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.

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.

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 necessary 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 an American televangelist, 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 courageous excavation of the deep wounds that racism and colonialism have left on Black people across borders, and an imaginative effort to care for oneself and one’s community in the wake.

Born in a close-knit Haitian enclave in Miami, Edna Bonhomme was raised to fight for her community—at first for their rights as immigrants, and then as part of the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements. Later, as an immigrant in Berlin, she encountered species of racism and of resistance that were new and different in some ways but fueled by the same legacy of colonial power.

With astute insight and immersive prose, Bonhomme outlines a personal and political history of life in the United States, Haiti, and Germany, discovering what it means to be Black at home and abroad. She unlearns the lies that she was told about slavery and colonialism and explores how communities are resisting the weight of centuries of history.

Whether thinking through debt, medical racism, art, or reparations, Tending to Our Wounds offers a case study on how to navigate between the past and the present, the individual and collective—identifying the tendrils of history in the everyday, and outlining a path to repair.

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 necessary 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 an American televangelist, 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 courageous excavation of the deep wounds that racism and colonialism have left on Black people across borders, and an imaginative effort to care for oneself and one’s community in the wake.

Born in a close-knit Haitian enclave in Miami, Edna Bonhomme was raised to fight for her community—at first for their rights as immigrants, and then as part of the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements. Later, as an immigrant in Berlin, she encountered species of racism and of resistance that were new and different in some ways but fueled by the same legacy of colonial power.

With astute insight and immersive prose, Bonhomme outlines a personal and political history of life in the United States, Haiti, and Germany, discovering what it means to be Black at home and abroad. She unlearns the lies that she was told about slavery and colonialism and explores how communities are resisting the weight of centuries of history.

Whether thinking through debt, medical racism, art, or reparations, Tending to Our Wounds offers a case study on how to navigate between the past and the present, the individual and collective—identifying the tendrils of history in the everyday, and outlining a path to repair.

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. 

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.

“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.

Sigmund Freud’s work has impacted the modern world in profound ways. The contributions in this collection trace the influence of his psychanalytic perspective on a wide range of philosophers and sociologists who built on his thought.

The “father of psychoanalysis,” Freud wrote numerous works wherein his psychoanalytic perspectives were applied to history, society, religion, and other cultural phenomena. By expanding his psychoanalytic theories into these realms, Freud insured his place within the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, history, theology, and religious studies, wherein his works are still studied. More specifically, his psychoanalytic theories were adopted, revised, and expanded upon by philosophers and sociologists, such as Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, and many others, who in some cases radicalized the latent political content within Freud’s thought, using it to critique modern industrialized capitalism and theorize about the possibility for alternative forms of societies more conducive towards mental health.

Although Freud is often marginalized, or even denigrated, there are still elements within the corpus of Freud’s work that are valuable for both diagnosing social problems and addressing such problems psychoanalytically. The book demonstrates the lasting relevance of Freud’s thought to a variety of disciplines, as they diagnose a myriad of social issues.

A strategic reconstruction of modern German thought from the standpoint of aesthetic theory.

The Narrowest Path reveals the characteristically modern, revolutionary project of freedom-as-autonomy to be unresolvably antinomic. Based on four seminal texts by Kleist, Hegel, Marx, and Adorno, Mehrgan develops four basic figures – the literary, the person, the republic, and the artwork – that flourished during the long period between the French Revolution and the aftermath of the Second World War in Europe. Their main antagonist was the rule of capital, which paradoxically enabled self-determination while thwarting it. Still present in contemporary revolutionary experiments, this daunting conflict is most visible in the aesthetic – but its resolution lies elsewhere.

Written during periods of radical activity in the tumultuous twentieth century, these essays by Paul Mattick have lost none of their urgency.

The themes addressed in this collection—the devastation of war-torn areas and the abject destitution to which beleaguered populations are subjected, the authoritarian character of ostensibly democratic regimes, the ecological disasters that increasingly beset the world, the rationale behind and limits to governmental efforts to stimulate and stabilize the economy, and Mattick’s assessment of economic theorizing within the Marxian tradition —are still relevant for us today. The essays combine contemporary commentary with theoretical analysis and represent some of the finest work Mattick produced.

