Verso Spring 2018 Catalogue

Spring 2018

The imprint of New Left Books

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Spring 2018 Highlights

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FEBRUARY

A walker’s guide to Paris, taking us through its past, present and possible futures

A Walk Through Paris A Radical Exploration Eric Hazan Translated by David Fernbach Eric Hazan, author of the acclaimed The Invention of Paris, leads us by the hand in this walk from Ivry to Saint-Denis, roughly following the meridian that divides Paris into east and west, and passing such familiar landmarks as the Luxembourg Gardens, the Pompidou Centre, the Gare du Nord and Montmartre, as well as little-known alleyways and arcades. Filled with historical anecdotes, geographical observations and literary references, Hazan’s walk guides us through an unknown Paris. He shows us how, through planning and modernisation, the city’s revolutionary past has been erased in order to enforce a reactionary future; but by walking and observation, he shows us how we can regain our knowledge of the radical past of the city of Robespierre, the Commune, Sartre and the May ’68 uprising.

And by drawing on his own life story, as surgeon, publisher and social critic, Hazan vividly illustrates a radical life lived in the city of revolution.

Eric Hazan is the founder of the publisher La Fabrique and the author of several books, including the celebrated The Invention of Paris. He has lived in Paris all his life.

Praise for The Invention of Paris “This is a wondrous book, either to be read at home with a decent map, or carried about sur place through areas no tourists bother with.” Adam Thorpe, Guardian “Hazan is all business. He trudges through Paris street by street, quoting what Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire or Kafka said about a particular spot, pointing out where barricades were once erected and thieves gathered for drinks.”

Donald Morrison, Financial Times “Hazan’s brick-by-brick account of the city’s history of strife and political posturing is riveting.” Publishers Weekly “Hazan wants to rescue individual moments from general forgetting and key sites from the bland homogenization of international city development; he is also a passionate left-wing historian seeking to rescue the truth of Paris’s revolutionary past.” Julian Barnes, London Review of Books

CATEGORY

History / Travel

EXTENT

272 pages

SIZES

210 x 140mm

FORMAT

Hardback

ISBN

978 1 78663 258 6

PRICES

£14.99 / $22.95 / $29.95CAN

RIGHTS

Éditions du Seuil

•• Author of the acclaimed The Invention of Paris.

•• Part travel guide, part psychogeographic drift through the revolutionary city.

•• Published in time for the holiday season.

•• Reviews across the national press.

•• Author events in the UK.

5

An extract from A Walk Through Paris by Eric Hazan At the end of the Avenue de Choisy I reach the Place d’Italie, where the counterpoint to the flat façade of the mairie of the 13th arrondissement is a building by Kenzo Tange, the Grand Écran, today known as Italie Deux. Tange was a good architect in the 1960s; but here, this immense concave curtain wall, topped by a Meccano campanile lift, adds nothing to his fame. The place itself is a major traffic roundabout. Its central reservation is deserted, as only daring sprinters could reach it – it was in crossing the Place d’Italie that Giacometti was knocked down by a car and left with a limp for the rest of his life. The reservation is planted with Paulownias, as Ernst Jünger, a botanist among other things, mentions in his Journal de guerre. On 5 May 1943, he passed here en route for the Eastman centre, to have treatment for his teeth: ‘All these Paulownias on the Place d’Italie: an impression of precious aromatic oil burning on enchanted candelabras.’ The blue flowers of these candelabras are not enough to give charm to the Place d’Italie, which has still less of this than the Place de la Nation, another great roundabout along the Wall of the Farmers-General, but whose central reservation boasts Dalou’s magnificent ‘Triumph of the Republic’. The municipal authorities preferred the fat lady by the Morice brothers that contributes to the ugliness of the Place de la République today.

At that time, Dalou was under a cloud. He had been a member of the artists’ commission during the Commune, still an unpardonable offence in the 1880s. Later on he would sculpt other marvels in Paris, such as the pediment of the Grands Magasins Dufayel on the Rue de Clignancourt, the monument to Delacroix in the Luxembourg, and the recumbent figure on Blanqui’s tomb in Père-Lachaise.

During the June Days of 1848, the site of the present Place d’Italie saw one of the most controversial events in this great insurrection of the Paris proletariat, who took up arms against the threat of being sent to Algeria as agricultural workers, or to the Sologne to drain the marshes.

The barrière here was part of the Wall of the Farmers-General, which followed the present course of the Boulevard de l’Hôpital on one side and that of the Boulevard Blanqui on the other. Situated in the middle of the present place, this barrière, designed like the other fiftytwo gates in the wall by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, was made up of two pavilions whose arched façades faced each other in perfect symmetry, with the customs offices between them.

This is where the misfortunes of General Bréa began on 25 June, the third day of the battle. After having seized half of Paris in the first couple of days, the insurgents were now in full retreat, even routed on the Left Bank where they were chased by artillery fire from the Latin Quarter, the Panthéon, the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève and the Faubourg Saint-Marceau. Withdrawing to the barrière, several hundred insurgents took up position behind a barricade erected between the two pavilions. General Bréa reached the barrière at the head of a column of 2,000 men, and proposed to negotiate. The accounts are so discordant that it will never be possible to decide between a ruse of war and a real concern not to add to the blood already spilled. What is certain is that Bréa entered the insurgent camp and did not come out alive. He was killed along with his aide de camp in a house on the Route de Fontainebleau (today the Avenue d’Italie), on the Maison-Blanche side. Twenty-six supposed authors of this ‘abominable infamy’ were tried by a military court in January 1849. Most were given long prison sentences, and two of them, Daix and Lahr, condemned to death. For their execution, the guillotine was erected close to the Barrière d’Italie, surrounded by thousands of soldiers and twelve cannon.

The Boulevard Arago then crosses the Rue de la Santé, the boundary between the 13th and 14th arrondissements. This corner was the place

of public executions between 1909 and 1939, after which they took place within the prison. Opposite the main gate of the prison, reinforced and always closed, a newer edifice from around 1960 replaced the low buildings and a café with the sign La Bonne Santé. At the corner of the Rue Jean-Dolent, the prison wall bears a plaque with the names of eighteen résistants executed here after being judged and condemned by the Sections Spéciales, tribunals created in 1941 by interior minister Pierre Pucheu and justice minister Joseph Barthélemy. No doubt we shall have to wait another fifty years for a plaque to indicate that it was within the same walls that members of the FLN were guillotined after being condemned to death by military tribunals during the Algerian War, under a procedure similar to that of the Sections Spéciales.

Today, visitors to the Santé enter through a tiny gatehouse on the opposite side from the main gate, on the short Rue Messier. A few years ago, I came this way several times to see a friend imprisoned here. It was winter, and from a caravan on the opposite pavement nuns offered coffee to poor people waiting in the cold. Among all the families in the queue, I never saw a single white person. Nor were there many among the guards who controlled the entrances. As in the Paris hospitals, subaltern jobs in the prison system are often filled by West Indians.

After long-running rumours to this effect, the Santé was finally demolished in January 2016. It is the last in a long series of prisons to have disappeared since the most famous of their number – the Bastille -- was dismantled in the summer of 1789. The Abbaye prison, near the church of Saint-Germain-des-Près, where the September massacres began; the Force, on the Rue Saint-Antoine at the corner of the present Rue Mahler, where Claude-Nicolas Ledoux was imprisoned (he would come out alive) and later the four sergeants of La Rochelle, guillotined on the Place de Grève on 21 September 1822 for plotting against the restored Bourbon monarchy; the Madelonnettes, a women’s prison on the Rue Turbigo, where the Lycée Turgot now stands; SaintePélagie, between the Rue de la Clef and the Rue du Puits-de-l’Ermite, a political prison under the Restoration and the July monarchy, through which all the opposition leaders passed, as well as Gérard de Nerval, who speaks of it in a poem: In Sainte-Pélagie, Under this lengthy reign Where I lived in captivity, Dreamy and pensive …

There was also Clichy, a debtors’ prison that stood at no. 68 on the street of the same name, where debtors were locked up and maintained at the cost of their creditors; and the Petite Roquette, a hexagonal panopticon for women that was not demolished until 1974.

After the Santé, at the corner with the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Jacques, there is a bare plinth. Before the war it carried the statue of François Arago, opposite the gardens of the Observatoire of which he was for a long time the director. An inscription indicates that the statue was destroyed by the Vichy government, and that in 1994, Jan Dibbets, a Dutch conceptual artist, replaced it with an ‘imaginary monument, made from medallions marked with the astronomer’s name, fixed to the ground along the course of the Paris meridian that crosses this place at the statue’s plinth’ – a far better homage than one of the duds that contemporary statuary generally produces. That François Arago was an ambiguous figure: a great scientist, an opponent of the July monarchy, an active campaigner for the abolition of slavery in

1848, and indeed a republican icon. But he was also minister of war in the provisional government at the start of the Second Republic, and personally directed the artillery barrage on the Latin Quarter during the June Days, hurling abuse at the insurgent workers who had attacked the Republic and the result of universal suffrage.

Leaving the monumental gates for the region of the railway stations, you enter the faubourgs. As applied to Paris, this is an odd word, since if fau comes from the Latin fors, the characteristic of a faubourg is to be outside the city, whereas the Paris streets that bear this name are, if not central, at least well within the urban perimeter. This is of course a question of history. In the early eighteenth century, after crossing the tree-planted boulevard that marked the limit of Paris, you were in the country, where the major Paris streets continued along paths of beaten earth bordered by market gardens, vines and windmills. But Paris was very close, so much so that in the course of that century these earthen paths were paved and served as markers for an urbanization that advanced steadily from the centre despite royal decrees. It was these routes that would form the faubourgs, outside the official limits of the city until the end of Louis XVI’s reign – hence their name – then included in Paris when the Wall of the Farmers-General shifted the boundary. Previously Paris had come to an end at the Bastille, the Porte Saint-Martin and the Tuileries, but it now extended via the Faubourg Saint-Antoine to the Barrière du Trône (now Place de la Nation), via the Faubourg Saint-Martin to the Barrière de La Villette (now Stalingrad), and via the Champs-Élysées to the Étoile. The next leap, the annexation of the ‘crown villages’ in 1860 (Vaugirard, Passy, Les Batignolles, Montmartre, Belleville, etc.), ended up making the old faubourgs almost central. Yet in literature the ambiguity remained: the faubourgs are very present in Baudelaire (‘Le faubourg secoué par les lourds tombereaux’ in ‘The Seven Old Men’, ‘Au coeur d’un vieux faubourg, labyrinth fangeux’ in ‘The Rag-Pickers’ Wine’, examples abound), without our ever knowing their precise location. Much later, when Eugène Dabit wrote Faubourgs de Paris in 1933, he included the Rue de Ménilmontant, the Rue de Choisy-le-Roi and even the Rue de Montlhéry.

From the Porte Saint-Denis and the Porte Saint-Martin, the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, the Boulevard de Strasbourg and the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin run almost parallel – ‘almost’, as the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis bends a little towards the Gare du Nord, while the other two make a straight line towards the Gare de l’Est. Despite the short distance between them, each of these streets has its specific identity, population and beauty.

The Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Martin is open, airy, almost peaceful despite the traffic. As Thomas Clerc wrote in his book on the 10th arrondissement, ‘all the buildings in this fine street, which escaped Haussmann, are different from one another – it is a faubourg, with its irregular curve and its rebel spirit’. This book is almost ten years old and the street has changed: fewer ready-to-wear wholesalers, more boarded-up shops, more couscous and Chinese restaurants, and an increasing number of African hairdressers as you continue. On the right-hand pavement, Le Splendid, whose hour of glory goes back to the 1970s, now leads a discreet existence. Further along, the Passage du Marché opens onto a Haussmannian building that welcomes you with its sculpted décor, and leads to a pleasant coin (a coin being less than a quartier but more than a crossroads), a small open space bordered by the Saint-Martin market, an ugly building from the 1960s, a fire station and, on the corner with the Rue du Château-d’Eau, a good-quality brasserie, ‘Le Réveil du 10e’.

Between the barracks and the mairie of the 10th arrondissement, the little street called after Pierre Bullet is as chaste as that of his colleague Blondel, on the other side of the Porte Saint-Martin, is light, devoted as it is to tariffed love. The Rue Pierre-Bullet runs into the Rue Hittorff, tiny and ending in a kind of cul-de-sac. The Paris

municipal counsellors did not do Hittorff proud, perhaps because he was ‘Prussian’. The architect who renovated the Place de la Concorde, with the idea of centring it on the obelisk, who built the Cirque d’Hiver, the Théâtre du Rond-Pont des Champs-Élysées, the church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul on the Rue La Fayette, the mairie of the 5th arrondissement as a pendant to Soufflot’s Faculté de Droit, and such a masterpiece as the façade of the Gare du Nord, deserves better than this wretched little street.

The mairie of the 10th arrondissement, built in the 1890s, is a good culmination of nineteenth-century eclecticism. The objective is clear: a large building in French neo-Renaissance style, neo-Chambord if you like, more coherent and in my view more successful than the majority of Parisian mairies, which are indecisive and often lazy in style. Opposite it is the start of the Passage du Désir, with its almost monastic silence, low and regular buildings alternately in brick and white stone, which despite its name is a kind of Parisian convent. But its closed windows and its many boarded-up shop fronts lead us rather to fear the intentions of some developer or a semi-public company.

I owe my knowledge of La Goutte-d’Or to the last authentic representative of Belgian surrealism, Maurice Culot. It was he who introduced me to this quarter in 1984, when he was working on his great book on the subject. He showed me the traces of streets in a St Andrew’s cross (a flattened ‘X’), creating gentle slopes, dispensing with steps, and giving buildings on street corners a bevelled edge – particularly noticeable at the corner of Rue de Chartres and Rue de la Charbonnière. He took me around all the sites of L’Assommoir, which were already demolished or in the process of demolition – the café of Old Colombe that gave its name to the book, the Rue des Islettes where Zola located both Gervaise’s home and the washhouse where she worked. Above all, he explained to me the absurdity of the development now under way, the thin concrete colonnades, the unnatural levelling of the hill, the faults of alignment, the amputation of acute angles.

Nothing has been settled since that time. A police station has been implanted in the middle of the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or, reputedly one of the most brutal in Paris. The Rue des Islettes has been ravaged, and is now bordered on one side by a hideous primary school above an underground car park, and on the other by a post office in front of which is a wasteland that, with consummate if involuntary irony, has been given the name ‘Place de l’Assomoir’. The mosque, on the corner of Rue Polonceau and Rue des Poissonniers, was demolished in 2013. It is planned to build on this side an Institut des Cultures d’Islam, which will probably be as deserted as that which already exists on the Rue Stephenson. Between the Rue de la Goutte-d’Or and the Rue Polonceau, a gloomy stairway has been constructed and called after Boris Vian. Poor Boris, what sins did he have to expiate to be given this place out of thousands of others! On the Rue des Gardes, the Paris municipality has implanted a row of fashion shops, ‘creators’ for whom the term ‘out of place’ would be insufficient; ‘obscene’ is a better term. Not that the poor are not entitled to dress themselves nicely, but to exhibit dresses worth a fortune in such a place!

So, is there still any reason to visit La Goutte-d’Or? Yes indeed, as it has, like the Noailles market in Marseille, the atmosphere of an Arab city with its liveliness, the smell of spices, the warm reception, the gentleness – regarding this word, which goes against everything that is said and written at the moment, I recall an event that dates from the time when I lived on the Rue de Sofia. One Sunday morning, I was walking with my daughter Cléo, then two years old in a pushchair, when an old Algerian came up to me on the Rue de Chartres, leaned down and kissed her hand. That sums up the whole charm of La Goutte-d’Or.

FEBRUARY

The Zad and NoTAV Territorial Struggles and the Making of a New Political Intelligence Mauvaise Troupe Collective Translated with an introduction by Kristin Ross At a time of ever more accelerated and expanded development of natural and agricultural territory, in the aim of making targeted areas more profitable and controllable, there are inhabitants who oppose these projects with a firm, unwavering NO! This is the case in Notre-Dame-des-Landes in western France and in the Italian Susa Valley, where decades-long battles have been mounted against high-speed transport infrastructure, an airport for one, and a highspeed train (TAV) between Lyon and Turin for the other.

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS

Politics 288 pages 235 x 156mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 496 2 £14.99 / $24.95 / $33CAN Editions de l’Eclat

This book recounts these two histories-in-the-making and gives voice to their protagonists. It was born of the intuition that these experiences and the hypotheses that emerge from them should circulate at the same time as the slogans and the enthusiasm, to strengthen the will to resist.

The Mauvaise Troupe Collective is a writing group of variable size that attempts to write the immediate history of political struggles in the words of their protagonists and in the heat of action.

FEBRUARY

The Blanqui Reader Louis Auguste Blanqui Edited by Philippe Le Goff and Peter Hallward Translated by Philippe Le Goff, Peter Hallward and Mitchell Abidor Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881) was one of the most important and controversial figures in nineteenth-century French revolutionary politics, and he played a major role in all of the great upheavals that punctuated his life – the insurrections of 1830, 1848 and 1870–1871. Adamant that a just and egalitarian society can only be established by revolutionary means, he recognised that no revolution can succeed if it fails to overcome the coercive resources of the state, and no revolutionary government can endure if it betrays the principles that alone earn and deserve mass support.

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS

Politics 336 pages 235 x 156mm Hardback 978 1 78663 501 3 £70 / $120 / $157CAN Verso

This is the first collection of Blanqui’s political writings ever published in English, and it includes new and complete translations of his best known texts: Instructions for an Armed Uprising and Eternity by the Stars.

Philippe Le Goff teaches French at Kingston University, where he was previously a postdoctoral research fellow in the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy.

Peter Hallward teaches Philosophy at Kingston University. His books The Will of the People and Blanqui and Political Will are also forthcoming from Verso.

8

FEBRUARY

A compelling analysis of fascism, replete with insights into the authoritarian movements and states of our time NEW EDITION

Fascism and Dictatorship The Third International and the Problem of Fascism Nicos Poulantzas Translated by Judith White The resurgence of the far right across Europe and the emergence of the “alt-right” in the US have put the question of fascism urgently back on the agenda. For those trying to understand these forms of politics, there is no better place to start than Fascism and Dictatorship, the unrivalled Marxist study of German and Italian fascism. It carefully distinguishes between fascism as a mass movement before the seizure of power and what it becomes as an entrenched machinery of dictatorship. It compares the distinct class components of the counterrevolutionary blocs mobilised by fascism in Germany and Italy; analyses the changing relations between the petty bourgeoisie and big capital in the evolution of fascism; discusses the structures of the fascist state itself, as an emergency regime for the defence of capital; and provides a sustained and documented criticism of official Comintern attitudes and policies towards fascism in the fateful years after the Versailles settlement. Fascism and Dictatorship represents a challenging synthesis of factual evidence and conceptual analysis, a standard bearer of what Marxist political theory should be.

Nicos Poulantzas was born in Athens in 1936 and died in Paris in 1979.

His other published works include Political Power and Social Classes, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, The Crisis of Dictatorships and State, Power, Socialism.

CATEGORY

Politics

EXTENT

368 pages

SIZES

210 x 140mm

FORMAT

Trade Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78663 581 5

PRICES

£12.99 / $19.95 / $25.95CAN

RIGHTS

Édtions La Découverte

PREVIOUS EDITION

978 0 86091 716 8

“The first comprehensive work of this kind to appear in English.”

New German Critique “A fascinating work ... A book that can be used as an encyclopaedia for those interested in class and fascism.” Contemporary Sociology

•• Timely reissue of this classic book, as the world becomes more anxious about the rise of authoritarian populist movements.

•• Some say that the rise of Trump means that we need to see how his trajectory matched those of earlier fascist movements.

•• New introduction from a leading scholar.

9

FEBRUARY

Britain’s leading radical updates his attack on the failures of the political centre ground N EW U P DAT E D E D I T I O N

The Extreme Centre A Second Warning Tariq Ali In this fully updated edition of his coruscating polemic, Tariq Ali shows how, since 1989, politics has become a contest to see who can best serve the needs of the market. In this urgent and wide-ranging case for the prosecution, Ali looks at the people and the events that have informed this moment across the world. This reaches its logical conclusion with the presidency of Donald Trump, the success of En Marche in France and the dominance of Merkel’s Germany through Europe.

But are we starting to see cracks within the fabric of the extreme centre? In a series of new chapters Ali suggests that there is room for hope. He finds promise in developments in Latin America and at the edges of Europe. Emerging parties across Europe, Greece and Spain, formed out of the 2008 crisis, are offering new hope for democracy.

In the UK, the rise of Jeremy Corbyn indicates that the hegemony of the centre may be weaker than imagined.

