour within rural extractive households and rural labour markets, and (iv) labour process and control strategies in the spheres of production and social reproduction.

A new collection of essays from a pioneer of global Gramsci studies, spanning from 1968 to the present.

This volume collects Alastair Davidson’s work from various difficult to access sources covering such diverse topics as the sources: Marx, Lenin, Machiavelli, Labriola and Croce; the party and workers’ councils, through to the question of what is living and what is dead in the legacy of Gramsci, cultural studies and subalternality, uneven development and globalization, human rights and the peasantry, literature and culture.

The Longest Night tells the captivating story of Chinese Trotskyism in its later years, including after Mao Zedong's capture of Beijing in 1949.

The book covers the three main periods of Chinese Trotskyism: the founding generation around Chen Duxiu, Zheng Chaolin, Wang Fanxi, and Peng Shuzhi, who joined the Opposition after their expulsion from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP); the first generation of those who (after 1931) did not first pass through the ranks of the CCP before becoming Trotskyists; and those who became Trotskyists after 1949, mainly in Hong Kong and the diaspora.

Capital is often depicted as an all-encompassing and abstract social force which seeks to “subsume” all human life. But what is “subsumption” and how might it be resisted?

Tracing the discourse of subsumption through the work of Kant, Hegel, Marx and the critical Marxist tradition, this book offers a materialist framework for analysing capitalist power. Saenz de Sicilia argues that capitalist subsumption operates at three distinct yet interrelated levels: exchange, production, and reproduction, with each characterised by distinct logics of domination and resistance. Conflicts over subsumption at each of these levels lie at the heart of capitalism’s struggle to determine the shapes of human social life.

A major intervention into debates surrounding the historical trajectories of capitalism, Subsumption in Kant, Hegel and Marx: From the Critique of Reason to the Critique of Society systematically refutes the influential thesis that we are now in a stage of "total" capitalist subsumption which leaves no space of refuge or resistance.

Revolutionary Subjectivity in the Thought of Karl Marx presents a rigorous interdisciplinary analysis of Marx’s social philosophy.

Paul Elias critically examines a terminal inconsistency within Marx’s idea of revolutionary subjectivity. In doing so, major areas of Marx’s thinking which have been misrepresented in scholarly discourse are coherently interpreted and rearticulated, providing a basis for exploring the incipient psychology and theory of mind in his work. This project reveals a novel theoretical waypoint whereby Husserl’s phenomenology and Freud’s psychoanalysis (particularly as developed by Melanie Klein) can engage in conversation with his social theory. While this critique poses a significant challenge to Marxism, it also offers an innovative prospect to sublate the insights of Marx’s work and reanimate his thinking for our contemporary period.

Capital’s Food Regime traces India’s integration into the global food regime and reveals the consequences for the country’s different classes of labour.

The book is an in-depth study of agrarian transformations in contemporary India through the lens of food regime analysis. While the food regime approach has emphasized global-scale studies, this book breaks new ground in downscaling the approach to account for specific historical-geographical cases. Jakobsen thus develops an innovative Marxist approach to food regime analysis that challenges prevailing scholarly accounts in Agrarian Studies and beyond.

The second of two volumes, Criminalization: Where Do We Go from Here embarks on an exploration of the historical roots of over-criminalization.

The authors trace its origins back to ancient legal systems and societal norms, elucidating the evolution of the legal framework alongside shifting attitudes and policy decisions. The chapters shed light on the socio-cultural forces that have contributed to the proliferation of criminal laws, resulting in a state of over-criminalization in contemporary society, supported by empirical analysis.

Drawing from research across five countries, this book presents a comprehensive theoretical and empirical account of the social impact of financialisation.

Through case studies on housing, water, and health, Ben Fine traces the effects of financialisation on economic and social reproduction, alongside the corresponding material cultures of neoliberalism. Economic is understood as embedded within social reproduction, with neoliberalism, as the current stage of capitalism, fundamentally underpinned by, but not reducible to, the financialisation of everyday life. Considerable emphasis is placed upon the variegated outcomes attached to the neoliberalisation of social reproduction, as highlighted by the comparative study of economic and social provisioning across different countries and sectors.