A bold proposal for an ethnographic approach to popular entrepreneurship based on the experience of wageless life in Brazil.

In the Remains of Progress begins from the historical premise that self-employment is at the heart of the popular way of life, whose main characteristic is the desire for autonomy. In turn, the global discourse of self-realisation carries a strong attempt at modernisation aimed at young people, but which is also capable of embarrassing older people. From the shopping streets, social entrepreneurship and Pentecostal cults, this process is giving shape to political conflicts that are redrawing the sense of community in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city.

A pioneering biography of an overlooked but integral figure in the history of the Frankfurt School. 

Friedrich Pollock was many things. The son of an industrialist who wanted to abolish private property. A Jew who didn’t want anything to do with Judaism. A professor who published little. An economist who squandered his wealth on the stock market. A communist who thought Marxism was anachronistic. And finally: a critical intellectual. 

When dealing with the political culture of the Weimar Republic, the development of Critical Theory and German-Jewish emigration to the USA, there is no way around Pollock. Max Horkheimer’s companion and the founder of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt plays an important part in German-Jewish intellectual history as one of the most prominent representatives of Critical Theory.

A pioneering analysis of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), making sense of the region’s sharply changing political orientation from a “left turn” to a “right curve”.

It has been difficult to build stable and predictable international relations with the unique LAC region. At the beginning of the 21st century, we witnessed a sharp increase in interest in LAC from extra-regional powers that, due to historical, cultural, and geographical factors, traditionally did not have strong ties with the region. The 2020s is a time of competitive and systemic rivalry, when the value of each individual partnership, union, or alliance is increasing. In this regard, this wave of interest in LAC is not caused by a desire to expand trade and investment presence, but by the desire of new actors in the Americas to use the region to gain greater global geopolitical influence.

This book addresses the question: What role do extra-regional actors—the US, China, the EU, and Russia—play in the new system of international relations formed in LAC at the beginning of the 21st century? Ultimately, the book opens up a new multilateral perspective on the role and place of LAC in global processes in the context of the interaction and confrontation between the worldviews of the West and the non-West.

An up-to-the-moment account of COVID-19 and its aftermath from an interdisciplinary network of transatlantic scholars reporting from Brazil, Colombia, and France.

The case studies presented in Care and Pandemic diagnose problems resulting from the pandemic, hereby revealing socio-demographic dynamics of care labor markets, outlining the impact of online care platforms on the conditions of care work, and providing caring strategies rooted in community solidarity. The authors argue that creating a robust and more resilient care organization requires a comprehensive understanding of why systems failed to build capacity that can absorb external shocks and address structural changes before, during, and after disasters.

Contributors include: Gabriela Alkmin, Mariana Eugenio Almeida, Ana Carolina Andrada, Daniella Castro-Barbudo, Amparo Hernández-Bello, Eileen Boris, Ana Claudia Moreira Cardoso, Aurélie Damamme, Guita Grin Debert, Jorge Felix, Heidi Gottfried, Nadya Araujo Guimarães, Helena Hirata, Léa Lima, Pascale Molinier, Suelen Castiblanco-Moreno, Carolina Moreno, Renata Moreno, Pedro Augusto Gravatá Nicoli, Maria Júlia Tavares Pereira, Javier A. Pineda D., Luana Simões Pinheiro, Jeanny Posso, Marcelo Maciel Ramos, Michelle Redondo, Maria Camila Vega-Salazar and Simone Wajnman.

China in Contemporary Capitalism presents outstanding research in Political Economy on the economic, social, and political development of China from a unique Global South-centred perspective.

The authors cover topics such as the Chinese development model, the evolution of social classes, the country's projection on the global stage, and the recent technological dispute with the United States. It does so by avoiding the trap (particularly perilous in the case of China) of isolating the economy from politics. The authors demonstrate that without understanding the contradictory movements of these two dimensions in their historical evolution, it is impossible to grasp contemporary China.

Contributors include: Esther Majerowicz, Carlos Aguiar de Medeiros, Isabela Nogueira, Edemilson Paraná, Valéria Lopes Ribeiro and Hao Qi.

A collection of engaging and highly readable essays from a leading historian of American Social Art.