CATEGORY

Politics

EXTENT

288 pages

SIZES

198 x 129mm

FORMAT

Trade Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78663 706 2

PRICES

£8.99 / $16.95 / $21.95CAN

RIGHTS

Andrew Nurnberg Associates

PREVIOUS EDITION

978 1 78478 262 7

Tariq Ali has written more than two dozen books on world history and politics the most recent of which are The Obama Syndrome, The Extreme Centre and The Dilemmas of Lenin as well as the novels of his Islam Quintet and scripts for the stage and screen. He is a longstanding member of the editorial committee of New Left Review and lives in London.

•• Fully updated to include the rise of Corbyn and Sanders, Trump in the White House and the Europe of Macron and Merkel.

•• An important inquiry into the role of populism in politics.

•• In-depth analysis into the rise of Corbynism in the UK. •• Sold over 6,500 copies in its first edition.

10

FEBRUARY

How our contemporary counter-terrorism practices reveal the persistence of Empire

The Invisible History Prevent and the Persistance of Empire Karma Nabulsi When the conservative government introduced the CounterTerrorism and Security Act in 2015, its existing Prevent programme was upgraded placing a duty on public sector workers, including university staff, nurses, teachers, doctors, and council employess, to report signs of extremism among those they encounter in their work.

This new responsibility turns British citizens into a surveillance militia of minority communities, viewing black, migrant, minority, and racialised Muslims as potential threats, and removes basic democratic liberties and protections from everyone. It is now being used as a means of controlling unwanted dissent in the name of counter-terrorism.

Karma Nabulsi shows how this policy is more than counterproductive, but deeply dangerous to all. Eighty per cent of reported accusations have been shown to be unfounded. Over sixty children are investigated each week. Few believe this method is an effective deterrent, yet it continues. Nabulsi shows why: another set of customs and habits lie behind this current policy, connecting Prevent to Britain’s deeper historical origins, to Empire and its insidious denial of recent colonial history. The Invisible History explores our current crisis in policing, and demands that we understand our recent history rather than bury it, in order to overcome divisions and create a more equal future.

Karma Nabulsi is Fellow in Politics at St Edmund Hall and Associate Professor at the University of Oxford, where she is Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Department of Politics and International Relations. She writes for the London Review of Books, and the Guardian.

CATEGORY

Politics

EXTENT

144 pages

SIZES

210 x 140mm

FORMAT

Hardback

ISBN

978 1 78663 791 8

PRICES

£12.99 / $19.95 / $25.95CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

•• Prevent is one of the most urgent topics of debate in UK politics.

•• Excavates the lost, bloody legacies of Empire – bound to cause controversy in on-going debates involving Pankaj Mishra, Niall Ferguson, Shashi Tharoor.

•• Author is leading spokesperson and historian, often cited in the media.

•• Will get widespread media attention across UK press.

11

MARCH

How the development of twentieth-century fascism depended on strong civil societies NEW IN PAPERBACK

The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe Dylan Riley

CATEGORY

History

EXTENT

288 pages

SIZES

235 x 156mm

FORMAT

Trade Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78663 523 5

PRICES

£16.99 / $24.95 / $35.99CAN

RIGHTS

John Hopkins University Press

PREVIOUS EDITION

978 0 80189 427 5

•• A controversial analysis – the author argues that twentieth-century fascism thrived on a strong middle class and civil society, rather than weak, backward countries.

Drawing on a Gramscian theoretical perspective and developing a systematic comparative approach, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain and Romania 1870–1945 challenges the received Tocquevillian consensus on authoritarianism by arguing that fascist regimes, just like mass democracies, depended on wellorganised, rather than weak and atomised, civil societies. In making this argument the book focuses on three crucial cases of interwar authoritarianism: Italy, Spain and Romania, selected because they are all counterintuitive from the perspective of established explanations, while usefully demonstrating the range of fascist outcomes in interwar Europe. Civic Foundations argues that, in all three cases, fascism emerged because of the rapid development of voluntary associations, combined with weakly developed political parties among the dominant class, thus creating a crisis of hegemony.

Riley then traces the specific form that this crisis took depending on the form of civil society developed (autonomous, as in Italy; elite -dominated, as in Spain; or state-dominated, as in Romania) in the nineteenth century.

Dylan Riley is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and is on the editorial committee of New Left Review.

“This brilliant comparative study of the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Romania brings Tocqueville and Gramsci into a novel and surprising conversation. It will change the way you think about civil society, fascism, and democracy.” William Sewell, University of Chicago “Make no mistake, this is much more than comparative fascisms. Dylan Riley not only rethinks and meshes the legacies of Tocqueville, Arendt and Gramsci; he sobers us up to the actual history of civil society and democratisation in continental Europe. This theoretical lesson seems still gravely relevant elsewhere in the world today.” Georgi M. Derluguian, author of Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus: A World-System Biography “Dylan Riley’s intelligent study succeeds in opening fresh perspectives. His book ought to be read by everyone interested in fascism.” Robert O. Paxton, New Left Review “Riley’s account of the civic foundations of fascism succeeds not only in throwing new light on old questions, but also in redefining the theoretical parameters for understanding fascism. It will change the way we think about fascism in the future.” Max Whyte, American Journal of Sociology

12

MARCH

One of the world’s best-known radicals relives the early years of the protest movement NEW EDITION

Street-Fighting Years

1968

An Autobiography of the Sixties Tariq Ali Tariq Ali revisits his formative years as a young radical. Reissued for the 1968 anniversary, Street-Fighting Years captures the mood and energy of the era of hope and passion as Ali tracks the growing significance of the nascent protest movement.

Through his own story, he recounts a counter history of the 60s rocked by the effects of the Vietnam war, the aftermath of the revolutionary insurgencies led by Che Guevara, the brutal suppression of the Prague Spring and the student protests on the streets of Europe and America. It is a story that takes us from Paris and Prague to Hanoi and Bolivia, encountering along the way Malcolm X, Bertrand Russell, Marlon Brando, Henry Kissinger, and Mick Jagger.

This edition includes a new introduction, as well as the famous interview conducted by Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1971.

Tariq Ali has written more than two dozen books on world history and politics. He is a long-standing member of the editorial committee of New Left Review and lives in London.

“Tariq Ali has not lost the passion and vim which made him a symbol of the spirit of ‘68 ... has not seen fit to join forces with the terminally cynical, or set up a graven god that can be accused of failing ... Ali has spent much of his life documenting America as the arsenal of counter-revolution.” Christopher Hitchens, Observer “We need to remember the sixties, and Tariq Ali’s book is valuable and well presented evidence of the time ... as Ali points out the transition from revolutionary to arch-conservative is nothing new ... we may frequently have been misguided, but nothing is sadder than a generation without a cause.”

John Mortimer, Sunday Times “Has me rapt on the hearthrug, peering into the embers of memory ... the memoir proposes that the overriding themes were the confrontation with US imperialism ... the efforts of a generation to shake off the shackles of social-democracy and conduct war on capitalism à l’outrance.” Alexander Cockburn, Guardian “Street Fighting Years is readable, informative and also inspirational ... the recollections of a person who has remained true to himself.” Sydney Morning Herald

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CATEGORY

Biography / Politics

EXTENT

416 pages

SIZES

210 x 140mm

FORMAT

Trade Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78663 600 3

PRICES

£9.99 / $17.95 / $23.99CAN

RIGHTS

Andrew Nurnberg Associates

PREVIOUS EDITION

978 1 84467 029 1

•• Re-issued for the fiftieth anniversary of 1968, the year that saw the resurgence of a worldwide protest movement.

•• A classic account of sixties radicalism by one of the leaders of the protest movement.

•• First hand account of a radical generation.

Radical Thinkers

Set 16

Available as a set • ISBN: 978 1 78873 068 6 • £40 / $55 / $73CAN

MARCH

On Karl Marx Ernst Bloch

MARX 200

This study of Marx serves not only as an excellent introduction to that most influential of “worldly philosophers” but is also a significant statement of the central issues of Bloch’s own profound and wide-ranging thought.

Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) is one of the most important German Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century and one of the great theorists of utopia. A friend of Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno, his works include The Principle of Hope, Spirit of Utopia and Traces.

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS

Philosophy / Politics 192 pages 198 x 129mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 606 5 £11.99 / $17.95 / $23.99CAN Suhrkamp

MARCH

The Theory of Need in Marx Agnes Heller

MARX 200

From Marx’s varying and passing interpretations of a theory of need, Agnes Heller unravels the main tendencies and demonstrates the importance which Marx attached to the “restructuring” of a system of needs going beyond the purely material.

Agnes Heller was born in Budapest in 1929. A pupil and co-worker of Lukács during the 1950s, her other published works include studies of Aristotle’s Ethics and Marx’s theory of value.

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

Philosophy 144 pages 198 x 129mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 612 6 £11.99 / $17.95 / $23.99CAN Verso 978 0 85031 174 7

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“An extremely pleasant surprise: a new imprint from Verso called Radical Thinkers, and a pile of paperbacks by the likes of Theodor Adorno, Fredric Jameson, Guy Debord and Walter Benjamin.

Not only do they have nifty cover designs, they are ridiculously cheap.” – Nick Lezard, Guardian

MARCH

Really Existing Nationalisms

MARX 200

A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels Erica Benner Really Existing Nationalisms challenges the conventional view that Marx and Engels lacked the theoretical resources needed to understand nationalism. It argues that the two thinkers had a much better explanatory grasp of national phenomena than is usually supposed, and that the reasoning behind their policy towards specific national movements was often subtle and sensitive to the ethical issues at stake. This new edition includes a new introduction.

Erica Benner is a Fellow in Political Philosophy at Yale University. She is the author of numerous books, most recently Be Like the Fox. “An invaluable contribution to the critique of nationalism theory.” Mike Davis, New Left Review

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

Politics 288 pages 198 x 129mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 478 8 £11.99 / $17.95 / $23.99CAN Oxford University Press 978 0 19827 959 4

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

Politics / History 288 pages 198 x 129mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 615 7 £11.99 / $17.95 / $23.99CAN Monthly Review Press 978 0 85345 647 6

MARCH

Late Marx and the Russian Road Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism Teodor Shanin

MARX 200

By exploring Marx’s late writings on Russia, this classic book examines Marx’s attitudes to “developing” or “peripheral” societies. It includes the first full translation into English of Marx’s 1881 drafts concerning rural Russia.

Teodor Shanin is a British sociologist who was for many years Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. His books include The Awkward Class, The Rules of the Game, Peasant and Peasant Societies and The Roots of Otherness.

15

MARCH

A devastating analysis of what is happening to our universities NEW IN PAPERBACK

Speaking of Universities Stefan Collini In recent decades there has been an immense global surge in the numbers both of universities and of students. In the UK alone there are now over 140 institutions teaching more subjects than ever to nearly 2.5 million students. New technology offers new ways of learning and teaching. Globalisation forces institutions to consider a new economic horizon. At the same time governments have systematically imposed new procedures regulating funding, governance, and assessment. Universities are being forced to behave more like business enterprises in a commercial marketplace than centres of learning.

CATEGORY

Politics / Education

EXTENT

240 pages

SIZES

198 x 129mm

FORMAT

Trade Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78663 165 7

PRICES

£9.99 / $15.95 / $22CAN

RIGHTS

RCW

PREVIOUS EDITION

978 1 78663 139 8

In Speaking of Universities, historian and critic Stefan Collini analyses these changes and challenges the assumptions of policy-makers and commentators. Does “marketisation” threaten to destroy what we most value about education; does this new era of “accountability” distort what it purports to measure; and who does the modern university “belong to”? Responding to recent policies and their underlying ideology, the book is a call to “focus on what is actually happening and the clichés behind which it hides; an incitement to think again, think more clearly, and then to press for something better".

Stefan Collini is Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge University and Fellow of the British Academy. He is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement and Guardian. Other works include Common Writing and What Are Universities For? “A strong, persuasive voice, and we need to hear it.” Marina Warner “Stefan Collini pulls back the curtain on the vacuous management-speak of the modern university … Any student who wants to understand what has happened to their university needs to read this book. Any parent who wants to know what lies behind the adverts for securing their child’s future might also be interested in what the words in the seller’s prospectus actually mean and why they are now there.” Danny Dorling, author of Inequality and the 1% “It is only through the consistent speech of dissident voices like Stefan Collini that we have any hope of remaking the university as a place defined by academic judgment and thought.” Michael Meranze, Los Angeles Review of Books

16

MARCH

A debate between two leading theorists on the relation of redistribution to recognition NEW EDITION

Redistribution or Recognition?

A Political-Philosophical Exchange Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth “Recognition” has become a veritable keyword of our time, but its relation to “redistribution” remains under-theorised. This volume remedies the lacuna by staging a sustained debate between two philosophers, one North American, the other European, who hold different views of the matter. Highly attuned to contemporary politics, the exchange between Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth constitutes a rigorous dialogue on moral philosophy, social theory, and the best way to conceptualise capitalist society.

Axel Honneth is a Professor of Philosophy at both the University of Frankfurt and Columbia University.

Nancy Fraser is Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research. Her books include Fortunes of Feminism and Adding Insult to Injury.

“A carefully wrought and provocative debate between philosophers with strong commitments to asking what a more just social life might be. This text will doubtless produce a spate of new and important scholarship in critical theory in its wake.” Judith Butler “In this exciting dialogue, Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth do not simply explore with perfect conceptual rigor the analogies and tensions of the paradigms of ‘equal distributrion’ and ‘struggle for recognition.’ They also demonstrate why engaged theory matters for collective practice. Their speculative effort will set the agenda for transnational debates of vital importance.” Etienne Balibar “In this fascinating volume, two of the major theorists of our time battle it out over the question of redistribution versus recognition. The stakes are high: how might a critical theory of capitalist society be revivified in a manner that unites philosophy, politics, and social theory. This is engaged theoretical debate of the highest level.” Simon Critchley

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CATEGORY

Politics / Philosophy

EXTENT

288 pages

SIZES

210 x 140mm

FORMAT

Trade Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78663 319 4

PRICES

£14.99 / $24.95 / $33CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

PREVIOUS ISBN

978 1 85984 492 2

MARCH

NEW EDITION

An Act of State

1968

The Execution of Martin Luther King William F. Pepper On 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was killed and a clean-up operation set in motion – James Earl Ray was framed, the crime scene was destroyed, and witnesses were killed. William Pepper, attorney and friend of King, has conducted a thirty-year investigation into his assassination. An Act of State shows how the US government shut down a movement for social change by stopping its leader dead in his tracks.

William F. Pepper is an English barrister and an American lawyer. He is the author of four other books and numerous articles.

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

History 352 pages 210 x 140mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 597 6 £10.99 / $17.95 / $23.99CAN Verso 978 1 84467 285 1

“Within the first chapter, An Act of State presents enough circumstantial evidence to raise questions about Ray’s involvement as the sole assassin.” Washington Post “We recommend this book to everyone who seeks the truth about Dr. King’s assassination.” Coretta Scott King “No one has done more than Dr William F. Pepper to keep alive the quest for truth concerning the violent death of Martin Luther King.” Ramsey Clark, US Attorney General, 1967–1969

APRIL

NEW EDITION

Revolution in the Air

1968

Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che Max Elbaum Introduction by Alicia Garza (co-founder of Black Lives Matter) Revolution in the Air is the definitive study of how radicals from the sixties movements embraced twentieth-century Marxism, and what movements of dissent today can learn from the legacies of Lenin, Mao and Che. Max Elbaum was a member of Students for a Democratic Society and a leader of one of the main new communist movement organisations. His writings have appeared in the Nation and the Guardian, among others.

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

History 380 pages 210 x 140mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 459 7 £12.99 / $19.95 / $25.95CAN Verso 978 1 84467 563 0

“It should be required reading for those interested in the modern history of social movements and for radicals of my generation who are trying to find out what went wrong.” Los Angeles Times “Truly a superb work of scholarship that raises all the right questions.” Radical History

18

APRIL

Why we misunderstand the nature of money, and what we can do about it NEW IN PAPERBACK

The Production of Money How to Break the Power of Bankers Ann Pettifor According to leading economist Ann Pettifor, one of the few people to predict the 2008 financial crisis, money is not a commodity but a promise. This radical reconsideration of the power of money means that we can reimagine the way the economy works.

The Production of Money also examines popular alternative debates on, and innovations in, money, such as “green QE” and “helicopter money.” She sets out the possibility of linking the money in our pockets (or on our smartphones) to the improvements we want to see in the world around us.

Ann Pettifor is the Director of Prime (Policy Research in Macroeconomics) and a Fellow of the New Economics Foundation. She is known for her leadership of the Jubilee 2000 campaign. In 2015 she was invited onto the economic advisory board of the British Labour Party by Jeremy Corbyn. She is the author of The Real World Economic Outlook and The Coming First World Debt Crisis and co-author of The Green New Deal.

“Ann Pettifor was always the ideal author of a book that shatters the fantasy of apolitical money and the toxic myth that monetary policy must remain a democracy-free zone. This book is now a reality.” Yanis Varoufakis “Pettifor has a splendidly clear vision, both of money creation and of the role of banks. There is a great deal to applaud here, including her critique of mainstream economic models, which continue to ignore money and banking or, alternatively, get that horribly wrong.” Charles Goodhart, Emeritus Professor, London School of Economics

CATEGORY

Economics

EXTENT

192 pages

SIZES

198 x 129mm

FORMAT

Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78663 135 0

PRICES

£8.99 / $17.95 / $23.99CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

PREVIOUS EDITION

978 1 78663 134 3

“In language we can all understand, Ann Pettifor explains the issues and the debates around money, shadow banking, QE and ‘helicopter money.’ A mustread.” Caroline Lucas, Co-Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales

•• Makes a passionate demand for the need for financial literacy on the left.

“Coolly authoritative, soberly trenchant, unexpectedly compelling, Ann Pettifor’s book is vital in both senses, important and full of life.” Zoe Williams, Guardian

•• Argument for the regulation of the banks for the public good rather than private profit.

“Pettifor’s new book aims to elucidate the nature of money, the better to help women advocate for their needs.” Vogue US

•• Author was one of the few economists to predict the 2008 financial crisis – and the one to come.

•• For readers of Joseph Stiglitz, David Graeber and Gillian Tett.

19

APRIL

A narrative history of council housing – from slums to the Grenfell Tower

Municipal Dreams The Rise and Fall of Social Housing John Boughton Municipal Dreams presents an alternative history of the United Kingdom. This history begins in the slum clearances of the late nineteenth century and the aspirations of those who would build anew. John Boughton looks at how and why the state’s duty to house its people decently became central to our politics.

CATEGORY

Politics

EXTENT

384 pages

SIZES

210 x 140mm

FORMAT

Hardback

ISBN

978 1 78478 739 4

PRICES

£18.99 / $26.95 / $35.99CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

Traversing the nation, Boughton offers an architectural tour of some of the best and most remarkable of our housing estates, as well as many accounted ordinary; he asks us to understand better their complex story and to rethink our prejudices. His accounts include extraordinary planners and architects who wished to elevate working men and women through design and the politicians, high and low, who shaped their work, the competing ideologies which have promoted state housing and condemned it, the economics which has always constrained our housing ideals, the crisis wrought by Right to Buy, and the evolving controversies around regeneration. He shows how the loss of the dream of good housing for all is a danger for the whole of society – as was seen in the fire in Grenfell Tower.

John Boughton has published in the Historian and Labor History and gives talks on housing to a range of audiences. He is involved in a number of housing campaigns and lives in London. His blog is municipaldreams.wordpress.com.

•• For readers of Owen Hatherley, Lynsey Hanley, David Kynaston, and Anna Minton.

•• A history of council housing and architecture from author of popular blog: Municipal Dreams, visited over 650,000 times.

•• Essential reading for urbanists, planners and readers of twentiethcentury British history.

•• Reviews across the national press.

20

APRIL

The renowned Pan-Africanist and socialist analyses the Russian Revolution

1917 The Russian Revolution Walter Rodney Preface by Jesse Benjamin and the Walter Rodney Foundation Introduction by Robin D. G. Kelley Afterword by Vijay Prashad In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading revolutionary thinkers of the Black Sixties. He became a leading force of dissent throughout the Caribbean and a lightning rod of controversy. The 1958 Rodney Riots erupted in Jamaica when he was prevented from returning to his teaching post at the University of the West Indies. In 1980, Rodney was assassinated in Guyana, reportedly at the behest of the government.

In the mid-’70s, Rodney taught a course on the Russian Revolution at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. A Pan-Africanist and Marxist, Rodney sought to make sense of the reverberations of the October Revolution in a decolonising world marked by Third World revolutionary movements. He intended to publish a book based on his research and teaching. Now historians Jesse Benjamin, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Vijay Prashad have edited Rodney’s polished chapters and unfinished lecture notes, presenting the book that Rodney had hoped to publish in his lifetime.

CATEGORY

History

EXTENT

240 pages

SIZES

210 x 140mm

1917 is a signal event in radical publishing, and will inaugurate Verso’s standard edition of Walter Rodney’s works.

