Contributor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.