In these essay, spanning from 1977 to 2023, Alan Wallach explores the art of Thomas Cole, patronage of the Hudson River School, so-called “Luminism,” the rise of the American art museum, the historiography of American art, scholarship and the art market, as well as the work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Rockwell Kent, Grant Wood, Philip Evergood, and Norman Rockwell. Throughout, Wallach employs a materialist approach to argue against traditional scholarship that considered American art and art institutions in isolation from their social, historical, and ideological contexts.

Critiques offers a compelling defence of development, showing that Marxist approaches to this contentious concept still have much to offer us today.

Tom Brass pushes back against claims that development is outdated, environmentally destructive and Eurocentric, arguing instead for the revival of a Marxist analysis focused on class struggle, economic production and redistribution. The book takes aim at two dominant interpretations of rural development: populism and postmodernism. Under the misleading guise of new paradigms, these approaches have sought to exorcise two ghosts: not just development itself, but also Marxist theory about development. The book includes a discussion of one aspect of the debate about racism – labour market competition – and asks why the reproduction of this ideology is more acute at some historical conjunctures but not others. This same question, Brass suggests, can also be asked about the “industrial reserve”.

Grounding Critique shows that Marxism must have a robust understanding of social relations, such as race, gender, and sexuality, if it wants to produce the knowledge we need to transform society.

Tanyildiz subjects two important strands of Marxist social theory —Marxist-feminism and social reproduction theory— to a methodological examination and demonstrates their shortcomings. Focusing on these strands’ critiques of intersectionality as a moment of crystallization in concept formation, Grounding Critique explores alternative ways of using Marx’s method to understand contemporary human praxis.

A comprehensive history of Puerto Rico’s independence struggle against Spanish and U.S. colonialism.

Rafael Bernabe traces the independence movement’s currents from the time of the Napoleonic Wars within and beyond the island, linking them to ongoing social conflicts and international trends and conjunctures. Beginning with the radical democratic fight against Spanish control, the book moves on to the early reactions to U.S. rule, the role of Nationalism, Communism and New Deal currents during the Great Depression and the Second World War, the rise of new forces in the wake of the Cuban revolution and recent struggles in the epoch of capitalist globalisation.

This urgent and timely book traces peasant resistance to the advance of destructive capitalist agriculture in Brazil.

As debates about “sustainable development”, ecosocialism, agroecology, and the production of healthy food have become increasingly popular in Europe and across the world, we should turn our focus to the peasant movements who pioneered alternative forms of agriculture. By socialising the results of their research, the authors show us how peasant resistance prefigures alternative forms of labour based on agroecology, cooperation, and cooperativism. The book also focuses on the agroecology schools of one of the main social movements of our time: The Landless Workers’ Movement (MST).

Rethinking the Social casts a spotlight on Central and Eastern European societies, making their experiences visible and meaningful within postcolonial discourse.

Modernization theory overlooked important aspects of postsocialist transformation leading to the separation of sociological knowledge and the social production of knowledge. As a result, sociology has become alarmingly irrelevant to the people it studies. This book departs from preconceived notions of “normal” and “modern” to foreground the importance of actual social experience. After all, Central and Eastern Europe is a valuable yet underestimated social laboratory. Thus, the contributors experiment with new theoretical and methodological approaches to bridge the gap between social research and real people.

Contributors include: Izabella Bukraba-Rylska, Jacek Burski, Grzegorz Ekiert, Kaja Gadowska, Anna Giza, Małgorzata Głowacka-Grajper, Michał Kaczmarczyk, Krzysztof T. Konecki, Mirosława Marody, Adam Mrozowicki, Joanna Wawrzyniak, Anne White, Renata Włoch, Tomasz Zarycki, and Marek Zirk-Sadowski.

An incisive critique of the Austrian School’s failure to reduce political economy to individual psychology by one of the foremost Soviet economists of the twentieth century.

Emphasising the sociological dimension of Marx’s work, Isaak I. Rubin welcomes a new “social direction” in the writings of Rudolf Stolzmann, Alfred Amonn and Franz Petry. These economists rejected Austrian individualism, but their works were often influenced by the ethical idealism of Kant and Hegel, resulting in detachment of the economy’s social form from the material process of production. Rubin critically explores methodological differences between Marx and early twentieth-century critics and proponents of marginalist economic theory.