FORMAT

Trade Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78663 530 3

Jesse Benjamin is Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Kennesaw State University, and the author of more than sixty articles, chapters, and books.

PRICES

£16.99 / $26.95 / $35.99CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor of history at UCLA. He is the author of five books, most recently Africa Speaks, America Answers!

Vijay Prashad is the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College. He is the author of many books, including Poorer Nations.

21

•• First book in a long-awaited standard scholarly edition of Walter Rodney’s works.

APRIL

A first-hand account of a Greek refugee camp – and the stories of the refugees staying there

Hara Hotel A Tale of Syrian Refugees in Greece Teresa Thornhill Hara Hotel chronicles everyday life in a makeshift refugee camp on the forecourt of a petrol station in northern Greece. In the first two months of 2016, more than 100,000 refugees arrived in Greece.

Half of them were fleeing war-torn Syria, seeking a safe haven in Europe. As the numbers seeking refuge soared, many were stranded in temporary camps, staffed by volunteers. Hara Hotel tells some of their stories.

Teresa Thornhill arrived in Greece in April 2016 as a volunteer. She met one refugee, a young Syrian Kurd called Juwan, who left his home and family in November 2011 to avoid being summoned for military service by the Assad regime. Interweaving memoir with Juwan’s story, and with the recent history of the failed revolution in Syria, and the horror of the ensuing civil war, Hara Hotel paints a vivid picture of the lives of the people trapped between civil war and Europe’s borders.

Teresa Thornhill is a linguist, writer and child protection barrister with a special interest in the Middle East. Her previous publications include Sweet Tea with Cardamom and The Curtain Maker of Beirut.

CATEGORY

Politics

EXTENT

256 pages

SIZES

210 x 140mm

FORMAT

Hardback

ISBN

978 1 78663 519 8

PRICES

£14.99 / $24.95 / $33CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

•• Gripping eyewitness account of the struggles of Syrian refugees in Greece.

•• Extraction in national newspaper.

•• Reviews across the national press.

•• Author events across the UK and US.

23

An extract from Hara Hotel by Teresa Thornhill ‘We didn’t risk our lives for this’

‘He wanted to get through and we were in his way.’

The following afternoon I stood on the international highway a few hundred metres from the Greek border post, with Sintra, Ian and several Syrian boys and young men. It was hot in the sun and I rummaged in my bag for a scarf. Behind us, women and children had gathered on the grass, leaning against the barrier at the central reservation, watching and waiting with an air of anticipation. In front, a few feet away, thirty or so refugees sat cross-legged on the tarmac, staging an impromptu protest. Some had knotted T-shirts over their heads against the sun. Two small tents, one dark pink, one blue, marked the front of the demonstration. A woman sat in the doorway of the blue one, fanning herself with her hand.

‘Are you okay?’

The protest blocked the path of the freight lorries travelling from Greece to FYROM. A single line of Greek policemen stood between the demonstrators and the first, massive lorry in a queue which already extended as far as the eye could see. Resembling workmen more than police in their dark blue fatigues, the officers lounged on their plastic riot shields, lighting cigarettes and regarding the refugees with an air of bored benevolence.

I’d spent the morning with Charly, shopping in various supermarkets in Gevgelija, buying large quantities of shampoo, deodorant, hairbrushes and other items which the female refugees had requested. I was still unclear as to whether Charly had a particular role in mind for me, but for the time being I was happy to lend a hand with whatever she was doing. When we reached Hara she’d disappeared, leaving me free to attend the demonstration.

I felt tempted to go and sit among the demonstrators, but a young Syrian Kurd with good English said, ‘Don’t, it could compromise your position with the Greeks.’ I’d noticed Sintra joking with him earlier, and now she introduced him as Juwan Azad. He was of middling height with a neatly trimmed beard and, true to my memory of Kurdish men, his cheekbones and chin were sharply defined and full of character. A long scar followed the line of his left eyebrow. ‘I should go and sit with the demonstrators,’ he told me, ‘but I’m not going to!’ I glimpsed a playful quality in his eyes, mixed with a sharp intelligence.

I didn’t want trouble with the Greek police and could see that, since I’d come to Hara as a humanitarian volunteer, I should stick to that role. So I stood quietly watching, drinking from my water bottle and taking photographs. A couple of lads near the front of the demonstration had written a slogan on a piece of cardboard.

A tall, thin man in a baseball hat moved through the crowd with a restless, impatient energy. He had a brown, weather-beaten face and greying hair. ‘Yalla,’ he cried in Arabic, ‘come on all of you, chant: OPEN THE BORDER!’ He used the English words.

The men got to their feet and the chant rose in a crescendo, while the tall man waved his arms like a musical conductor, urging them to keep in time by stamping his feet. His eyes burned with a passionate energy.

Journalists were beginning to appear, men in jeans with large cameras slung around their necks and runners with television microphones. The atmosphere became more tense when a Greek woman burst through the police line and screamed at the demonstrators. She was trying to drive to FYROM and the sit-in blocked her route.

I glanced at the lad standing beside me, who was somewhere in his mid-teens. He was swigging from a bottle of water and rubbing his head. ‘A car hit me,’ he explained in Arabic. ‘I was out there on the tarmac with the men, when they first sat down, and a man drove his car at us.’

‘What, just like that?’

‘I’m alright, but my head’s a bit sore.’

‘Have you got a bump?’ I reached out and touched the place he’d been rubbing. There was nothing obvious. ‘Does it hurt?’

The boy nodded. He had a lovely face with a wide mouth and the beginnings of a moustache on his upper lip. It disgusted me that someone should have driven a vehicle at him. I reached in my bag for my Panadol supply. ‘Do you want to take something?’

‘Eh.’ ‘Try this, it works really well for headaches. Put it in your water and let it dissolve.’

He opened the bottle and I broke the tablets and dropped them in.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Hasan.’ He grinned at me.

‘From Syria?’

‘From Aleppo.’

‘Welcome to Europe!’ I smiled back. In the Arab world, when someone asks where you’re from and you tell them, they say ‘Ahlan wa Sahlan’ (Welcome), by way of welcoming you to their country. I was saying it now to all the Syrians I met. Greece wasn’t my country, but it certainly wasn’t theirs, and I felt it was important to tell them that, as far as I was concerned, they were welcome in Europe.

‘How old are you, Hasan?’

‘Sixteen.’

I smiled. ‘Same as my boy.’

‘Yeah?’ His grin widened. ‘Is he here?’

‘No, he’s at home with his dad. He’s got exams coming up and he has to study.’

Hasan pursed his lips. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Exams. Of course.’

Behind us a group of young women had heard me speaking Arabic.

‘Where’s she from?’ they asked Hasan.

I turned round to face them. ‘I’m from Britain. And you?’

‘From Syria!’ The young spokeswoman wore a long dark green coat dress and a matching headscarf. She had prominent cheekbones, a high forehead and smooth, beautiful skin which glowed with health, despite her circumstances. ‘Where did you learn Arabic?’

I gave my little speech about my funny confusion of accents.

The woman beamed at me. ‘No, no, your Arabic’s not funny,’ she protested. ‘We thank God that somebody speaks our language! We don’t know Greek and we don’t speak English!’

I asked the women how long they’d been at Hara.

‘Forty days,’ one replied. ‘Some of us a bit less, but most of us forty days.’

‘You must be exhausted!’ Much as I love camping, I couldn’t imagine sleeping on that unforgiving tarmac even for a week, with nowhere to cook and nowhere to wash. And for most of the previous forty days, it had rained.

‘We are exhausted!’ The women stared at me. ‘But what can we do?

We’re waiting for the border to open!’

A short woman in a grey headscarf had taken out her phone and was scrolling through images. ‘Look,’ she said, thrusting the phone towards me. ‘I took this video on the way here.’ On the screen I saw a tightly packed cluster of men, women and children, their faces taut with fear, lurching this way and that as their rubber dinghy was tossed by the waves. ‘We were so scared,’ the woman added, ‘we

thought we were going to die. And when we reached the island, we had to wade to the beach through water which came up to here.’ She held the palm of her hand against her midriff.

‘Is that the smuggler at the back, holding the rudder?’ I pointed to a thin figure at the back of the group.

‘Smuggler? No, no!’ She wagged her finger at me. ‘The smuggler doesn’t travel on the boat! All the smuggler does is take the money, supply the boat and tell the people where to find it on the beach.’

This was news to me. ‘So who drives the boat?’

‘The people do! On my boat, it was a boy, he wasn’t more than fifteen, sixteen!’

I gulped. It was horrifying to imagine a child refugee from a near land-locked country like Syria, Afghanistan or Pakistan having to operate an over-crowded dinghy on the open sea.

‘You see!’ The woman in the long green coat dress leaned towards me again, her eyes wide with anger. ‘We didn’t risk our lives on those boats to then have to sit here in Greece, day after day, week after week.’

‘Of course not.’ Uncomfortable, I glanced back at the demonstration.

The tall man was on his feet again, rousing the men to a new chant.

‘When will they open the border?’ another woman asked, looking at me sharply. She had a toddler in her arms and wisps of hair were escaping through the sides of her headscarf. She was very pale, with dark shadows under her eyes.

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I wish I knew! I guess it’s up to the Macedonians.’ The FYROM parliament had passed a decree a few days earlier saying they would keep their border closed to refugees until the end of 2016; but I wasn’t aware of that yet.

‘My husband’s in Germany,’ the woman went on. ‘He’s been there eight months. I want to join him, but I can’t if they don’t open the border.’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘And you’ve got a child with you.’

‘I’ve got three!’ She tossed her head in the direction of a pair of kids who were running about on the grass.

I looked at her again. To my eye she wasn’t older than her early twenties. A second later, she started to cry. Tears coursed down her face and her friends bunched up close around her. ‘I’m so sorry you’re going through this,’ I murmured. ‘You’ve been through hell in Syria, hell on your journey to Greece, and now you’re stuck.’ I paused for breath. ‘But it’s good that your husband’s in Germany.

Has he applied for asylum?’

The woman blew her nose. ‘He’s applied, but they’ve not yet made a decision.’

‘Once they do, I think he’ll be able to bring you and your children to join him.’ With a husband in Germany, I thought she should qualify for the Family Reunification programme, which required that you had a close family member already legally in a European state. ‘I’m no expert,’ I went on, ‘but I think you’ve a good chance.’

The woman in the green dress spoke again. ‘Inshallah!’ (God willing). She stared at me. ‘But if they don’t open the border, how is she going to get there?’ * The afternoon shadows were lengthening when I scrambled down the embankment of the highway with Hasan and Ian and crossed the small side road to Hara Hotel. Small children wandered in the road, their parents apparently oblivious to the intermittent cars which swooped down off the main highway and passed the camp at thirty miles an hour. Young men stood on the roadside, smoking, chatting and occasionally turning aside to kick a stray football back onto the forecourt.

Petrol was no longer sold at Hara, but the yellow canopy roof

under which the pumps had stood was still in place, with ‘KA OIL’ emblazoned in blue plastic letters. Twenty or so tents had been pitched beneath, crammed together as if for safety. Beyond the canopy, the mini-supermarket-cum-café still functioned, though it sold little more than ice creams, cigarettes and pricey plastic sandals. The Greek manager sat all day behind a massive desk, glowering at the refugees who occupied the café chairs and tables, chain smoking, conversing in languages he couldn’t understand and rarely, if ever, buying a drink.

Three or four sleek white taxis had parked in front of the hotel, as if waiting to drive an invisible but affluent clientele to local amenities. The drivers stood about in the sunshine, smoking, chatting and – as I later discovered – observing the comings and goings of the refugees and volunteers, in order to report on them to the authorities. In front of this impromptu cab rank, in an area between the taxis and the road, boys of all ages played football.

As I followed Ian and Hassan, I was struck by the amount of rubbish on the ground. Plastic bottles, dirty wipes, cigarette butts and discarded food containers rolled around on the tarmac and accumulated into little mounds against any available wall, alongside the wedges of fluffy white blossom. Several large metal dustbins, filled to the brim, occupied a wall at the back of the supermarket, with black plastic bin bags stacked up beside them. A tap was fixed to the wall beyond the dustbins, the only free source of water for the refugees.

A white van, marked with the letters ‘MSF’ (Médecins Sans Frontières) was parked to one side of the forecourt, and a queue of people stood in line waiting to see the doctor. As we passed by I noticed, near the front, a very old woman seated in a wheelchair.

She was small and brown and her cheeks were hollow. She sat upright in the chair, with a pale orange headscarf draped loosely over her head and shoulders, her eyes sharp little points of anxiety.

For a moment my heart stood still. Something about those sunken cheeks reminded me of how my own mum had looked in the weeks before she died, just one short year ago.

When we reached the back of the forecourt, Hasan said goodbye, Ian went in search of Charly and I climbed the steps to the hotel verandah, none too sure what I was supposed to be doing. It was very tempting simply to move around the camp, observe the goings on and chat with anyone who felt like talking.

There were never less than fifty refugees sitting, standing or walking about on the verandah, and, at busy times of day, probably a hundred. It was a fine spot for meeting, smoking, conversing and being somewhere other than in the confines of your tent. The smell of cheap tobacco made me feel slightly sick.

At one end of the verandah, double doors opened into the hotel bar and restaurant. This must be an even better spot for meeting, smoking and conversing, especially in cold weather. The restaurant alone could seat 150 people. Perhaps in better days it had been a place where tourists newly arrived from FYROM would have a celebration meal, their first in Greece; but today the entire clientele consisted of refugees.

Seated behind a counter I spotted a character who I thought must be Hercules, the owner of Hotel Hara. Charly had told me about him.

He was rummaging through a file while shouting into a telephone receiver which was hooked under his chin. A tall, bulky, middleaged man, he had sagging shoulders, a paunch and a lined, rubbery face. His bottom lip jutted out beyond his top one, forming a curious point at the centre. His hair was thick and curly in the manner of a Greek god and he wore an expression of enraged despair.

As the older brother of the supermarket manager, Hercules was the patriarch of the family. The other volunteers would later tell me they thought him a deeply unpleasant man; but I was never sure. It can’t be easy, having spent your life building up a family

business, to witness it suddenly overrun with ‘customers’ who are mostly unable to pay and unwilling to leave. It was true that a small number of refugee families were renting Hercules’ half dozen hotel rooms, but the vast majority were camping for free on the forecourt and in the adjoining fields.

Hercules’ right-hand man was a slightly younger character who went by the name of Stassos. Stassos was as tall as Hercules and equally flabby. He spent most of his time shuffling about in a pair of moccasins between the restaurant and the kitchen, the smoke from a lit cigarette trailing from his fingers, his belly bulging through his dirty white T-shirt. When he wasn’t at the counter conferring with Hercules, he was snarling at refugees or firing orders at the mainly female kitchen staff.

The small bar at the back of the restaurant had comfortable seats and a large television. I was on my way there now for a cup of hot, sweet tea. The heavily made-up Greek woman serving could not have been nicer to me. She smiled when she saw me coming, laid her cigarette in the ash tray and enacted an elaborate mime to establish exactly how much sugar I wanted. Perhaps there was something a little conspiratorial in her attitude – hello love, you’re middle-aged like us, you’re European and we know you’re trying to help; you can see that we’re going through hell with this crazy invasion of refugees, but we won’t take it out on you! I wasn’t too sure we’d agree on many things had we been able to have a proper conversation in a language we both understood, but I made a point of thanking her, in my minimal Greek, for her kindness.

As I stepped away from the bar, my eye landed on Sintra, who was sitting on one of the black plastic sofas with Juwan, the young Kurd I’d seen her with at the demonstration. He was giggling as he showed her something on his phone. Sintra glanced up and waved.

‘Hiya, Teresa!’ she cried. ‘Come and join us.’

I picked up my tea and sat down beside her on the arm of the sofa.

‘Juwan was just showing me a film of his cousin’s baby,’ she explained. ‘It’s so sweet, you’ve got to see it.’

Still chuckling, Juwan held out the phone to me. ‘Look,’ he cried, ‘see this boy!’

I watched as a sturdy looking baby in a white babygro, lying on a rug, rolled from his back onto his side with an air of determination.

But each time he succeeded, a woman’s hand pushed him back.

After a few seconds the little face puckered up and he started to cry.

‘Why won’t she let him roll over?’ I asked.

‘He’s trying to roll towards the TV, and she doesn’t want him to.

She’s so mean to him!’ Juwan’s expression was indignant.

‘Poor baby,’ I smiled. ‘Where are they?’

‘Damascus.’

‘Is that where you’re from?’

‘Yes.’ ‘But you’re a Kurd?’

‘Lots of Kurds live in Damascus.’

The Syrian Kurds intrigued me, so I asked if he’d mind telling me a bit about them.

‘Sure, I love to talk about the Kurds. Where shall I begin?’ The playful look I’d noticed at the demonstration returned to his eyes.

‘Are you from a political family?’ It was awkward talking across Sintra, so I picked up my tea and moved to a vacant armchair on Juwan’s side of the sofa.

‘Yes and no.’ He jiggled his head from side to side as he weighed up the question and I was struck again by the strong, sharp lines of his forehead and chin. ‘Yes, in that my family were very proud to be Kurdish. When I was growing up, we all had a strong emotional attachment to the idea of a Kurdish state.’ He rested an elbow on

the arm of the sofa. ‘But no, my family was not directly involved in any political party.’

Juwan’s father and uncles had all been to university and there were writers and poets in the extended family.

‘They wrote in Kurdish?’

‘Of course. My parents are fluent in Kurdish, Arabic and English.’

‘Ah, that’s why your English is so good!’

Juwan nodded. ‘My parents started to teach me English when I was five or six. They used to show me things and say, “This is a tree” or, “This is a bird”.’ His eyes seemed to grow larger as he spoke and the scar above his left eyebrow shifted towards his hairline. ‘I loved the sound of English words from the first moment I heard them, although in those days I couldn’t pronounce them very well. Instead of “This is”, for example, I used to say “Chiz biz”.’ … He caught my eye and laughed.

It wasn’t hard to imagine a six-year-old version of Juwan, following his parents around a comfortable house and garden, picking up English words with the extraordinary absorbency of a young child’s brain. Like most Kurds, Juwan’s family were Sunni Muslims, but nowadays his siblings didn’t practise their faith and some of his relatives were atheists.

‘How about you?’ I asked.

‘Till I was in my teens, I was a believer. But then I read Descartes, and I lost my faith! His cogito ergo sum made me an atheist.’ Juwan looked from Sintra to me, as if wondering what we would make of this. ‘But much later, after I’d been through a lot of things, I came back to Islam.’

‘And what about politics?’

‘When I went to university, in Raqqa, I became a student activist.

My activities were more cultural than overtly political. I was an independent, not attached to any political party. A few of us used to organize events with Kurdish music and poetry.’

After all the media coverage of Raqqa as the headquarters of ISIS and its ‘caliphate’, I found it hard to imagine it as a city where students had once lead a normal life. ‘Was it safe to hold parties?’ I asked. These days music was banned by ISIS; in the past, I thought the regime might have seen the celebration of Kurdish culture as a threat to national identity.

‘Safe enough. We invited Arab friends along, people who had connections, to protect us. We held a few of those parties, and then we stopped.’ He put his tea down on the table. ‘The PKK approached me around that time, wanting me to edit their newspaper. But I didn’t want to, so I refused.’

The PKK, known in English as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, is the dominant Kurdish separatist organization in Turkey. In the 1980s and 1990s its leader, Abdullah Öcalan, had spearheaded an all-out war against the Turkish state. Much to the chagrin of the Turkish government, Hafez al-Assad had allowed the PKK to run training camps for its fighters in both Syria and Syrian-occupied Lebanon.

Due to this, in 1999, Turkey had threatened to invade Syria and in response Hafez had forced the PKK to leave; but the organization had retained a major influence in Kurdish areas of the country.

Juwan cleared his throat. ‘The PKK asked me three times to edit their paper, and each time I refused. After my third refusal, I started to receive threats. That was in 2008.’

‘So it was dangerous?’ I glanced at Sintra, wondering if she was interested in what Juwan was saying. She was listening with rapt attention.

‘In those days,’ Juwan went on, ‘if someone even heard you curse Abdullah Öcalan, just curse him, you might be killed by the PKK. So they didn’t like my refusal. After that, I stopped holding the cultural parties. I went on studying, but the teaching was poor. After two

years, I packed in my studies.’

‘What d’you think of the PKK now?’

‘I see the PKK as the Kurdish ISIS. Although they’re atheists, they have the same intolerant mentality as ISIS, the same way of treating people – they’re a bunch of tyrants.’ He paused. ‘And the PYD are no better.’ Juwan was perched now on the edge of the sofa, looking at me intently as he spoke, as if to make sure I was following. I listened in silence, nodding from time to time. So far, I liked everything about this young man. His command of idiomatic English astonished me.

‘So, Juwan,’ Sintra said after a pause, ‘how did you become a refugee?’

Now he flashed Sintra a smile, joining the thumb of his right hand to the finger tips. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he began, shaking his hand in a gesture which meant ‘Be patient’, ‘but first you have to understand the background.’

We looked at him expectantly.

‘As you know, the crisis started in March 2011. After people saw the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya, they wanted something to happen in Syria; but for the previous forty years, the mass of the Syrian people had not been politically organized. There were Syrians living outside Syria who were politically organized, but the people inside didn’t know them. The Syrian Kurds were organized, of course; but when the revolution started, they held back.’ Juwan looked from Sintra to me. ‘D’you know how the revolution started?’

young and feeling, but perhaps he’d seen so much horror as to numb his emotions.

‘Were the children ever released?’

‘No.’ He took his phone out of his pocket and began to turn it over with his fingers. ‘So then the demonstrations began. 18 March was the first Friday, “The Friday of honour”. There were big protests in Deraa and in Homs, with the slogan “hamiya haramiyya” (The protector is a thief), directed against the governor of Deraa.

And every Friday after that there were protests. Each town that demonstrated went out in support of other towns that were protesting.’ Juwan looked up at us. ‘When the protests started, many old men were crying with happiness. After forty years of repression, people had lost hope; and now they saw a chink of light.’

I knew that the regime had responded to the peaceful demonstrations with extreme violence. Demonstrators had been bludgeoned to death by the regime’s shabbiha (organized thugs) or shot dead by snipers. In just the first three months of the uprising, nearly three thousand people were detained. The regime made a point of returning the mutilated corpses of protesters who had died under torture to their families. Children were treated no better than adults: on 25 May 2011 the body of a thirteen-year-old boy arrested a month earlier in a protest against the siege of Deraa was returned to his family with gunshot wounds, cigarette burns, broken bones and a severed penis.

‘The first big demonstration took place in February in Damascus.’

I had tried to read accounts of what went on in the regime’s detention centres, although I found the material unbearable. I felt I knew enough to understand the extraordinary courage it must have taken to go out onto the streets, even in a crowd of many thousands.

‘Were you there?’

‘So what about you?’ I asked at last.

Juwan sucked his teeth. ‘No, no, I was in Raqqa, at the other end of the country.’

‘Me, I was watching and waiting to see how things would develop.

I was due to start my military service the following March, in 2012.

By September 2011 the situation was so bad that I knew I couldn’t go into the army and fight for the regime. If I had done, I would have been expected to shoot my own people. So in December 2011 I started to make plans to leave the country.’

I did know, but I was interested to see how he would tell the story.

I felt a curious blend of relief and disappointment. I’d naively imagined that everyone of student age would have been at the centre of the action, wherever that was.

‘Then there was a “Day of Rage” on 15 March,’ Juwan went on, ‘when thousands of people demonstrated in lots of big cities.’

‘Peacefully?’ Sintra’s eyes were on Juwan.

‘Sure, totally peacefully, selmiyyeh (peaceful) was even one of the slogans. People were demanding the release of political prisoners and the lifting of the decades-old emergency law.’ He caught his breath. ‘But the thing that started the revolution so that there was no going back was the events in Deraa, right down in the far south of Syria.’ Juwan looked from Sintra to me. ‘It’s a big irony that Deraa is in a very tribal area, where everyone used to support the regime.

One day in March 2011, some kids wrote slogans on the wall of their school.’ He cleared his throat. ‘They were just young kids, thirteen, fourteen. You know what the regime did to these kids?’

I nodded in grim silence: the regime had detained and tortured the children, pulling out their fingernails. In recording the history of the revolution, there is no way to avoid this stark and horrific fact.

‘Initially the kids’ families didn’t want to challenge the regime, so they went to a tribal head to ask for their kids back. The guy was a head of political security. You know how Sunni tribesmen wear the traditional Arab headdress, the keffiyah, held in place with a black ring? The men of the families took off their black rings and put them on the guy’s table and then they asked for their kids to be released. But the guy was an asshole. He swept the black rings onto the floor, saying, “If you need kids, go and make new kids.” This was a huge insult to the honour of those families.’

‘It’s unbelievable,’ Sintra whispered.

‘Yes,’ Juwan replied in a matter-of-fact tone, ‘but it’s true.’ I observed his expression, grave but calm, and reflected that I didn’t know how he’d spent the previous five years. To me he appeared

‘How old were you then?’

‘Twenty two. A relative of my mother promised my family that he would put me up at his home in a coastal city in Turkey and help me get to Europe.’ Juwan put away the phone, took his left hand in his right and cracked his knuckles, one by one. ‘I was never happy about this plan. I’d not met the guy personally and I felt uncomfortable about throwing myself on his hospitality; but my parents insisted, saying they’d got it all arranged. I had to leave Syria as quickly as possible, and I didn’t have a better option. So I packed a bag and got myself ready. It was difficult to say goodbye to my family and I couldn’t take much with me: I had to leave all my books and my laptop behind.’

‘That must have been hard.’

‘It was all hard, of course.’ As he spoke, a young man of about Juwan’s age strode up, nodded at me and Sintra, and began to speak to Juwan very fast in Arabic. Within seconds Juwan rose to his feet. ‘I’m sorry, you two, I’ve got to go and interpret for a patient at the MSF medical van.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the forecourt. ‘Their interpreter’s gone home early and they’re stuck.’

He smiled at Sintra. ‘Thanks for the tea.’

‘Sure,’ she replied. ‘But we want to hear the rest of the story. Promise you’ll tell us another time?’ *

APRIL

Charting the decline of the French intellectual, from the Dreyfus Affair to Islamophobia

The End of the French Intellectual From Zola to Houellebecq Shlomo Sand Translated by David Fernbach Internationally acclaimed Israeli historian Shlomo Sand made his mark with books such as The Invention of the Jewish People and The Invention of the Land of Israel. Returning here to an early fascination, he turns his attention to the figure of the French intellectual.

CATEGORY

History / Politics

EXTENT

304 pages

SIZES

235 x 156mm

FORMAT

Hardback

ISBN

978 1 78663 508 2

PRICES

£20 / $29.95 / $39.95CAN

RIGHTS

Éditions La Découverte

•• A major examination of the intellectual health of not just France but also Europe.

From his student years in Paris, Sand has repeatedly come up against the "great French thinkers." He has an intimate knowledge of the Parisian intellectual world and its little secrets, on which he draws to overturn certain myths attaching to the figure of the "intellectual" that France prides itself on having invented. Mixing reminiscence and analysis, he revisits a history that, from the Dreyfus Affair through to Charlie Hebdo, seems to him that of a long decline. As a long-time admirer of Zola, Sartre and Camus, Sand is staggered to see what the French intellectual has become today, in such characters as Michel Houellebecq, Éric Zemmour and Alain Finkielkraut. In a work that gives no quarter, and focuses particularly on the Judeophobia and Islamophobia of the elites, he casts on the French intellectual scene a gaze that is both disabused and mordant.

Shlomo Sand currently teaches Contemporary History at the University of Tel Aviv. His books include The Invention of the Jewish People, The Invention of the Land of Israel, and Twilight of History.

Praise for The Invention of the Jewish People “Perhaps books combining passion and erudition don’t change political situations, but if they did, this one would count as a landmark.”

Eric Hobsbawm, Observer

•• Tackles the question of who and what is the public intellectual today?

“[Sand’s] quiet earthquake of a book is shaking historical faith in the link between Judaism and Israel.” Rafael Behr, Observer

•• Reviews across the national press.

“Extravagantly denounced and praised.” New York Times

•• Author of the controversial The Invention of the Jewish People, a bestseller.

“No discussion of the region any longer seems complete without acknowledgement of this book.” Independent on Sunday “A radical dismantling of a national myth.” Guardian

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APRIL

The secret life of the man who reshaped Russia

NEW IN PAPERBACK

The Dilemmas of Lenin Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution Tariq Ali Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the October 1917 uprising, is one of the most misunderstood leaders of the twentieth century. In his own time, there were many, even among his enemies, who acknowledged the full magnitude of his intellectual and political achievements. But his legacy has been lost in misinterpretation; he is worshipped but rarely read.

Tariq Ali explores the two major influences on Lenin’s thought – the turbulent history of Tsarist Russia and the birth of the international labour movement – and explains how Lenin confronted dilemmas that still cast a shadow over the present. Is terrorism ever a viable strategy? Is support for imperial wars ever justified? Can politics be made without a party? Was the seizure of power in 1917 morally justified? Should he have parted company from his wife and lived with his lover?

In The Dilemmas of Lenin, Ali provides an insightful portrait of Lenin’s deepest preoccupations and underlines the clarity and vigour of his theoretical and political formulations. He concludes with an affecting account of Lenin’s last two years, when he realized that “we knew nothing” and insisted that the revolution had to be renewed lest it wither and die.

Tariq Ali is a writer and filmmaker. He has written more than a dozen books on world history and politics, as well as the novels of his Islam Quintet series and scripts for the stage and screen. He is an editor of New Left Review and lives in London.

“Reading this book on your vacation will make your life better and your mind broader.” Branko Milanović, author of Global Inequality “What underpins his book is the view that October was an 'innocent and utopian birth' that was subsequently 'twisted' into Stalinism by three devastating years of civil war.” Daniel Beer, Guardian “This important work ... produced by a major figure on the international Left, is what some might term ‘a literary event.’ Tariq Ali’s vibrant contribution in this anniversary year of the 1917 Revolution engages the reader with a restless, critical intelligence coming to grips with intersections of history, culture, and politics.” Paul Le Blanc, International Socialist Review

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CATEGORY

History / Biography

EXTENT

384 pages

SIZES

210 x 140mm

FORMAT

Trade Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78663 111 4

PRICES

£9.99 / $17.95 / $23.99CAN

RIGHTS

Andrew Nurnberg Associates

PREVIOUS EDITION

978 1 78663 110 7

•• Brilliant examination of the role of Lenin in the midst of Revolution.

•• Why does Lenin matter today: rescues an icon from its history.

•• Ali is a leading writer who often appears on TV and radio and gives talks around the world.

APRIL

A powerful challenge to the way we understand class, identity, and the history of anti-racism

Mistaken Identity Race and Class in the Age of Trump Asad Haider The phenomenon of "identity politics" represents one of the primary impasses of the left, and has occasioned the reignition of frustrating debates between the partisans of race and class ad infinitum. In Mistaken Identity, Asad Haider reaches for a different approach – one rooted in the rich legacies of the black freedom struggle. Drawing from the words and deeds of black revolutionary theorists, he argues that identity politics is not synonymous with anti-racism, but instead amounts to the neutralisation of its movements. It marks a retreat from the crucial passage from identity to solidarity, and from individual recognition to collective struggle against an oppressive social structure.

Mistaken Identity is a political and theoretical tour de force, an urgent call for alternative visions, languages, and practices against the white identity politics of right-wing populism. The idea of universal emancipation now seems old-fashioned and outmoded. But if we are attentive to the lines of struggle that lie outside the boundaries of the state, we will see that it has been placed on the agenda once again.

Asad Haider is a writer and activist in the San Francisco Bay Area, a PhD student at UC Santa Cruz and the co-founder of Viewpoint Magazine.

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CATEGORY

Politics

EXTENT

144 pages

SIZES

210 x 140mm

FORMAT

Trade Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78663 737 6

PRICES

ÂŁ10.99 / $17.95 / $23.95CAN

RIGHTS

Haider

“Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

Workingmen of all countries, unite!� Karl Marx

APRIL

Epic new biography of Karl Marx for the 200th anniversary of his birth

A World to Win The Life and Works of Karl Marx Sven-Eric Liedman

MARX 200

Translated by Jeff Skinner The globalised world of the twenty-first century has many parallels with that of the period running up to the cataclysm of 1914, namely the world predicted by Karl Marx. Communications go that much faster, but this is a difference of degree, not type. People, messages, and ideas are flung around the globe. Money circulates in a neverceasing torrent, poverty lives side by side with wealth, and capital exercises its impersonal power over each and every one of us.

In this world, Karl Marx – blunt and straightforward enough to inspire criticism of the latest exploits of capitalism, the failings of politics, and the genuflection of those in power before fetishes like ‘The Market’ – lives on. Despite nearly 200 years having passed since his birth, his burning condemnation of capitalism remains of immediate interest today. The texts he left behind gave rise to what would come to be called Marxism, but that was a term he rejected. His approach – enormous amounts of reading and writing, integrating new discoveries from the various sciences into his analyses of society – was a far cry from how his theories would come to be used in states where only one, party-approved interpretation was allowed.

Now, more than ever before, these texts can be read for what they truly are. In addition to providing a living picture of Marx the man, his life, and his family and friends – as well as his lifelong collaboration with Friedrich Engels – Sweden’s leading intellectual historian SvenEric Liedman, in this major new biography, shows what Karl Marx the thinker and researcher really wrote, demonstrating that this giant of the nineteenth century can still exert a powerful attraction for the inhabitants of the twenty-first.

Sven-Eric Liedman, Professor Emeritus of the History of Ideas at the University of Gothenburg, has been reading and writing about Karl Marx for over fifty years. His textbook on political ideologies, From Plato to the War Against Terrorism, has been reprinted in fourteen editions.

CATEGORY

Biography

EXTENT

832 pages

SIZES

235 x 156mm

FORMAT

Hardback

ISBN

978 1 78663 504 4

PRICES

£30 / $40 / $54CAN

RIGHTS

Albert Bonniers Förlag

•• 2018 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of the world’s most renowned philosopher, political thinker, economist and revolutionary.

•• This sweeping and epic new biography is the product of decades of work by major Swedish scholar Sven-Eric Liedman.

•• A major project – reviews across the national press.

•• Broadcast interviews with the author.

•• Major online marketing campaign.

33

An extract from A World to Win by Sven-Eric Liedman The great project “When I was young, it was my good fortune to make the acquaintance of an old German Jew who was dying, here in London, from the effects of long hardship and privation, of overwork and poverty. I did what I could to save, to prolong his life.

I got him sent to Algeria, to the south of France, and got the most brilliant young physician on Harley Street to look after him. But it was too late. In the short time I knew him, he taught me more than all other teachers, dead or living. He saw more clearly than any other man the disease that was killing the world. His name was Karl Marx.”

The man who spoke these words was named E. Ray Lankester. He was one of Great Britain’s foremost biologists at the turn of the twentieth century, and one of the few present at Marx’s funeral.

But this book is not about Dr. Lankester. It is about Marx.

Karl Marx lived from 1818 to 1883. By the autumn of 1850, half of his life had passed.

He was truly a man of the 1800s, rooted in his century. Today he belongs to the distant past, yet his name constantly crops up.

After the collapse of the Soviet empire, he seemed at first to be dragged along in the masses of the avalanche, down into the oblivion that surrounds the hopelessly obsolete. Marx was only the first in a series of repugnant figures who now, fortunately, had been sent into history. Everything that had been realized in the Soviet Union and China had been prepared in Marx.

This is a notion that is still widely prevalent. But it soon turned out that Marx also could live his own life, independent of the disintegration of empires. Voices of regret could be heard.

The most influential of these voices belonged to Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher who played an important role in the intellectual life of the twentieth century. In 1993, he published Specters of Marx, in which he conceded that Marx was indeed dead, but nevertheless haunted a world of growing injustices like a ghost.

Another French philosopher, Étienne Balibar, also published an ingenious little book in which he asserted that Marx’s thought was extremely topical while the philosophy trumpeted from the Soviet Union had no actual connection with Marx.

A few years later, around the turn of the century, Marx became topical in a more spectacular fashion. New Yorker magazine named him the most important thinker of the coming century, and in a vote organized by the BBC, he came out at the top among philosophers. In his last book, How to Change the World (2011), the great Austro-British historian Eric Hobsbawm spoke about a meeting with George Soros, the prince of all investors. Soros asked him about his position on Marx; anxious to avoid a quarrel, Hobsbawm responded evasively, whereupon Soros replied: “That man discovered something about capitalism 150 years ago that we need to take advantage of.”

All this may seem like curiosities. Someone who is a celebrity, a public figure people readily refer to, does not need to be influential. It is more telling that Marx is constantly part of the discussion of the fateful questions of our time. When French economist Thomas Piketty caused a sensation in 2013 with his voluminous Capital in the Twenty-first Century, Marx was a recurring name in the flood of commentary the book gave rise to. Traditional economists ascribed to Piketty all the sins they routinely blame Marx for, and enthusiasts saw a new Capital for the twenty-first century in the book. In fact, the distance between Piketty and Marx is quite large. Piketty is not interested in the duel between labor and capital; his focus is on finance capital. The similarity lies in the long perspective of time, as well as in the moment, for the growing – and in the long run, catastrophic – division between the few who increasingly hold power through their riches and the many who are thereby rendered powerless. Piketty himself is eager to emphasize Marx’s significance. Marx’s thesis on the unending accumulation of capital is as fundamental for economic analysis in the twenty-first century as it is for the nineteenth, Piketty says.

Sociologist Göran Therborn attacks the growing division in the world from another direction in his 2013 book, The Killing Fields of Inequality. The growing inequality cannot be measured only by widening gaps in income and wealth, Therborn points out. Differences in health and lifespan – and people’s opportunities in general to develop in an adequate manner – are also appearing. Therborn perceives a particular existential inequality that concerns rights, dignity, respect, and degrees of freedom, for example. It turns out that this inequality, in all its aspects, is now rapidly accelerating even in Europe, especially in the Nordic countries.

Therborn himself has a background in Marxism and, by all appearances, now counts himself as a post-Marxist – that is, remaining in the tradition but free from all ties to previous groups. Indeed, one of his later books, from 2008, is titled From Marxism to Post-Marxism?

In the face of another fateful question of the age – the environmental crisis in general and the climate crisis in particular – Marx’s name sometimes comes up.

This may appear surprising: the empire that had its ideological origins in Marx – the Soviet Union – caused unparalleled environmental destruction. But those

who go directly to Marx and do not take a detour through Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev find that he certainly cared about the environment. Material production for him was an interaction between nature and humanity that had been eliminated as a result of capitalism. The person who above all emphasized this (and to some extent overemphasized it) is American sociologist John Bellamy Foster, above all in his 2000 book Marx’s Ecology. Foster’s perspective turns up in Naomi Klein’s 2014 grand general scrutiny of the relationship between capitalism and climate, This Changes Everything.

Marx is also present in discussions about the new class society that developed in the decades around the turn of the twenty-first century. British economist Guy Standing perceived a new social class in the world of that era. He wrote a widely discussed book about it in 2011 – The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. He considers people of today living in an incessantly uncertain situation as belonging to the precariat. He perceives three different layers: workers who, though deindustrialization, have lost their jobs with no prospects for new ones; refugees from the world’s hotbeds of crisis who have been forced out into the margins of society; and, finally, well-educated people who are reduced to temporary, always equally uncertain positions that are interspersed with periods of unemployment.

This is a diversity that is perhaps entirely too large for the term to be manageable.

But there is an important unifying link here that has to do with the labor market and the conditions of employment. More and more people are reduced to a diffuse borderland between temporary jobs and no jobs at all. The relative security that the workers’ movement fought for is becoming more and more restricted, and the social safety net is becoming thinner and being torn to shreds in recurring crises.

It is typical that the crisis that crossed the world in 2008 and 2009 aroused a new interest in Marx, and then for Capital in particular. At the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many said with pleasure that not only the Soviet Empire, but Karl Marx as well would thereby lose all the topicality they had had so far. It is fitting that the Soviet Union was sent to the past once and for all after 1991, but not Marx. And why not Marx?

To approach the question, we must first take a step back. The societal change that would characterize Marx’s work more than any other was industrialization, and with it the development of a workers’ movement. Today, that development appears distant and close at the same time. In countries where mass production once began, we have entered into a post-industrial society. The nineteenth-century sweatshops that Marx had in mind are now found chiefly in countries such as China, Indonesia and the Philippines. In Europe and the United States, class divisions other than those of the 1800s and 1900s are getting wider and deeper.

A large number of economists who portray the reality of the early twenty-first century as the best – indeed, the only natural one – are doing everything to convince ordinary people that they belong to the great capitalist community of interest. “It’s everyone’s money that’s at stake,” they chant. Their own theory is built on the notion of an eternal equilibrium in a world of restless change. We could speak about a new kind of more prosaic Platonism. Something eternal exists beyond the chaotic diversity that the senses (and the charts) bear witness to.

What could be more natural in a situation like this than to call Karl Marx forth, back again from the shadows? No social theory is more dynamic than his. No one speaks more clearly about widening class divisions than he does.

It is impossible to read the introductory, stylistically razor-sharp and rhetorically perfect first pages of the Communist Manifesto without recognizing the society that is ours. The bourgeoisie “has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism in the icy water of egotistical calculation”.

Are we not again living in that society? Have we not come back to the reality of the 1840s, even if more globalized and technologically more advanced? The free flow of commodities is the norm that makes other norms to shrink into insignificance.