The hidden interplay between violence and economies has long eluded public scrutiny, remaining a neglected topic in both academic and policy circles. The Economies of Violence sets out to change this.

In the 1990s, amidst proclamations of the “liberal peace”, democratic nations sidestepped discussions about violent influences within their borders. But the repercussions of economic violence, spanning psychological trauma to societal upheaval, persist globally. Beyond preconceived ideas limiting violence to geographic areas and certain political regimes, identifying the profiteers and veiled beneficiaries of such systems is paramount. This understanding is crucial in dismantling the undemocratic underpinnings of economies of violence, fostering a path towards equity and peace.

Contributors include: Arturo Alvarado, Alain Bauer, Clotilde Champeyrache, Julien Dechanet, Nazia Hussain, David Izadifar, Louise Shelley, and Guillaume Soto-Mayor.

The first book-length exploration of the Marxian concept of totality from a philosophical and sociopolitical perspective.

Drawing on a large number of classical and contemporary works (in English, French, German, Czech and Italian), Boveiri elucidates the distinctive features of Marxian totality with a particular focus on its methodology. The work has six moments. First, it develops arguments against two undialectical conceptions of totality, those held by Schelling and Wittgenstein. Then, it presents a critical reading of Hegelian totality focused on The Science of Logic. Next it examines the shortcomings of two well-known conceptions of totality, one by Georg Lukács, another by Karel Kosík, before examining in detail the developmental characteristics of Marxian totality. The volume concludes with a chapter dealing with some methodological implications of the conception advanced here.

Against Inequality offers a bold theoretical and political proposal for social emancipation.

The book recasts social emancipation not only as an opportunity to build conditions of equality in contexts of freedom, not only for ethical but essentially political foundations. To achieve this, the authors confront inequality in two ways: as a social phenomenon (and, therefore, historically situated and structured) and through critical reflection on the concepts, categories, indicators and frameworks of its understanding. In this sense, they propose a critical reflection of the ways in which it has been thought theoretically and politically at various times, with special reference to the way in which it has been conceived in modern, capitalist society.

A unique comparative look at two of the most influential historical figures of the nineteenth century: Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass.

The Communist and the Revolutionary Liberal in the Second American Revolution is a timely and urgent work of comparative political analysis. Juxtaposing the political thought and activism of Karl Marx and Frederick Douglass, who approached politics from very different theoretical and political perspectives, Nimtz and Edwards make insightful observations and conclusions about race and class in America. The book reveals how two still competing political perspectives, liberalism and Marxism, responded to the biggest breakthrough in the quest for democracy since the French Revolution: the abolition of chattel slavery in the United States. In doing so, Nimtz and Edwards connect debates about the most contentious issues of the nineteenth century to today’s struggles for democracy, freedom, and emancipation.

A fascinating look into the historic founding congress of the Red International of Labour Unions in Moscow in 1921.

This gathering set out to create an international revolutionary trade-union organisation embracing millions of workers, and it brought together a wide variety of forces within the world labour movement. Lively and at times acrimonious debates occurred at the congress with syndicalist and other currents over the purpose and tasks of trade unions, the nature of class-struggle unionism, and union strategy and tactics. The congress proceedings, published here in a richly annotated edition, are part of a multi-volume series on the Communist International in Lenin’s time.

(De)Automating the Future presents a wide-ranging investigation into automation’s ambivalences from an interdisciplinary Marxist perspective.

Much has been written about the prospects of automation in recent years. While many have raised concerns over the threat of technological mass unemployment, others have anticipated a fully automated communist utopia which will provide material abundance to everyone. The book’s contributors raise questions about automation’s affordances for postcapitalism, its transformation of manual and mental labour, and its role in the intensification of class antagonisms and exploitation.

A collection of seminal essays in the Marxist tradition from the renowned economist John Weeks. 

John Weeks (1941-2020) was one of the most prominent Marxist economists of his generation. His writings inspired many activists and socialist economists around the world. This book brings together a selection of his writings engaging with and developing the Marxist tradition. These essays examine theoretical issues, directly building on Karl Marx’s work, as well as practical and political issues, engaging with transformative and revolutionary activity. The essays included in this book are now made available to a new generation of critics of capitalism.