Marx can, sometimes, come almost painfully close. Today, a brutal economism dominates many minds to the extent that it has become invisible for them. It is often called neoliberalism, after the school that Milton Friedman became the symbol of in the 1970s. But the name doesn’t matter. The important thing is that many of Friedman’s ideas have become everyday life; the market dominates every detail, and even states and municipalities are run like businesses.

Friedman’s spiritual forefathers – the representatives of the Manchester school – lived in Marx’s time, with John Bright and Richard Cobden leading the way.

Even for them, free trade would solve all problems. Marx harbored a reluctant admiration for the Manchester liberals, seeing them as heralds for a development that had to precede the society he himself was fighting for. At the same time, he attacked them heatedly when they claimed to represent the whole of the people – the workers as well – against the aristocracy.

Marx wrote much about Cobden and Bright and their followers, especially in his articles in the New York Daily Tribune.

The Marx of the twenty-first century must brace himself in the reality that has been created ever since the 1980s.

The Marx of today may be discussed and often cited. He still has only a fraction of the influence he – apparently, at least – had fifty or a hundred years ago. In a way, this is paradoxical. His image of society seemed to be less pertinent then than it does now. The Soviet Union, which was considered to be following in his footsteps, was characterized by many kinds of things from censorship, forced labor camps, and rule by the bosses to schools and universities for everyone and guaranteed support for a non-modernistic culture – indeed, a ‘philistine sentimentalism’, to use the words of the Manifesto. In the other Europe, where Marx is also found in the family tree, certain politicians could talk about democratic socialism, and there – despite many shortcomings and injustices – moderate social security prevailed for most. The economy blossomed, preparing the ground for reforms that made life more tolerable for ordinary folk. Of course, there were still class divisions, but not as precipitous as a hundred years earlier.

Marx’s analysis of his time thus makes better sense today than it did fifty years ago.

Its accuracy applies, above all, to capitalism’s way of working.

But Marx hadn’t counted on capitalism’s ability to constantly renew itself and absorb new productive forces. Today, capitalism appears more dominant than ever.

In the only large country where Marx still has a place of honor – China – he has to put up with constantly being drenched in the “icy water of egotistical calculation”.

Communism has become the ‘Sunday best’, tight as a straitjacket. Everyday life is marked by a race for market shares, as ruthless as it is successful. Marx’s analysis of capitalism’s way of working is being brilliantly confirmed. But for him, it would have been inconceivable that a country that quotes his works would drive capitalism to its utmost extremes.

It is in this paradoxical situation that entering deeply into the study of Marx becomes important.

Going this deep requires that from the beginning, we settle accounts with a range of fallacies about Marx that circulate in the general public and make a reasonable understanding of his life and work more difficult. These fallacies, large and small, will turn up in their natural contexts further on in the text. Here, it is only a question of relieving the reader, from the beginning, of unnecessary ballast.

Misconceptions and exaggerations Several of the most common assertions about Marx are quite simply false. That he wanted to dedicate the first volume of Capital to Darwin belongs here. He never dreamed of it. On the other hand, he sent a printed copy to the great biologist, who thanked him for the kindness but at the very most read the first few pages.

Another fallacy is that Marx said that religion is opium for the people. He never said that; he said it is an opium of the people. There is a big difference. Religion is not something that the malicious powers that be dispense to the people. It is the people themselves who seek relief and comfort in religion. The mistranslation seems to be a typical one in Swedish, and by all appearances goes back to the fact that “opium for the people” has its own tradition, independent of Marx.

An idea that is often ascribed to Marx in Sweden is that interests never lie. A few similar expressions can actually be found in some of Marx’s works from the early 1850s. But he soon abandoned the word ‘interest’, surely because it is difficult to reconcile with his overall conception of how people think and act. The expression can thus not be seen as typical of him.

Other common ideas about him can be questioned with good reason. One of the most widespread is that he was a determinist. Societal development would inexorably progress from one stage to another. Socialism would follow capitalism with the necessity of natural law.

This idea comes more naturally, as the Marxism that followed after him often expressed itself this way. What is more, there are phrases in the works of Marx himself that are easily interpreted in this direction. But research over the last few decades – research that was able to work with his core texts in the condition he left them – has shown that he spoke more of tendencies than an inevitable development. According to him, there were far too many uncertain factors. He himself spoke of the power of accidental circumstances.

Sometimes, he is blamed for trying himself – often in vain – to live like a Victorian bourgeois. But he wasn’t ashamed of that. He didn’t follow any ascetic attitude to life, but indulged everyone – himself included – in the advantages that were still only possible for a small minority.

The Marx that can be found beyond the clichés is a living figure in a time full of revolutionary news and social changes, like our own. This is the man, and the world he lives in, that we will now meet.

But this book is not the first about Marx – only the latest in a nearly endless succession. What function will this particular book fulfill, then? To attempt an answer to this question, we have to cast a glance over the vast literature that exists.

The main stress, of course, lies on the biographies – the books that in one way or another claim to deal with the complete Marx, his life, and his works. The special studies will come under discussion in connection with the work of Marx that they deal with.

The diversity of the books Eleanor Marx, his youngest daughter, was the first person who intended to write a biography of Karl Marx. But apart from a few early articles there were only incomplete notes, for reasons we will come back to. The notes are of great value as eyewitness accounts by a person who was intimately familiar.

The earliest full-scale biography is by Franz Mehring, and was published in 1918.

Mehring’s book is solid; in addition, its particular strength lies in its historical proximity – Mehring knew Friedrich Engels personally. But his book, by today’s standards, has its inevitable limitations in that so relatively few of Marx’s written works were yet known in 1918.

The shadow of really existing socialism falls over the literature that came out during the more than 70 years of the Soviet Union’s history. Marx is either held up as the first great inspiration, or he is also denied responsibility for what happened.

The succession of more or less official biographies in the Soviet Union and the GDR had to be brought into harmony with the current regime. This did not prevent knowledgeable, well-balanced accounts from coming out in that environment.

Heinrich Gemkow’s 1967 work, Karl Marx: eine Biographie should be held up in particular here.

In Western Europe and the United States, many good biographies came out alongside bitter propaganda numbers. Some of them attempted to directly counteract both the devout tributes and the demonization of Marx. One example is Maximilien Rubel’s and Margaret Manale’s 1975 work Marx Without Myth. The American author Allen Wood concentrated on Marx’s works, and dealt with the biographical details in only a few pages in his 1981 book Karl Marx.

Another American, Jerrold Siegel, went in the opposite direction. In his book from 1978, Marx’s Fate: The Shape of a Life he tried above all to capture Marx the man. It is an interesting personal portrait that nevertheless does not seem fully convincing.

In his 1973 work Karl Marx: His Life and Thought, British author David McLellan strives to find a balance between the man and his works. It is an equally serious and ambitious biography that provides much important information. Marx’s works are treated conscientiously, but closer textual analyses are often set behind a swarm of lengthy citations.

One lucid, easily accessible – but also cursory – work is German author Werner Blumenberg’s 1962 work Marx in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten, an English translation of which came out as late as 1998.

‘Analytical Marxism’ represents a special kind of interpretation of Marx. It aims at understanding and criticizing Marx’s works with the tools of modern analytical philosophy. Norwegian author Jon Elster is the only one of the central representatives of the school who has written something that could resemble a biography of Marx: his 1986 work An Introduction to Karl Marx. It is a handy little book in which Marx’s life is dealt with in a few pages, and the author keeps his works at arm’s length, certain of what is valuable and what is worthless in it.

Elster’s book has the usual virtues of analytical philosophy – order and clarity – but also its shortcoming, a von oben attitude to the object of study.

Back in the 1960s, the most comprehensive work about Marx’s early development came out, in which Engels’s childhood and youth were also dealt with: French author Auguste Cornu’s Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels: leur vie et leur œuvre (1955– 1970). Despite its four volumes, the work does not cover more that the time up until 1846, when Marx was 28 and Engels 26. It is written in the orthodox tradition but abounding in richness of detail, and it stays close to the sources. Anyone seeking the most certain information about Marx’s background and earlier development can turn with confidence to Heinz Monz’s 1973 book Karl Marx: Grundlagen der Entwicklung zu Leben und Werk.

After the Soviet epoch, the biographies changed their character. There is no longer a politically sanctioned tradition of interpretation to concur with or to repudiate.

The relationship to Marx has also become more direct. British author Francis Wheen’s 1999 contribution to the genre, Karl Marx: A Biography, is marked by a certain infectious rashness and enjoyed international success. Wheen wallows in both the comical and the tragic details of Marx’s life, but only by way of exception does he go deeper into the reason Marx still arouses interest: his ideas and his works.

Less easygoing is American author Jonathan Sperber, who in his extensive 2013 biography Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-century Life paints prefers to paint its grey in grey. While most are astounded over the hunger for learning that pushed Marx further, as over the singular, colorful and highly tragic in his life story, Sperber does not let himself be impressed. He absent-mindedly devotes half a page at the end of his account to Marx’s literary appetite, which was aimed at everything from Aeschylus to Balzac. The meter-high stacks of excerpts that Marx produced under an intense life of readership elicits a comment from him that it was terribly untidy in Marx’s workroom with all those disorganized notes.

Sperber’s gray-toned image of Marx may well be contrasted with the glowing colors in a biography a few years older – that of the famous French economist, author, and political adviser Jacques Attali’s light and elegant 2005 work, Karl Marx – l’esprit du monde. Attali’s chief merit is that he does justice to the many facets of Marx in an enjoyable way. But despite everything, even this is a book that deals more with

his life than with his works. Descriptions form a beautifully shimmering diversity, but do not really create any idea of why this old German would still be topical.

Anyone who wants a genuinely penetrating introduction to Marx’s works has reason to turn to a somewhat older book that nevertheless comes out in constantly new, reworked and expanded editions: Michael Heinrich’s 1991 work, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert (The Science of Value). The entire great project of Capital is in focus there. In this way, it joins a hard to grasp and rapidly growing specialised literature, which will here be presented in its given context. But Heinrich’s actually follows Marx’s development in its entirety, and can therefore also be seen as an intellectual biography that places great demands on its reader, but also yields bountiful rewards.

The once-vigorous Italian literature on Marx and Marxism has more or less run dry since the Italian Communist Party passed into being a general party of the left.

There are exceptions, however. Philosopher Stefano Petrucciani wrote a handy 2009 biography simply titled Marx. Since then, he has gone further with a more inspired 2012 study titled A lezione da Marx (Taking Lessons from Marx), in which he discusses how we can approach Marx’s texts today.

A number of introductions to Marx’s works have come out over the past few years, intended to initiate new readers into the old master’s world of ideas. The foremost example is Thomas Petersen’s and Malte Faber’s solid, thought-provoking 2015 book, Karl Marx und die Philosophie der Wirtschaft (Karl Marx and the Philosophy of Economy), the third edition of which has already come out.

Finally, I would like to mention a few short pamphlets by the celebrated British literary scholar Terry Eagleton. In 1999, he published Marx, a very small biography – in format, a longer essay – and in 2011, the somewhat more extensive Why Marx Was Right followed. The latter is not as apologetic as the title hints at, but is primarily an attempt to explain why Marx is still a current thinker in the twentyfirst century.

That is an ambition that also inspires this book.

After this review of the literature – in which many more titles could have been mention and where the selection is also marked by my ignorance of a number of important languages – it may seem odd to write yet another biography of this man who already has had so much written about him.

in Germany around 1930 (in connection with the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts first being published). But Adolf Hitler put a stop to the project’s continuation in 1933.

The first major edition of both Marx’s and Engels’s works was the Marx-Engels Werke, or MEW, which was published in East Germany from 1956 onward. It was not a critical edition. Works in French or English were reproduced in German translation; the long introductions were highly tendentious and carefully adapted to the prevailing political climate in the Soviet sphere, and the text editions themselves had their shortcomings. Works considered dangerous to the official ideology – such as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and the Grundrisse – were sent off to supplementary volumes or only published long afterward.

These shortcomings would be rectified in and through the critical edition – the Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe – which through its name was already directly linked to the incomplete project from the 1930s. The first volume came out in 1975, but after forty years the work is still far from completed. The gigantic proportions are a part of the explanation: the edition will eventually comprise approximately 120 volumes with accompanying extensive critical apparatus. Another contributing reason is the collapse of the GDR and the Soviet Union. It took a while before the project got another principal (which was the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities). Now volume after volume is being published at a fairly rapid pace.

A critical review shows that the early volumes of MEGA have certain shortcomings that an observant reader must bear in mind. The same sharp gaze has not been directed towards later parts of the edition. Nothing human is perfect.

What shortcomings there may be are no longer due to the bad influence of the machineries of power in the GDR and the Soviet Union.

In any case, MEGA is the most outstanding edition, in principle containing everything (except the irretrievably lost) that Marx and Engels put down on paper.

Much that previously lay inaccessible and hard to interpret in the archives is now available, and provides a richer, more complex image of both men than previously.

But important parts of the totality are still missing. A number of central works

by Marx are, for the time being, only in the Marx Engels Werke or some other reasonably reliable edition.

There is a crucial reason that I did it, after all. I believe myself capable of bringing something new in relation to previous biographies. One important reason is that I have devoted greater attention than usual to Marx’s work in the biographical literature about him. His life history is also included here, in both its grand and its trivial details. But it is his writings that make Marx memorable, influential, and still important. I have carefully gone through everything he left behind, both complete documents and manuscripts. I have even reviewed the things that most researchers of Marx browsed past with a routine flick of the thumb. As regards the important works – with the great project bearing the name of Capital in the center – I have tried to summarize current research and have also provided an overview that is entirely my own.

On the other hand, Capital and all its preliminary work back to the Grundrisse have now been published in MEGA. It is possible for the first time to distinguish between Marx’s own texts and Engels’s contributions – something that is important, particularly as regards the third volume of Capital, in which Engels made extensive changes and supplements to what Marx wrote.

On a number of points I feel I am capable of renovating the image of Marx the thinker and researcher. I show that the concept of alienation has a changed, but still central, place in his later works as well. It thereby also becomes possible to develop his little-developed theory of ideology. In general, I believe myself capable of clarifying his relationship to his philosophical predecessors, particularly Hegel and his central conceptual framework. At the same time, I can indicate the significance of a broad cultural – and in particular, literary – structure for the whole body of Marx’s work. I can derive his rapidly changing political position from his view of the relationship between political and social change. I can localize the border between him and his followers – yes, even between him and Engels: what is called Marxism, I argue, should by rights be called Engelsism. Marx does not create any system. As a researcher and author he is more of a Faustian figure, constantly on the way further into the endless world of knowledge.

As regards the many newspaper articles Marx wrote in the New York Daily Tribune, it is sometimes difficult to precisely distinguish Engels’s share, particularly concerning the purely linguistic formulation in English. As luck would have it, Marx’s and Engels’s styles of writing differ in a fundamental way. This makes it easy to determine when Marx, in all essentials, is the author of the articles.

The Marx I wish to depict is firmly anchored in the nineteenth century. Its horizons were also his. At the same time, he stands out as a red-hot current critic of the capitalism that rules the world of the twenty-first century.

A great, unfinished body of work Only a small part of what Marx wrote was printed during his lifetime. Most of it remained lying in incomplete manuscripts. Since then, posterity has gradually published what he left behind. Engels was first with the continuation of the only volume of Capital that Marx himself allowed the world to study. He not only reproduced Marx’s text but also, on his own accord, filled in the gaps his friend left open.

Later publishers largely reproduced what Marx wrote. This was so when the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (or the Paris Manuscripts) were published around 1930, showing a Marx that deviated from the standard picture being punched out at the time. So also a few decades later when another, equally astounding manuscript, the Grundrisse, surprised faithful readers of Marx with its existence.

An attempt at a critical edition of both Marx’s and Engels’s works was launched

In this case, we can know exactly what Marx wrote in his own hand. This is so in most cases. For a long time Jenny Marx, his wife, made clean copies of his hard-toread handwriting, but so far as can be determined, she made no additions of her own. There is, however, one notable exception: she made, by all appearances, her own small but not insubstantial contribution to her husband’s manuscript for the Communist Manifesto.

The intent of this book is not only to provide an all-round picture of Marx and above all his work. It is also to entice into further reading. Marx is an exciting writer, sometimes brilliant, sometimes carefully investigative, often polemically razor-sharp – and occasionally coarse, or biased, or thoughtless. His repertoire of knowledge is substantial, his frames of reference are broad.

Texts by Marx have been my reading matter for more than fifty years now. In 1965 I published my first selection of writings from his youth – Människans frigörelse (The Liberation of Mankind) – and three years later came a book about the young Marx, En värld att vinna (A World to Win). In the 1970s, I became engrossed in Engels’s philosophy and its relation to nineteenth-century scientific and ideological development. The result was my 1977 work in two volumes: Motsatsernas spel (The Play of Contradictions).

Over all the years that have passed since then, I have come back again off and on to questions about Marx and Engels, about Marxism and socialism and communism.

In 2003, together with Björn Linnell, I published a selection of central Marx texts.

The book the reader now holds in their hands is the most extensively I’ve written about Marx. In principle, I try to cover all the important things Marx wrote. Against this background – before I give an account of the book’s contents – it may be reasonable for me to say something about the most appropriate path into the world of Marx’s ideas. These recommendations cannot be anything but highly personal.

The best beginning is the brilliant first section of the Communist Manifesto. The Manifesto as a whole is marked by the problems of the 1840s, by dreams of the future, and especially by the disputes among various factions of the left. But it is as if the prelude were written for our own time.

After that, it would be good to follow with the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Marx soon abandons the ideas about human nature he brings forward

there, but he holds on to the crucial ideas about what human life should be and what prevents it from being so in capitalist society.

It is best if the path into Marx’s great theory of society goes through his little pamphlet Value, Price, and Profit, which originally was a few lectures he gave for the London members of the International Workingmen’s Association – the famous First International – where he himself soon began setting the tone. It was at the same time as he was completing the first volume of Capital, and the lectures are an easily accessible introduction to several of the main thoughts there.

From there the path to Capital should lie open – this remarkable, powerful foundation of the theory, as eternally incomplete as Gaudí’s Sagrada Família in Barcelona. The Grundrisse also lies within reach, as with everything else Marx left behind in the form of books, manuscripts, newspaper articles, excerpts, and letters.

It should be a pleasure to read Marx – an intellectual and emotional adventure.

If I succeed in infecting any of my readers with this love of adventure, I will be satisfied.

A guide through the work The first chapter briefly depicts the historical background of Marx’s life: the path from the industrial and political revolutions of the late 1700s to the age when electricity transformed the world and the social-democratic parties began to be established.

The following four chapters cover Marx’s life up through the revolutions of 1848– 49. They deal first with his childhood and youth up until his marriage with the baroness Jenny von Westphalen and their departure from Germany.

After that it is the nineteenth-century capital of Paris that will come into focus both for the young family and for this account. Paris of the 1840s is a magnificent environment, and young Karl will become acquainted with both luxury and poverty, with both the finest salons and the dark places where rebellious journeymen gather and hammer out insidious plans. In this environment, he also begins the great project that would gradually be given the name of Capital.

But German (or more precisely, Prussian) police spies were on his trail all the time, and finally got him deported from Paris. He was forced to take refuge in Brussels, a considerably more colorless city. He and his new-found friend, Friedrich Engels, nevertheless created a small rebellious center there and soon came into contact with like-minded people in London. From there, they were both tasked with working out a program for the Communist League, which had now taken shape. Engels wrote the model for the Communist Manifesto, but it was Marx who completed the text and gave it its brilliant stylistic formulation.

The Manifesto came out just as a long-heralded revolution broke out, first in Paris and then in many other parts of Europe. Marx could have returned to Paris in triumph, though it was not in Paris that his strengths were needed most but in Cologne, where the rebellion was also in full swing. In Cologne he became a celebrated journalist: like a red flag to a bull for some, a guiding star for others. But this time as well, the vigilant censorship was too much for him, and his paper – the Neue Rheinische Zeitung – had to be shut down. As always, Marx fought using only words, in newspaper columns or in other revolutionary organizations, but never with weapons. His friend Engels also tried his luck on the barricades. But the revolution was soon put down and reaction triumphed.

Now there was only one European country Marx could seek refuge in: Great Britain.

It was in London that the rest of his and his family’s lives would take place. The remaining chapters of the book deal with his activities there. This account is more systematic than chronological.

But the first terribly dark and heavy years in London deserve a particular description. The financial problems seemed to be too much, and the only possibility was a steady stream of money from Engels, who was now working in the family company of Ermen and Engels in Salford, outside Manchester. But Engels’s money could not prevent several of the Marx children from falling ill and dying. For Jenny and Karl Marx, the pain was dreadful.

The situation was not improved by Karl most likely having had an affair with the family’s maid, Helene Demuth, behind his wife’s back. The result was a son, who was immediately given up.

At the same time, Marx tried to continue working as a journalist and author. The newspaper and journal articles are given their own chapter here. In particular, I dwell upon his employment in the New York Daily Tribune. Engels sometimes got to step in as his ghostwriter, as Marx himself was occupied with his great project on Capital. But he wrote most of them himself; the articles unmistakably bear his mark, and on the other hand it is often magnificent journalism and an important source for anyone who wants to know how he concretely assessed the age in which he lived. The picture of Marx and his works would be incomplete if these articles are left out.

Nonetheless, his labor on the great theory of society was and remains the backbone of his work. The first grand example of his plans is a more than 700-page manuscript that he quickly compiled over a few months at the end of the 1850s, exhilarated by an international economic crisis that he saw as a forerunner to social revolution. This is known to posterity as the Grundrisse (the ‘Outlines’), and it is

a partially chaotic but in long parts extremely profound, sometimes completely brilliant and thoroughly original account. A thoroughgoing exposition is devoted to it here.

But Marx himself wasn’t satisfied with the open form of the Grundrisse and went over instead a significantly tighter setup. This became Capital, the first volume of which came out in 1867. More volumes were to have come, but Marx was never finished; it was Engels who, after Marx’s death, completed Volumes Two and Three.

In particular, he put his mark on the third volume. Now Marx’s own text exists in a critical edition, and it thereby become possible to make comparisons. The differences, as we shall see, are significant.

Capital is the subject of an enormous amount of literature. Interpretation often stands against interpretation. This diversity will be illustrated as comprehensively as possible here, at the same time as my own preferences are indicated. The chapter on Capital is the most extensive, and perhaps also the most intensive, in the book.

Readers who tire out can be glad of the opportunity for getting a good rest in the chapter’s final section, “The unknown masterwork”.

Marx cannot be thought of without Engels, nor Engels without Marx. In the literature about them, the issue of differences and similarities is extremely controversial. Sometimes they are represented as intellectual twins, and sometimes it is said that Engels completely misinterpreted his friend. Here, I attempt to provide a nuanced response. They were two distinctly different personalities united by a long, deep friendship that was complicated by Marx becoming financially dependent at the same time as Engels never questioned that it was Marx who was the groundbreaking thinker and researcher. Their scientific interests coincided partially, but not completely. Marx was well acquainted with Engels’s ambition to create a kind of world view that resulted in works such as Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature, but the results made no impression on his own work. On the other hand, as we shall see, a few peripheral notes in Capital had unintended consequences both for what Engels achieved and for all of subsequent history.

Engels was also the one who above all got to pass on the inheritance once Marx was dead. He did it both reverentially and in his own way at one and the same time.

Marx and his politics is a chapter in itself. He was politically active during several important periods of his life; at the same time, he saw politics only as a form for society’s real content, which was the way that class societies created and distributed resources among themselves. Political power was a confirmation and reinforcement of the basic relations of power. But it was also there that people became conscious of their own different interests.

Marx’s fundamental understanding explains why, in his political activity, he sometimes appears as a man of compromises who wants to assemble a radical left, and sometimes as a caustic polemicist castigating those who do not have the same opinions as he does. Within the International, he succeeds in writing programs that satisfy a broad spectrum of perceptions about how society should be changed. But when clashes of opinion between his followers and Bakunin’s anarchists become sharp, he is again a man of battle and would rather let the organization come to nothing than engage in negotiations. At first, he greets the Paris Commune of 1871 with mistrust, but soon it fills him with enthusiasm. He follows the development of German social democracy with a certain ambivalence: his criticism of the first party program is merciless but becomes crucial for the future.

With the chapter on his politics, Marx’s life and work is illustrated in its various facets; the great question that must finally be asked still remains: what is the relationship between Marx and what is called Marxism? The answer requires a brief exposition of Marxism’s varied history. From this it becomes clear that Marx is not a system builder, as both leading German social democrats and Lenin asserted. He was always on the road, never satisfied with the results he had reached, guided by what he himself calls a lead.

At the same time, much can be recognized in his attitude towards those who think differently than he does in the movement he inspired. He could be ruthless in his polemics, driving out those who diverged from organizations where he had a decisive influence. He was certainly not always like that; he could also work for compromises. But dialogue was not his natural medium. He pushed his own positions with unfailing force and energy.

It is nevertheless precisely that force and energy that makes Marx one of the great living classics – a classic that must constantly be brought up to date, especially in an age marked by ruthless capitalism. He is the master of the incomplete work and the excerpt, and he is the perpetual model of the close involvement of journalism and the detachment of Capital. He himself should not be regarded uncritically.

Both the outstanding and the less tenable – yes, even the purely objectionable – must be held out under the light. This can only happen through a thoroughgoing exposition of what he achieved. Story, account, and analysis must be welded together into a totality.

Nostalgia is not an emotion suitable to Marx studies. We need him for the present, and for the future.

APRIL

The rise and fall of New York – a radical architect’s view of the destruction of the city

What Goes Up The Rights and Wrongs of the City Michael Sorkin Michael Sorkin is one of the most forthright and engaging architectural writers in the world. In What Goes Up he charts the dehumanising regimes of mayors Bloomberg and De Blasio that created a city of glittering towers and increasing inequality. He looks at what has happened to Ground Zero, as a place of memory has been reconstructed by "staritects" and turned into malls. The city, he suggests, has to be reimagined from the street up on a human scale, to develop new ways to revitalise neighbourhoods Alongside these essays on New York, Sorkin also brings his lifetime’s experience as an architect to bear. He talks of the joy of observing a city in order to understand it. Why a young designer must learn to draw by hand rather than only use a computer. There are also personal encounters with some of the greatest names who have changed the city. Sorkin gets lost in Rio with Zaha Hadid; talks about the old Bronx with Marshall Berman; and gets on the wrong side of Daniel Libeskind.

CATEGORY

Architecture

EXTENT

304 pages

SIZES

235 x 156mm

FORMAT

Hardback

ISBN

978 1 78663 515 0

PRICES

£20 / $34.95 / $45.95CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

•• A brilliant polemical attack on the reign of Mayor Bloomberg and why De Blasio was unable to change New York.

•• Will get widespread media attention – from the highly acclaimed architect and critic for the Village Voice.

•• In 2015 named John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in Architecture, Planning and Design.

Michael Sorkin is an award-winning architect and Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York. For ten years, Sorkin was architecture critic for the Village Voice, and he has written for the New York Times, Architectural Review, Vanity Fair, the Wall Street Journal and the Nation. His books include Exquisite Corpse, Twenty Minutes in Manhattan and All Over the Map. “Easily one of the best architecture critics around ... Sorkin is a flaneur with a sense of public purpose.” Guardian “America’s most invigorating writer on architecture.” Observer “Sorkin is one of the most intelligent writers on architecture today.”

Library Journal Praise for Twenty Minutes in Manhattan “I am glad Sorkin doesn’t take the subway: this is the most brilliant epitome of Manhattan ever written.” Mike Davis “Michael Sorkin secures his claim to succeed Jane Jacobs ... He brings to bear an eye every bit as acute, a pen nearly as trenchant, and a political understanding perhaps a little bit more sophisticated of the never-ending struggle over New York’s neighbourhoods.” Times Literary Supplement

38

MAY

The brilliant family memoir of the much-beloved poet and political campaigner NEW IN PAPERBACK

So They Call You Pisher!

A Memoir Michael Rosen “If you didn’t know whether to risk doing something, what’s the worst that could happen? ‘So they call you pisher!’”

In this humorous and moving memoir, Michael Rosen recalls the first twenty-three years of his life. Born in the North London suburbs, his parents, Harold and Connie, both teachers, first met as teenage Communists in the 1930s Jewish East End. The family home was filled with stories of relatives in London, the United States and France and of those who had disappeared in Europe.

Unlike the children around them, Rosen and his brother Brian grew up dreaming of a socialist revolution. Party meetings were held in the front room, summers were for communist camping holidays, till it all changed after a trip to East Germany, when in 1957 his parents decided to leave "the Party." Michael followed his own journey of radical selfdiscovery: running away to march against the bomb at Aldermaston, writing and performing in experimental political theatre and getting arrested during the 1968 movements.

Michael Rosen is the author of over 140 books of poetry, stories and politics. He was the Children’s Laureate between 2007–2009 and is currently the Professor of Children’s Literature at Goldsmiths University. He has won numerous international awards for his work in literature. He presents Word of Mouth on BBC Radio 4.

“In his writing, he puts on no airs; his literary background (English degree from Wadham, Oxford) has not held him up – or back. Sometimes his writing is so simple, you wonder at it: how did he resist the temptation to dress it up?

He knows – in his work at least – when to stop.” Observer “The lovely thing about Rosen’s writing is that it is rooted in the reality of his own post-war childhood – you can smell the matzo bray his father makes as a treat when his mother is out, hear the wheels squeak on his go-kart, sense the thrill of him and his 10-year-old friend Mart on holiday climbing the Sugar Loaf mountain and crossing from Wales into England with their trousers down.” Guardian “Throughout his career, Rosen has inspired children and adults to fall in love with reading.” Independent

39

CATEGORY

Biography

EXTENT

320 pages

SIZES

198 x 129mm

FORMAT

Trade Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78663 399 6

PRICES

£9.99 / $16.95 / $22.95CAN

RIGHTS

United Agents

PREVIOUS EDITION

978 1 78663 396 5

•• Best-selling hardback.

•• Reviewed across the national press.

•• Author events to promote the paperback.

•• Hilarious and moving memoir by former Children’s Laureate.

MAY

NEW IN PAPERBACK

The Amateur The Pleasures of Doing What You Love Andy Merrifield Modern life is being destroyed by experts and professionals. Andy Merrifield argue that we have lost our amateur spirit and need to rediscover the radical and liberating pleasure of doing the things we love.

Andy Merrifield is the author of nine books. His many articles, essays and reviews have appeared in the Nation, Harper’s, Adbusters, New Left Review and Radical Philosophy. He has also published three intellectual biographies, on Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord and John Berger, as well as a popular existential travelogue, The Wisdom of Donkeys.

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

Popular Philosophy 224 pages 210 x 140mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 107 7 £9.99 / $17.95 / $23.99CAN Verso 978 1 78663 106 0

“Erudite and engagingly written… refreshing.” Financial Times “Merrifield writes with a brio and wit often missing in professional academics, offers an idiosyncratic canon (Dostoevsky, Jane Jacobs, Edward Said) in which he holds up amateurs as outside-the-box thinkers, inter- and post-disciplinary radicals. It’s a stirring book whose critique of contemporary work culture will be instantly recognisable. It also doubles as a moving memoir of a working-class intellectual.” Sukdev Sandhu, Observer

MAY

Opening the Gates

1968

The Lip Affair, 1968–1981 Donald Reid In the Summer of 1973, workers occupied the Lip watch and clock factory, sparking a national cause and controversy. The Lip occupation and selfmanagement experience captured the imagination of the Left in France and internationally, as a living example of the spirit of May '68. In Opening the Gates, Donald Reid chronicles the history of this struggle. Beginning with the early stirrings of worker radicalism in 1968, Reid’s meticulously researched narrative details the nationally publicised conflict of 1973, the second bankruptcy and occupation of 1976 and the conversion of Lip into a group of cooperatives operating into the 1980s.

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS

History 416 pages 235 x 156mm Hardback 978 1 78663 540 2 £40 / $60 / $79CAN Verso

Donald Reid is a Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His work focuses on French labour history and the history of collective memory in modern France.

“A must-read for historians, Reid’s study will also open up for general readers the atmosphere of a time so far in the past that it is forgotten, yet so near that history has yet to remember it.” William M. Reddy, Duke University

40

MAY

A timely reissue of the classic socialist call to arms

NEW EDITION

May Day Manifesto 1968

1968

Edited by Raymond Williams The original publication of the May Day Manifesto in 1967 collected together the most influential radical voices of the era. Among the seventy signatories were Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, Iris Murdoch, Terry Eagleton, Ralph Miliband and R. D. Laing.

The manifesto set out a new agenda for socialist Britain, in the aftermath of the failure of postwar labourism.

Urgently relevant to the current arguments about the crisis of austerity, the burden of empire and the failures to control rampant capitalism, it offers a complete road map to a brighter future. Covering the purpose of the state and how finance and empire are twinned, the importance of a planned economy for all, the role of Britain in the world, the manifesto hoped to inspire change and a fairer society. It is a bold reminder that there are alternatives to the current situation, and that alternative policies can make a difference.

“A genuinely collaborative project among a range of leftwing intellectuals of the day.” Terry Eagleton

CATEGORY

Politics

EXTENT

208 pages

“The Manifesto sought to rescue and renew the idea that the purpose of the politics of the left – Labour and beyond – should be to further the longterm transformation of capitalist society in a democratic and egalitarian direction.” Michael Rustin, Guardian

SIZES

198 x 129mm

FORMAT

Trade Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78663 627 0

PRICES

£10.99 / $17.95 / $23.99CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

•• Anniversary edition of the classic political manifesto of 1968.

•• Essential contributions from leading figures, including Terry Eagleton, Stuart Hall, E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Iris Murdoch and Ralph Miliband.

•• Important socialist attack on labourism: relevant to current debates about direction of radical politics.

•• Extract in the national press with article on its genesis.

41

MAY

The major French economist offers a new theory of money

Money 5,000 Years of Debt and Power Michel Aglietta Translated by David Broder As the financial crisis reached its climax in September 2008, the most important figure on the planet was Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. The whole financial system was collapsing, without anything to stop it. When a senator asked Bernanke what would happen if the central bank did not carry out its rescue package, he replied,"lf we don’t do this, we may not have an economy on Monday."

What saved finance, and the Western economy, was money. Yet it is a highly ambivalent phenomenon. It is deeply embedded in our societies, acting as a powerful link between the individual and the collective. But by no means is it neutral. Through its grip on finance and the debts system, money confers sovereign power on the economy. If confidence in money is not maintained, crises will follow.

CATEGORY

Economics / History

EXTENT

480 pages

SIZES

235 x 156mm

FORMAT

Hardback

ISBN

978 1 78663 441 2

PRICES

£25 / $34.95 / $45.95CAN

RIGHTS

Editions Odile Jacob

Looking over the last 5,000 years, this book explores the development of money and its close connection to sovereign power. Michel Aglietta mobilises the tools of anthropology, history and political economy in order to analyse how political structures and monetary systems have transformed one another. We can thus grasp the different eras of monetary regulation and the crises capitalism has endured throughout its history.

Michel Aglietta is Emeritus Professor at the Université Paris-Ouest, where he is a scholarly advisor to the CEPII and France Stratégie.

Praise for A Theory of Capitalist Regulation

•• Groundbreaking analysis of the history of money and its power.

“One of the most important and stimulating books in Marxian political economy for many years.” Capital and Class

•• Review coverage across the national press.

“Regulation Theory’s founding statement.” Robert Brenner, New Left Review “Writing within the particularly vigorous discourse of contemporary French Marxism, Aglietta confirms the increasing interest of European Marxists in all aspects of US history and social development.” Mike Davis

42

MAY

Pakistan 1968: the history of a revolution

NEW EDITION

Uprising in Pakistan

1968

How to Bring Down a Dictatorship Tariq Ali The story of what happened in 1968 in Pakistan is often forgotten, but is yet another proof that the revolutionary moment was global.

In that year, following a long period of tumult, a radical coalition – led by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto – brought down the military presidency of Ayub Khan. Students took on the state apparatus of a corrupt and decaying military dictatorship backed by the US. They were joined by workers, lawyers, white-collar employees, and despite the severe repression, they took hold of power. Through a series of strikes, demonstrations and political organising a popular uprising was born.

In his riveting account of these events, first written in 1970, Tariq Ali offers an eyewitness perspective on history, showing that this powerful popular movement was the only successful moment of the 1960s revolutionary wave. The victory led to the very first democratic election in the country and the unexpected birth of a new state, Bangladesh.

Tariq Ali has written more than two dozen books on world history and politics – the most recent of which are The Obama Syndrome, The Extreme Centre and The Dilemmas of Lenin – as well as the novels of his Islam Quintet and scripts for the stage and screen. He is a longstanding member of the editorial committee of New Left Review and lives in London.

CATEGORY

Politics

EXTENT

208 pages

SIZES

210 x 140mm

FORMAT

Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78663 537 2

PRICES

£12.99 / $19.95 / $25.95CAN

RIGHTS

Andrew Nurnberg Associates

•• To coincide with the 1968 anniversary: a global revolutionary moment.

•• Author is one of the leading commentators on radical Pakistani history.

•• The story of the insurrectionary birth of modern Pakistan.

43

MAY

Acclaimed fantasy author China Miéville plunges us into the year the world was turned upside down NEW IN PAPERBACK

October

The Story of the Russian Revolution China Miéville In February of 1917 Russia was a backward, autocratic monarchy, mired in an unpopular war; by October, after not one but two revolutions, it had become the world’s first workers’ state, straining to be at the vanguard of global revolution. How did this unimaginable transformation take place?

In a panoramic sweep, stretching from St Petersburg and Moscow to the remotest villages of a sprawling empire, Miéville uncovers the catastrophes, intrigues and inspirations of 1917, in all their passion, drama and strangeness. Intervening in long-standing historical debates, but told with the reader new to the topic especially in mind, here is a breathtaking story of humanity at its greatest and most desperate; of a turning point for civilisation that still resonates loudly today.

China Miéville tells the extraordinary story of this pivotal moment in history.

CATEGORY

History

EXTENT

304 pages

SIZES

198 x 129mm

FORMAT

Trade Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78478 278 8

PRICES

£9.99 / $17.95 / $23.99CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

PREVIOUS EDITION

978 1 78478 277 1

•• Best-selling science fiction and fantasy author makes a rare excursion into non-fiction with his gripping history of the Russian Revolution.

•• Widely covered in national media on publication and very well reviewed.

•• Has sold over 20,000 copies in hardback.

China Miéville is the multi-award-winning author of many works of fiction and non-fiction. His fiction includes The City and the City, Embassytown and This Census-Taker, and has won the Hugo, World Fantasy and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. His non-fiction includes London’s Overthrow and Between Equal Rights. He has written for various publications, including the New York Times, Guardian, and Granta, and is a founding editor of the quarterly Salvage.

“This gripping account is a re-enactment of the Russian Revolution ... His writing can be as passionate as that of the poets of the time.” Financial Times “Miéville is an ideal guide through this complex historical moment, giving agency to obscure and better-known participants alike, and depicting the revolution as both a tragically lost opportunity and an ongoing source of inspiration.” Publishers Weekly “When one of the most marvellously original writers in the world takes on one of the most explosive events in history, the result can only be incendiary.” Barbara Ehrenreich “Elegantly constructed and unexpectedly moving.” Sheila Fitzpatrick, London Review of Books “There are delightful grace notes here over and above a brisk and perceptive narrative.” Stuart Kelly, Scotsman “Cinematic and vivid.” Newsweek 44

MAY

What does the good life – and the good society – look like in the twenty-first century?

NEW IN PAPERBACK

Out of the Wreckage A New Politics for an Age of Crisis George Monbiot Today, our lives are dominated by an ideology of extreme competition and individualism. It misrepresents human nature, destroying hope and common purpose. But we cannot replace it without a positive vision, one that reengages people in politics and lights a path to a better world. Urgent and passionate, George Monbiot shows how new findings in psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology cast humans in a radically different light: as the supreme altruists and cooperators. He shows how both democracy and economic life can be radically reorganised from the bottom up, enabling us to take back control and overthrow the forces that have thwarted our ambitions for a better society. Out of the Wreckage explains just how communities can be rebuilt with the help of a new "politics of belonging".

George Monbiot writes a weekly column for the Guardian and is the author of a number of books, including Heat, The Age of Consent, Captive State, Feral and How Did We Get Into This Mess?. He recently helped to found Rewilding Britain, which seeks to redefine people’s relationship to the living world.

“A dazzling command of science and relentless faith in people … I never miss reading him.” Naomi Klein “What most impresses in Monbiot’s clever, elegant writing is the way he strives to think beyond protest towards realistic, representative solutions to the problems of world politics and trade.” The Times of London “A writer of eloquence and passion.” Observer “George Monbiot, with the clarity and straightforwardness that is his trademark, has managed to lay out our dilemma and our possibilities – this book strikes the necessary balance between visionary and practical, and does it with real grace.” Bill McKibben, author of Enough “Inspired and inspirational, George Monbiot’s call to act gives new coherence to a movement that is changing as it learns. So much has to change that the scale of the task can feel overwhelming. But we have changed our lives as fast and fundamentally before.” Danny Dorling, author of Inequality and the 1%

CATEGORY

Politics

EXTENT

224 pages

SIZES

198 x 129mm

FORMAT

Trade Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78663 289 0

PRICES

£9.99 / $16.95 / $22.95CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

PREVIOUS EDITION

978 1 78663 288 3

•• Best-selling hardback – widely reviewed across the national press.