Work, Ideology, and Film under Socialism in Romania examines the cinematic architecture of work imaginary as developed through films produced between 1960 and 1989.

This book provides rich insight into the intimate configuration of cinematic thinking of work and displays of this form of social life, with focus on the relationship between conceived and lived ideology of work during socialist modernization, the relationship between individuals and political power in the (reflexive) experiences, and contexts of work.

Toward a Materialist Conception of Music History makes a convincing case for the relevance, appropriateness, and usefulness of historical materialism to the musicological project.

The book interrogates the history of encounters between Marxism and music studies — both within and outside of the Soviet sphere — before staging the missed encounter between classical musicology and Second International Marxism. It concludes by constructing a new framework for understanding the history of style in terms of changes in the forces and relations of musical production.

A groundbreaking work of Marxian economics, this book sets out to complete Marx’s unfinished theory of crisis.

Karl Marx wrote extensively on crisis but never transformed these reflections into a coherent theory. Starting from Marx’s observation that the crises of the world market are the 'real concentration and forcible adjustment of all the contradictions of the bourgeois economy', Samezō Kuruma, a Japanese Marxian economist, seeks to grasp the inherent contradictions that drive forward and limit capitalism. His focus on the contradictory dynamics of capitalism sets him apart from Marxian thinkers who try to identify a single, primary cause of crisis. This volume brings together the entirety Kuruma’s writing related to crisis.

A compelling analysis of the different ways in which Karl Marx investigates the political and social phenomenon of power.

As a political militant, as a journalist, as a critic of capitalism and as a revolutionary theorist, Marx continually confronts the ways in which individuals and social classes enter into power relations. For Marx, however, there is no bourgeois power that proletarians can simply conquer and then use to their advantage. Workers’ power is always provisional because it constantly changes the very conditions of its own production.

This new volume from esteemed Marxist historian Jairus Banaji collects his reflections on historical materialism from over fifty years of activism and academic research.

Historical materialism as Marx understood it was always an integrated conception or field of research, not one divided into separate disciplines. The essays gathered in this volume are a remarkable example of how this works across a wide range of subjects as diverse as agrarian history, capitalism, Hegel’s influence on Marx, and class struggles in India. As such, they embody Banaji’s lifelong engagement with Marxist theory. The collection includes his recent papers on merchant capitalism, as well as a biographical sketch contextualizing Banaji’s work.

An indispensable guide to approaching key philosophical and political questions from a Marxist-feminist point of view.

The book shows the fruitfulness of combining Marxist and feminist perspectives in our analysis of oppression under capitalism. Different modes of production like capitalism and feudalism have structures – “relations of production” – which shape and limit the potentials for human emancipation in general and women’s freedom in particular. Capitalism, then, is best understood as a framework within which other relations of oppression operate, with more or less salience in different times and places. Each of the essays takes this basic approach to key philosophical questions about freedom, rationality and human nature.

Riding with the Revolution tells the gripping story of American radicals and revolutionaries who stood in solidarity with the Mexican Revolution.

A towering work of historical scholarship, this book is both a re-assessment of the Mexican Revolution and an ode to international solidarity. Between 1900 to 1925 many American leftists—including anarchists, socialists and communists—expressed their solidarity with the Mexican Revolution. Indeed, John Reed actually saddled up and rode with Pancho Villa. Later, American war resisters crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico where they helped found the Communist Party, the Industrial Workers of the World, and a Feminist Council. Protestant ministers, the Socialist Eugene Debs, Samuel Gompers head of the AFL, the anarchist Emma Goldman, and Communists John Reed, Louis Fraina, Bertram Wolfe, as well as foreign politicos M.N. Roy, Sen Katayama, and Alexander Borodin all took an interest in the Mexican labor movement.

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

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

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

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

The Red Scare and the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s destroyed the careers of many progressive and left writers and performers in film, music, and the arts. Black women performers who already faced racism and marginalization in the entertainment industry were particularly vulnerable to the blacklist. Pianist and composer Hazel Scott, actor and journalist Fredi Washington, actor Lena Horne, and musician and writer Shirley Graham, all of whom Red Channels, an anticommunist publication targeting the entertainment industry, named as so-called subversives, were among those most affected.