•• Essential reading for people in search of new, progressive political ideas.

•• For readers of Naomi Klein, Paul Mason, Thomas Frank and Owen Jones.

•• Events across the UK.

45

MAY

A fascinating portrait of life with the Black Panthers in Algiers: a story of liberation and radical politics

Algiers, Third World Capital

1968

Black Panthers, Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries Elaine Mokhtefi Following the Algerian war for independence and the defeat of France in 1962, Algiers became the liberation capital of the Third World. Here, Elaine Mokhtefi, who as a young American woman had become involved in the struggle and worked with leaders of the Algerian Revolution, including Frantz Fanon, found a home. As a journalist and translator, she lived among guerrillas, revolutionaries, exiles and visionaries and was even present in the making of the groundbreaking film The Battle of Algiers.

CATEGORY

Politics

EXTENT

240 pages

SIZES

210 x 140mm

FORMAT

Hardback

ISBN

978 1 78873 000 6

PRICES

£16.99 / $24.95 / $33CAN

RIGHTS

Watkins/Loomis

•• In depth and personal portraits of key players and events in world liberation movements.

•• Action-packed narrative of revolution, murder, hijackings, undercover escapes and radical politicals.

Mokhtefi crossed paths with some of the era’s brightest stars: Stokely Carmichael, Timothy Leary, Ahmed Ben Bella, Jomo Kenyatta and Eldridge Cleaver. She was instrumental in the establishment of the International Section of the Black Panther Party in Algiers and was close at hand as the group became involved in intrigue, murder and international hijackings. She traveled for and with the Panthers and organised Cleaver’s clandestine departure for France. Algiers, Third World Capital is an unforgettable story of an era of passion and promise.

Elaine Mokhtefi was born in New York. After the Second World War, she joined the youth movement for world peace and justice becoming director of a militant student organisation. In 1951 she settled in France and became a world of international organisations translator and interpreter in the new postwar. In 1960 she joined the small team in New York of the Algerian National Liberation Front and government in exile lobbying the United Nations to support the independence of Algeria. Once victorious, she made Algeria her home, working as a journalist and translator. She was married to the Algerian writer and liberation war veteran, Mokhtar Mokhtefi, who died in 2014. She lives in New York where she is a writer and painter.

•• Reviews across the national press.

•• Author events in US and UK.

46

MAY

A field manual to the technologies that are changing our lives NEW IN PAPERBACK

Radical Technologies The Design of Everyday Life Adam Greenfield Everywhere we turn, a startling new device promises to transfigure our lives. But at what cost? In this urgent and revelatory excavation of our Information Age, leading technology thinker Adam Greenfield forces us to reconsider our relationship with the networked objects, services and spaces that define us. It is time to reevaluate the Silicon Valley consensus determining the future.

Having successfully colonised everyday life, radical technologies – from smartphones, blockchain, augmented-reality interfaces and virtual assistants to 3D printing, autonomous delivery drones and self-driving cars – are now conditioning the choices available to us in the years to come. How do they work? What challenges do they present to us, as individuals and societies? Who benefits from their adoption? In answering these questions, Greenfield’s timely guide clarifies the scale and nature of the crisis we now confront – and offers ways to reclaim our stake in the future.

Adam Greenfield has worked as a lead information architect for the Tokyo office of internet services consultancy Razorfish, head of design direction for service and user-interface design at Nokia headquarters in Helsinki, and Senior Urban Fellow at the LSE Cities Centre of the London School of Economics. He has been an instructor in Urban Design at the Bartlett, University College London. His books include Everyware, Urban Computing and its Discontents, and the 2013 pamphlet Against the Smart City.

“Adam Greenfield goes digging into the layers that constitute what we experience as smooth tech surface. He unsettles and repositions much of that smoothness. Radical Technologies is brilliant and scary.” Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, author of Expulsions “We exist within an ever-thickening web of technologies whose workings are increasingly opaque to us. In this illuminating and sometimes deeply disturbing book Adam Greenfield explores how these systems work, how they synergise with each other, and the resultant effects on our societies, our politics, and our psyches. This is an essential book.” Brian Eno “A tremendously intelligent and stylish book on the ‘colonisation of everyday life by information processing’ calls for resistance to rule by the tech elite ... a landmark primer and spur to more informed and effective opposition.” Steve Poole, Guardian

47

CATEGORY

Popular Science

EXTENT

340 pages

SIZES

198 x 129mm

FORMAT

Trade Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78478 045 6

PRICES

£9.99 / $17.95 / $23.99CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

PREVIOUS EDITION

978 1 78478 043 2

•• Exploration of the technologies – smart phones, AI, VR, blockchain, driverless cars, machine learning, 3D printing – that are about to change our lives.

•• What are the politics of Silicon Valley? A new era of autonomous liberation or a Faustian pact?

•• Author is leading speaker on smart cities, the internet of things and driverless vehicles.

JUNE

A different kind of politics for a new kind of society – beyond work, scarcity and capitalism

Fully Automated Luxury Communism A Manifesto Aaron Bastani The first decade of the twenty-first century marked the demise of the current world order. Despite widespread acknowledgement of these disruptive crises, the proposed response from the mainstream remains the same. Against the confines of this increasingly limited politics, a new paradigm has emerged. Fully Automated Luxury Communism claims that new technologies will liberate us from work, providing the opportunity to build a society beyond both capitalism and scarcity. Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness. For everyone.

In his first book, radical political commentator Aaron Bastani conjures a new politics: a vision of a world of unimaginable hope, highlighting how we move to energy abundance, feed a world of nine billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology and build meaningful freedom for everyone. Rather than a final destination, such a society heralds the beginning of history.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism promises a radically new left future for everyone.

Aaron Bastani is co-founder and senior editor at Novara Media. He holds a PhD from the New Political Communication Unit, University of London, examining social movements in the digital environment which fail to correspond to the traditional logic of collective action.

His research interests include new media, social movements, asymmetric strategies and post-scarcity political economy. He has written for Vice, London Review of Books, Guardian and Open Democracy.

CATEGORY

Politics

EXTENT

208 pages

SIZES

210 x 140mm

FORMAT

Hardback

ISBN

978 1 78663 262 3

PRICES

£12.99 / $19.95 / $25.95CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

•• Leading voice in the debate on postwork, post-capitalist politics, for readers of Paul Mason, Yuval Noah Harari and Rutger Bregman.

•• Looks at the potential benefits of asteroid mining, 3D printing, and AI as means of radical liberation.

•• Will get widespread coverage across the media, including innovative online marketing.

•• Reviews across the national press, extract in major newspaper.

49

An extract from Fully Automated Luxury Communism

by Aaron Bastani Yang

will be putting a rocket up there!”

Yang is a factory employee in Zhengzhou, in the province of Henan.

Born in a village further east, her working life has correlated with China arriving at the zenith of global manufacturing. As a teenager a decade ago, she arrived in the city in search of work and, since then, has managed to create a decent enough life for herself.

Everyone in the group is aware that the sudden over-supply for minerals will inevitably mean plummeting prices for every commodity, known and unknown - to mankind. But that doesn’t matter, not for a decade at least, because these guys would be at the front of the queue when asteroid mining became the fastest growing industry in history. It will not last of course, but nothing much does these days.

While her job is often back-breaking, with shifts running from 11 to 13 hours a day, Yang considers herself lucky to enjoy financial independence as well as the ability to send money back to her parents.

Like many Chinese her age, Yang is an only child. So while she feels fortunate professionally, she often worries about the health of her ageing mother and father. Between that and the transience of her personal relationships, Yang views the possibility of having children herself as remote. Her responsibilities lie elsewhere and, sooner or later, she will return home to perform them.

But alongside the perhaps distant spectre of family duty, another concern has recently emerged. A threat to her way of life it is quite unlike that of responsibility and was entirely unthinkable when she received her first paycheck: work is drying up.

While Yang’s earnings have been rising every year since she was a teenager - something few her age in Europe or North America can attest to - the foreman insists on making stupid jokes about industrial robots and how her team will no longer be needed. While she normally ignores him, the same things are frequently repeated by the trade unionists who illegally represent her workplace. The reality, they say, is that their wages are no longer competitive, and that for China to remain the workshop of the world some will go abroad, while others will be automated.

Of course many jobs will stay - there will always be work - but things could soon look very different. She even heard yesterday how the company she works for, FoxConn, is building factories in America.

Chris In late 2015 President Obama signed the Space Act into law. While broadly unremarked upon at the time, that was a historic moment - at least for Chris Blumenthal - because the legislation recognised the right of private companies to profit from resource extraction in space.

Today marks the three year anniversary of that day, and Blumenthal could not be happier. Alone in his Malibu condo he watches a Falcon Heavy first stage rocket alight somewhere in the Mid-Atlantic. Its successful landing not only makes a manned mission to Mars likely, but also continues an unblemished two year safety record for SpaceX. The private space industry, riding on government contracts and the coat tails of a new generation of industrialists, isn’t some science fiction fantasy, it’s already here. Soon rockets, just like this one, will be as safe as commercial jets.

Having watched the landing live on the @SpaceX Twitter account, Blumenthal, an early stage investor in an asteroid mining company, shares the stream with that Signal group of other investors. Along with the link he writes: “In five years we’ll be drinking from an ocean of Champagne as the platinum comes back”.

“If only the Champagne could be as plentiful as the asteroids” responds Jesse, another member of the group.

Blumenthal is unaware of it, but everybody else in the group watched the landing on a mobile device using a 4G network - just like he did. Some were at home, others were eating dinner with clients, friends or just at home with their family. One was lying in bed with his mistress while another, a few miles away in Upper Manhattan, was finishing her regular late-night workout. Regardless of coordinates, all of them watched history unfold on the same crystal display that fitted so elegantly in the palm of their hand.

As Blumenthal goes over to ESPN one chimes in: “Our only problem is there is too much of the stuff - its going to be so easy every son of a bitch

Leia Leia opens the door as she begins the morning shift where she works.

She walks straight over to the soundsystem, plugging the audiojack into her iPhone and presses the Spotify icon. She chooses the ‘Discover Weekly’ playlist, a series of songs curated by a predictive algorithm, before switching on the bars panoply of appliances - glasswasher, coffee machine, lights, air conditioning - before taking the widescreen television off standby.

At this point the entire energy needs of the building, from its Wifi router to the CCTV on the bar and door, are met by solar power. A fraction comes from several PV panels on the roof of the building, but most comes from a 13 megawatt solar farm several miles away. The energy needs of those living on the Hawaiian island of Kauai - where Leia was born - are met entirely by renewable energy.

As Leia begins to wipe down tables, the second track on the playlist continually fades out. She walks over to the phone and, on pressing the wake button, sees that her sister Kai, studying in California, is messaging her.

In what has become a customary feature of Leia’s weekend shifts, Kai relays pictures of herself partying to the family WhatsApp group they share with innumerable cousins across multiple timezones. At the foot of the picture, taken on the US-Mexico border only a few moments earlier, are the words ‘I miss you x’.

Meanwhile that solar farm - with its 54,978 silicone panels, four technicians and three security guards - is, just like Leia, commencing its day’s work. Solar City, who built and lease the site to the municipal energy cooperative, are confident that the maintenance of similar projects will be completely automated soon. Leia is unaware of it, but a similar fate likely awaits the job of her father, who is a software developer, a decade from now.

The relative novelty of instant global communication, just like the local transition from fossil fuels, has gone unnoticed by the teenager, just another mundane feature of an everyday that is take for granted. The slow passing of her father’s profession will feel no different.

Peter At the turn of the century Peter founded a company that was later purchased by one of the digital giants, He is now in an ebullient mood.

60 this year, he has the energy and complexion of a much younger guy - primarily the result of being extremely rich. These days he takes great pride in two things in particular: the baseball team he owns and making hyperbolic statements about technology trends.

Addressing a large industry event in San Antonio, Texas, he moves on to his favourite topic of the season, artificial intelligence and the future of jobs: “The first trillion dollar company will be Amazon, no question, Bezos won’t be the first trillionaire, but he’ll do fine. Who comes after?

Maybe SpaceX but I don’t think so, we’ve basically had that technology for seventy years, and soon everyone will be doing it. No, the first trillionaire will come from creating AI. Imagine…it would be like being in accountancy in Victoria England and suddenly you have a laptop with a quad-core processor - you wipe out the competition. And jobs? Once that technology is rolled out most people - and this doesn’t make me happy to say it - will be superfluous…unnecessary”.

Peter is joined by Anya, a younger founder originally from Sweden:

“Can I say, Peter, that I agree - AI changes a lot. It challenges how we understand value, and work, and even capitalism. In fact I imagine that in the future, lower classes of citizen won’t have lower IQs, they’ll just lack access to digital personal assistants. How do you have a fair labour market in that context? I don’t think you can. How would educational achievement be rewarded? I don’t think it would”.

or Bruce Willis in Armageddon, the market will solve any problem it has created; innovation, just like the Hollywood good guy, will save us. This was always wrong, but which each passing day more people see it for the delusional thinking that it is. What is more, the obsession with marketbased solutions means that nobody is able to formulate an actual plan to a range of crises without precedent in modern history.

“I’m telling you”, Peter replies, “the first arsehole who builds an AI is a trillionaire. He is either a trillionaire or a loser”.

But what if all of these problems, from climate change to falling living standards and a failing economic model, could be resolved? What if, rather than moving ever-closer to the point of no return, there was a route to a better future - one seeded in the new technologies and innovations we find around us already?

The scenarios above, while fictional, are based upon reality. As of Spring 2017 Kauai, the fourth largest of the Hawaiian Islands, meets all of its energy needs from solar power. In 2015 Barack Obama signed the Space Act into law. In Spring 2017 Mark Cuban declared that the world’s first trillionaire would be an artificial intelligence entrepreneur.

A few months later Foxconn’s CEO, Terry Lou - who once compared his companies workers to animals - announced the construction of a major facility in the US. Towards the end of the year SpaceX oversaw the successful launch, re-entry and landing of its new Falcon Heavy rocket.

All of these events share a certain resonance, one that we might associate with the future. Renewable energy, asteroid mining, rockets which can be used multiple times and even fly to Mars, industry leaders openly discussing the implications of artificial intelligence. And yet, that future is already here. But as William Gibson, once wrote. It is here, but the future is unevenly distributed. And with this asymmetry, inequality pervades the system. For those who want a better world, who believe that there is no higher good then human flourishing, it is crucial that we not only understand it, but that we create a politics that is ready for it.

But in order to do that, we must recognise a certain paradox. While these unfolding possibilities might feel like something from the future, their paths are also entirely predictable - inevitable even. In a sense it feels like the future is already written, and that for all the talk of a technological revolution, that dizzying transformation is conjoined to a static view of the world, one where nothing really changes.

That sense of inertia is political. Indeed it is the consequence of a certain political project prevailing at the expense of all others. Its economic model has been correctly labelled neoliberalism, a form of free market fundamentalism where, unlike in classical political economy, economic rationality is actively imposed rather than presumed to be human nature. But the cultural analogue to that is capitalist realism. You can only subordinate everything to profit if it is taken for granted that alternative worlds are impossible.

The signature phrase for such thinking is the claim, attributed to both Frederic Jameson and Zizek, that it is harder to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. For the social theorist Mark Fisher, that mental presumption was based on a new kind of dystopian thinking: “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. Once, dystopian films and novels were exercises in such acts of imagination - the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living.

Not so in Children of Men. The world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it. In its world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist.”

Fisher, as with Jameson and Zizek, views this turn as recent and broadly concurrent with the emergence of the information age and digital communications. The reason that a world of breakneck technological change can only ever stay the same is simple. Simply put, it is the politics we inherited. * Our inability to imagine alternatives to how we currently do things, from transport to food, energy and housing, means we stare at such catastrophes with a mix of doom and misguided faith in an inevitable solution. The latter, where apathy can seem almost like an article of faith - and which is comically reminiscent of good guys saving the world in a litany of disaster movies - should be understood as a natural expression of capitalist realism. Like Will Smith in Independence Day

This book does not pose technology in isolation as the solution. After all that is the ideology of the status quo, the magical thinking of capitalist realism. Rather it is to think of technology as political, as something which can uphold or disrupt existing concentrations of power, which can help us change course or speed up even faster to our present destination.

Perhaps the best way to understand technology - how it internalises and shapes social relations in culture, society and the economy - is to view it as one element within a broader ensemble through which history flows in an evolutionary pattern. That is how David Harvey, an English geographer based in the US, reads the thinking of Karl Marx on the topic.

For Harvey Marx offered a profound insight in Capital in how we might understand history as dynamic and adaptive, outlining six distinct but mutually constitutive fields within which to define the world we inhabit. These fields are technology, nature, the process of production, the reproduction of daily life, social relations and mental conceptions.

Of course Marx wanted to understand history, and the process through which it was made, in order to change it. When you think about history as something that complex, and generated by whole fields that themselves encompass so much, you quickly recognise how some people identify just one as all-important. Elon Musk, for instance, might say technology, as would capitalist realism more generally (because this allows us to ignore other, more perceivedly political spheres). Meanwhile while an eco-anarchist might say nature and social relations, maybe if we were all vegan and cycled, we could save the planet. Elsewhere a classical Marxist-Leninist would say the production process mattered more than anything else, and that without significant change there, the rest would be meaningless. Indeed, to their detriment, virtually every political tradition places greater emphasis on one of these areas than the others.

Perhaps we all do.

Marx disagreed though. For him systemic transformation, what he referred to as moving to a ‘new mode of production’, necessitated dealing with all of these categories together, something the philosopher Felix Guattari agreed with in the late twentieth century when he called for the development of an ‘ecology’ of thought.

Unfortunately for those who want to understand the process of history in order to influence it, each of these fields is seemingly autonomous, moving at varying speeds and with changing levels of influence over one another at any particular time. The present moment for instance, which can be understood as one of huge technological change alongside political inertia, reflects one field that has completely uncoupled from the rest. So while any transformational politics will require change across the board, that means our technological paradigm is in fact running ahead of everything else, including who we think about nature, one another and how to organise society more generally. In short, technology has changed everything, now politics needs to catch up.

This book offers such a politics, one appropriate to a world we are already creating: Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Realisable because it is growing anew everyday around us, preferable because it answers inevitable catastrophe with abundance beyond imagination, obvious by highlighting the gap - never more absurd nor apparent - between what we could be and what we are.

Rather than an abstract template for the future, fully automated luxury communism is an urgent response to the immediate crises that both our species and planet now face. Born within a new paradigm of technology, it will open new ways of being - but before all of that, it will save us from ourselves.

JUNE

How the Information Age destroys knowledge

New Dark Age Technology, Knowledge and the End of the Future James Bridle We live in times of increasing inscrutability. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically generated by anonymous software. As a result, we no longer understand what is happening around us. Underlying all of these trends is a single idea: the belief that quantitative data can provide a coherent model of the world, and the efficacy of computable information to provide us with ways of acting within it. Yet the sheer volume of information available to us today reveals less than we hope. Rather, it heralds a new Dark Age: a world of ever-increasing incomprehension.

In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle offers us a warning against the future in which the contemporary promise of a new technologically assisted Enlightenment may just deliver its opposite: an age of complex uncertainty, predictive algorithms, surveillance, and the hollowing out of empathy. Surveying the history of art, technology and information systems he reveals the dark clouds that gather over discussions of the digital sublime.

James Bridle is a literary editor, technologist, writer, journalist, and visual artist. He writes for Guardian, Observer, Wired, Frieze, Atlantic, and many other publications.

“The young British artist is spearheading a conceptual-art movement – ‘the New Aesthetic' – through Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram, as he tries to capture technology’s strange effects on society.” Vanity Fair

CATEGORY

Politics / Popular Science

EXTENT

256 pages

SIZES

210 x 140mm

FORMAT

Hardback

ISBN

978 1 78663 547 1

PRICES

£14.99 / $24.95 / $33CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

•• For readers of Evgeny Morozov, Jaron Lanier and Cathy O’Neil.

•• Author is leading artist and technology writer who has exhibited around the world including MoMA, New York and Serpentine Gallery, London.

•• Named by WIRED magazine as one of 100 most influential people in Europe.

•• Author events throughout the UK and US.

53

THE ESSENTIAL ŽIŽEK JUNE

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce Slavoj Žižek

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

Philosophy 160 pages 198 x 129mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 593 8 £9.99 / $17.95 / $23.99CAN Verso 978 1 84467 428 2

Billions of dollars were hastily poured into the global banking system in a frantic attempt at financial stabilisation. So why has it not been possible to bring the same forces to bear in addressing world poverty and environmental crisis?

In this take-no-prisoners analysis, Slavoj Žižek frames the moral failures of the modern world in terms of the epoch-making events of the first decade of this century. What he finds is the old one-two punch of history: the jab of tragedy, the right hook of farce. In the attacks of 9/11 and the global credit crunch, liberalism dies twice: as a political doctrine and as an economic theory. The election of Donald Trump only confirms the bankruptcy of a liberal order on its last legs.

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce is a call for the left to reinvent itself in the light of our desperate historical situation. The time for liberal, moralistic blackmail is over.

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. His books include Less Than Nothing, The Sublime Object of Ideology, and many more. “Žižek is to today what Jacques Derrida was to the '80s: the thinker of choice for Europe’s young intellectual vanguard.” Observer

JUNE

Living in the End Times Slavoj Žižek There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. But if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it possible for Western society to face up to the end times?

In a major new analysis of our global situation, Žižek argues that our collective responses to economic Armageddon correspond to the stages of grief: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and withdrawal. For this edition, Žižek has written a long afterword that leaves almost no subject untouched, from WikiLeaks to the nature of the Chinese Communist Party.

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

Philosophy 520 pages 198 x 129mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 080 3 £14.99 / $24.95 / $33CAN Verso 978 1 84467 702 3

“Fierce brilliance ... scintillating.” Steven Poole, Guardian “Such passion, in a man whose work forms a shaky, cartoon rope-bridge between the minutiae of popular culture and the big abstract problems of existence, is invigorating, entertaining and expanding enquiring minds around the world.” Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph

54

JUNE

How the law harms sex workers – and what they want instead

Revolting Prostitutes The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights Molly Smith and Juno Mac You hear that selling sex is degrading; you hear that no one would ever choose to do it; you hear that it’s dangerous; that women get abused and killed. You often hear, "There should be a law against it!"

Or, perhaps just against the buyers. What do sex workers want? That’s not something you hear asked very often.

In some places, like New York, selling sex is illegal. In others, like Sweden, only buying it is. In some, like the UK and France, it’s legal to sell sex and to buy it, but not to run a brothel or solicit a sale. In New Zealand, it’s not illegal at all. In Revolting Prostitutes, Juno Mac and Molly Smith – both sex workers – explain what each of these laws do in practice to those doing the work. Addressing each model in turn, they show that prohibiting the sex industry actually exacerbates every harm that sex workers are vulnerable to.

Juno Mac is a sex worker and activist with the Sex Worker Open University, a sex worker–led collective with branches in London, Leeds and Glasgow.

Molly Smith is a sex worker and activist with the Sex Worker Open University. She is also involved with SCOT-PEP, a sex worker–led charity based in Edinburgh, which is working to decriminalise sex work in Scotland. She has written articles on sex work policy for Guardian and New Republic.

CATEGORY

Politics

EXTENT

144 pages

SIZES

210 x 140mm

FORMAT

Hardback

ISBN

978 1 78663 360 6

PRICES

£12.99 / $19.95 / $25.95CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

•• Juno Mac’s TedX talk 'The laws that sex workers really want' has been viewed more than 1.7 million times.

•• For readers of Melissa Gira Grant, Natasha Walker.

•• Huge interest in topic since Amnesty International came out in support of full decriminalisation – the same model advocated by the authors.

•• Author events in UK. •• Extract and reviews in national press.

55

THE ESSENTIAL MIKE DAVIS Mike Davis was a meat cutter and truck driver, as well as an activist for Students for a Democratic Society before starting his academic career. He is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award.

His many books on history and the city, including the bestselling City of Quartz, have been critically acclaimed across the world.

In this series we bring together his classic books in beautiful new editions.

JUNE

City of Quartz Excavating the Future in Los Angeles Mike Davis In City of Quartz, Davis reconstructs LA’s shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it.

He gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathanael West – a city in which we may glimpse our own future mirrored with terrifying clarity.

“Absolutely fascinating.” William Gibson “A history as fascinating as it is instructive.” Peter Ackroyd, Times CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

History / Urban Studies 448 pages 198 x 129mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 589 1 £12.99 / $19.95 / $25.95CAN Verso 978 1 84467 568 5

“Few books shed as much light on their subjects as this opinionated and original excavation of Los Angeles from the mythical debris of its past and future.” San Francisco Examiner

56

JUNE

Prisoners of the American Dream Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class Mike Davis Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis’s brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world’s most industrially advanced nation never spawned a mass party of the working class? This series of essays surveys the history of the American bourgeois democratic revolution from its Jacksonian beginnings to the rise of the New Right and the reelection of Ronald Reagan, concluding with some bracing thoughts on the prospects for progressive politics in the United States.

“Impressive – a perceptive and rigorous structural analysis.” David Montgomery, Nation “One of the most uncompromising books about American political economy ever written – brilliant, provocative, and exhaustively researched.” Village Voice

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

History 336 pages 198 x 129mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 590 7 £12.99 / $19.95 / $25.95CAN Verso 978 1 85984 248 5

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

History / Urban Studies 496 pages 198 x 129mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 624 9 £14.99 / $22.95 / $29.95CAN Verso 978 0 37570 607 3

“One of the most trenchant and original analyses of American politics.” Socialist Review

JUNE

Ecology of Fear Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster Mike Davis Counterpointing LA’s central role in America’s fantasy life – the city has been destroyed no less than 138 times in novels and films since 1909 – with its wanton denial of its own real history, Davis creates a revelatory kaleidoscope of American fact, imagery, and sensibility. Drawing upon a vast array of sources, Ecology of Fear meticulously captures the nation’s violent malaise and desperate social unease at the end of the "American century." With savagely entertaining wit and compassionate rage, this book conducts a devastating reconnaissance of our all-too-likely urban future.

“Graced with a bold political and environmental vision, much splendid phrasemaking and a multitude of facts … A truly eccentric contribution.” New York Times Book Review

57

JUNE

NEW IN PAPERBACK

The EU

An Obituary John R. Gillingham With Britain leaving the EU, now is the time for an obituary for the EU as an institution. In this short, rigorously argued book, updated after Brexit, John R. Gillingham tells the history of an idea that has soured and withered away.

He reveals the failures from its postwar origins to set out what the EU was; the role that Delors played in creating the neoliberal monster it is today, and the contemporary – crises; refugees, Brexit, the Euro – that the current institution fails to deal with.

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

Politics 192 pages 210 x 140mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78478 424 9 £9.99 / $26.95 / $22.95CAN Verso 978 1 78478 421 8

John R. Gillingham is the author of numerous articles, two edited volumes, and six books, and is a fellow at the Harvard Center for European Studies.

“John Gillingham has established himself as one of those very rare commentators who can read European history in three dimensions.” Norman Stone, Oxford University “An excellent, up-to-date history of the EU which overturns many preconceived ideas and challenges the views of Eurofanatics and Eurosceptics alike.” Ian Sked, London School of Economics

JULY

NEW EDITION

The Other Ryszard Kapuściński Introduction by Neal Ascherson In our globalised but increasingly polarised age, Kapuściński shows how the Other remains one of the most compelling ideas of our times.

In this reflection on a lifetime of travel, the renown travel writer takes a fresh look at the Western idea of the Other: the non-European or non-American.

Looking at this concept through the lens of his own encounters in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Kapuściński traces how the West has understood the Other from classical times to colonialism, from the Age of Enlightenment to the postmodern global village.

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

Travel / Politics 112 pages 198 x 129mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 596 9 £8.99 / $15.95 / $20.95CAN Liepman AG 978 1 84467 416 9

Ryszard Kapuściński is the author of, among other titles, Shah of Shahs, Imperium, Shadow of the Sun, and the memoir Travels with Herodotus. His books have been translated into twenty-eight languages. He died in 2007.

“In this short, simple, extraordinarily intelligent book, Kapuściński explores what it is to be European, to be non-European, to be colonised, to be the coloniser, to have or to impose an identity.” Jason Burke, Observer “A powerful, quasi-religious, meditation on the power of humbling oneself in the face of the unknown.” Independent 58

JULY

What is the "populist moment" and what does it mean for the left?

In Defense of Left Populism Chantal Mouffe Populism, today, is the expression of a crisis of liberal-democratic politics. It is more than an ideology or a political regime. It is a way of doing politics that can take various forms but emerges when one aims at building a new subject of collective action – the people.

In this new book the leading political thinker Chantal Mouffe proposes a new way to define left populism. The political is to be constructed by establishing a political frontier that divides society into two camps, mobilising an "underdog" against "those in power".

Populism, far from being a perversion of democracy, constitutes the most adequate political force to recover and reconstitute itself. This new politics must recognise its partisan character. This presents itself as more than the image of demagoguery and emotive rabbles seen across our media. Furthermore, it is an urgent struggle, because the future will be formed by the kind of populism that emerges victorious from the conflict against the current threats of post-politics and post-democracy.

Chantal Mouffe is Professor of Political Theory at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the University of Westminster. Her books include Agonistics, The Return of the Political, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (with Ernesto Laclau), The Dimensions of Radical Democracy, The Democratic Paradox and The Challenge of Carl Schmitt.

Praise for Chantal Mouffe “Mouffe represents a position that every serious student of contemporary political thought must acknowledge and come to terms with.”

Philosopher’s Magazine “Evocative and challenging.” Radical Philosophy “Important and timely.” Political Theory

CATEGORY

Politics

EXTENT

176 pages

SIZES

198 x 129mm

FORMAT

Hardback

ISBN

978 1 78663 755 0

PRICES

£12.99 / $19.95 / $25.95CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

•• A passionate manifesto for left populism by world renowned political theorist.

•• Influential thinker who has inspired popular movements in Spain, Greece, France and Latin America.

•• Urgent contribution to the debate on the power of populism in the age of Trump and Corbyn.

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JULY

NEW EDITION

Night Haunts A Journey Through the London Night Sukhdev Sandhu Night Haunts seeks to reclaim the mystery and romance of the city to revitalise the great myth of London for a new century. Sukhdev Sandhu journeys across the city to find out whether the London night really has been rendered insipid by street lighting and CCTV.

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

Travel 144 pages 198 x 129mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 331 6 £9.99 / $16.95 / $22.95CAN Verso 978 1 84467 655 2

Sukhdev Sandhu is the author of London Calling. He lives in New York and London, and writes for London Review of Books, Modern Painters and Times Literary Supplement. He is the award-winning chief film critic of Daily Telegraph and Associate Professor of English and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.

“Offering some of the greatest insights we have into contemporary London.” Michael Moorcock, Daily Telegraph “A book that restores some mystery and romance to the London night.” Times “Unconventional, poetic and haunting meditation on the capital’s hours of darkness and the largely unregarded men and women who wakefully inhabit it.” Observer

JULY

NEW IN PAPERBACK

The Communist Horizon Jodi Dean Jodi Dean unshackles the communist ideal from the failures of the Soviet Union.

In the new capitalism of networked information technologies, our very ability to communicate is exploited, but revolution is still possible if we organise on the basis of our common and collective desires. Examining the experience of the Occupy movement, Dean argues that such spontaneity can’t develop into a revolution and it needs to constitute itself as a party.

An innovative work of pressing relevance, The Communist Horizon offers nothing less than a manifesto for a new collective politics.

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

Politics 256 pages 198 x 129mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 552 5 £10.99 / $17.95 / $23.99CAN Verso 978 1 84467 954 6

Jodi Dean teaches political and media theory in Geneva, New York. She has written many books, including Crowds and Party and Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies.

“This is what everyone engaged in today’s struggles for emancipation needs: a unique combination of theoretical stringency and a realistic assessment of our predicament. To anyone who continues to dwell in illusions about liberal democracy, one should simply say: read Jodi Dean’s new book!” Slavoj Žižek “Jodi’s sharp analysis of the impasses of the left is also a kind of requiem for much of the 2.0 bluster of the last decade.” Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism

60

JULY

Yvonne Kapp’s monumental biography of the daughter of Karl Marx who became a radical activist NEW EDITION

Eleanor Marx

MARX 200

A Biography Yvonne Kapp Introduction by Sally Alexander

Eleanor was the youngest of three surviving Marx children. She was the only one to be born, live, love, work and die in England and to become a public figure in her own right. Yvonne Kapp, in this highly acclaimed biography, brilliantly succeeds in capturing Eleanor’s spirit, from a lively child, opining on the world’s affairs, to the new woman, aspiring to the stage, earning her living as a free intellectual, and helping to lead England’s unskilled workers at the height of the new unionism; being always more than, yet at the same time inescapably, Karl Marx’s daughter. And so inevitably and fortunately Eleanor’s biography is also an unrivalled biography of the Marx household in Victorian London, of the Marx circle, and especially of Friedrich Engels, the family’s extraordinary mentor.

Yvonne Kapp (1903–1999) was a British writer and political activist.

“One of the few unquestionable masterpieces of twentieth-century biography.” Guardian “A work of scholarship but also a work of art.” Michael Foot

CATEGORY

Biography

EXTENT

912 pages

SIZES

235 x 156mm

FORMAT

Trade Paperback

ISBN

978 1 85984 515 8

PRICES

£30 / $44.95 / $59.95CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

•• The huge classic biography of Eleanor Marx, the daughter of Karl, published in the year of the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth.

•• Feature in national newspaper.

61

JULY

An award-winning cultural history of how we experience the world through art, film and architecture NEW EDITION

Atlas of Emotion Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film Giuliana Bruno Atlas of Emotion is a highly original endeavour to map a cultural history of spatio-visual arts. In an evocative montage of words and pictures, emphasises that “sight” and “site” but also “motion” and “emotion” are irrevocably connected. In so doing, Giulana Bruno touches on the art of Gerhard Richter and Annette Message, the film making of Peter Greenaway and Michelangelo Antonioni, the origins of the movie palace and its precursors, and her own journeys to her native Naples. Visually luscious and daring in conception, Bruno opens new vistas and understandings at every turn.

CATEGORY

Art / Architecture

EXTENT

496 pages

SIZES

256 x 203mm

FORMAT

Trade Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78663 322 4

PRICES

£29.95 / $45 / $61CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

PREVIOUS EDITION

978 1 85984 133 4

•• Winner of the Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award, 2003.

•• Named by The American Library Association as "Outstanding Academic Title".

•• Groundbreaking study of art and film – richly illustrated throughout.

Giuliana Bruno is Emmet Blakeney Gleason Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Streetwalking on a Ruined Map, winner of the 1993 Katherine Singer Kovács prize for the best book in film studies, Public Intimacy and Surface.

“One of those critical works packed with learning and insights that at the same time takes you on an exhilarating ride through its author’s imagination.” Marina Warner, Guardian “A hugely ambitious mapping of the complex intertwinings of film, architecture, and the body. This adventurous book will be of interest to anyone concerned with what we might call ‘mobility studies’: the attempt to understand cultural performances not as the manifestation of fixed structures but as the expression of restless energies.” Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University “In this astonishingly provocative, captivating, tender, elegant, and passionate nonchronological, interdisciplinary book, Bruno connects splendidly a psychogeography of cultural life ... She takes the readers through a poetico-scholarly and picturesque journey – a visual travelogue, based both on philosophical theories and erudite conjectures ... Bruno writes like an expressionist painter, who deeply captures the invisible and the instantaneous.” Choice “In an exhilarating ride, the reader is transported across this vast hidden landscape to reach a whole new understanding of spatial experience.” Mark Wigley, Professor of Architecture, Columbia University

62

FEMINI S T C L A S S IC S JULY

NEW EDITION

The Heart of the Race Black Women’s Lives in Britain Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe Introduction by Lola Okolosie The Heart of the Race is a powerful record of life as a black woman in Britain: grandmothers drawn to the promise of the "mother country" in the 1950s talk of a different reality; young girls describe how their aspirations at school were largely ignored; working women tell of their commitments to families, jobs, communities. First published in 1985, this new edition includes a new introduction by Lola Okolosie and a new interview with the authors, conducted

by Heidi Mirza, on the impact and relevance of their book today.

Beverley Bryan is Professor at the University of the West Indies, and the author of Between Two Grammars. Stella Dadzie is a founding member of the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent. Suzanne Scafe is a Reader in Caribbean and Post-colonial Literature at London South Bank University.

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

Politics 256 pages 210 x 140mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 586 0 £11.99 / $19.95 / $25.95CAN Verso 978 0 86068 361 2

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

Politics 196 pages 210 x 140mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 603 4 £11.99 / $19.95 / $25.95CAN Verso 978 0 80148 447 6

JULY

NEW EDITION

Constituting Feminist Subjects Kathi Weeks Kathi Weeks suggests that one of the most important tasks for contemporary feminist theory is to develop theories of the subject that are adequate to feminist politics. Although the 1980s modernist-postmodernist debate put the problem of feminist subjectivity on the agenda, Weeks contends that limited debate now blocks the further development of feminist theory.

Both modernists and postmodernists succeeded in making clear the problems of an already constituted, essentialist subject. What remains as an ongoing project, Weeks contends, is creating a theory of the constitution of subjects to account for the processes of social construction. This book presents one such account. Drawing on a number of different theoretical frameworks, including feminist standpoint theory, socialist feminism and poststructuralist thought, as well as theories of peformativity and self-valorisation, the author proposes a nonessential feminist subject, a theory of constituting subjects.

Kathi Weeks is Professor in the Program of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the author of The Problem With Work and a co-editor of The Jameson Reader.

63

JULY

One of the world’s leading anthropologists assesses the work of the founder of structural anthropology

Claude Lévi-Strauss A Critical Study of his Thought Maurice Godelier Translated by Nora Scott Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was among the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. In this rigorous study, Maurice Godelier traces the evolution of his thought. Focusing primarily on Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of kinship and myth, Godelier provides an assessment of his intellectual achievements and legacy. Meticulously researched, Lévi-Strauss is written in a clear and accessible style. The culmination of decades of engagement with Lévi-Strauss’s work, this book will prove indispensible to students of his thought and structural anthropology more generally.

Maurice Godelier is Professor of Anthropology at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. One of the world’s most influential anthropologists, Godelier has written numerous works including Rationality and Irrationality in Economics, The Mental and the Material, The Making of Great Men and The Metamorphoses of Kinship.

CATEGORY

Anthropology

Praise for The Metamorphoses of Kinship

EXTENT

432 pages

“This is a blockbuster of a book. Nothing like it has been written since Lévi-Strauss’s Structures élémentaires de la parenté (1949) or Meyer Fortes’s Kinship and the Social Order (1969). Yet in the sweep of its evidence and argument, Godelier’s summa is more ambitious and far-reaching than either of these. It is at once a major intervention in the discipline of anthropology, and a work of the widest human interest ... It is certain to be read and discussed for years to come.” Jack Goody, New Left Review

SIZES

235 x 156mm

FORMAT

Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78478 707 3

PRICES

£24.95 / $45 / $58CAN

FORMAT

Hardback

ISBN

978 1 78478 706 6

“In striking and elucidating prose, Godelier writes both for the trained anthropologist and for the general public. This is a book that aims to introduce the merits of anthropology to a broader readership. With singular conviction and remarkable depth, Godelier traces anthropology’s long courtship with kinship studies … a hopeful and compelling read.” Fiona Murphy, Irish Times

PRICES

£70 / $95 / $123CAN

RIGHTS

Editions du Seuil

“A truly monumental work.” Times Higher Education Supplement

65

•• A groundbreaking study of one of the modern founders of anthropology by one of the leading contemporary anthropologists.

JULY

An exhaustive collection of revolutionary theory from slavery and reconstruction to Black Power to Black Feminism

Black Radical Tradition A Reader Edited by Ben Mabie, Erin Gray and Asad Haider Preface by Barbara Ransby With activists taking to the streets with renewed vigor to fight racism, inequality, and capitalism, this collection of classic writings and primary documents restores the historical grounding and revolutionary genealogy of today’s protest movements. Including key writings of thinkers and figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Hubert Harrison, Harry Haywood, Claude McKay, Claudia Jones, C.L.R. James, Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde and the Combahee River Collective, this is the most comprehensive collection of revolutionary black voices ever assembled. In highlighting the central debates that animated the movement through its long history, it registers the monumental import once of black radical theory to our understanding of the past and present alike.

Incisive contextual materials from the editors help situate each contribution in its historical and political setting, and a preface from Barbara Ransby argues for the resounding purchase these authors have for our own time. The book is a powerful testament to over 150 years of struggle, a valuable resource for both scholars and activists.

CATEGORY

Politics / History

EXTENT

352 pages

SIZES

235 x 156mm

Ben Mabie is the managing editor of Viewpoint Magazine, a journal of Marxist theory as it is articulated within mass movements. He works as an editorial assistant at Verso Books.

FORMAT

Trade Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78478 618 2

PRICES

£16.99 / $24.95 / $32.49CAN

Erin Gray is a historian and theorist of lynching. Her writing appears in Viewpoint Magazine, and multiple other journals.

FORMAT

Hardback

ISBN

978 1 78663 274 6

PRICES

£70 / $95 / $125CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

Asad Haider is a founding editor of Viewpoint Magazine and author of Mistaken Identity.

•• A major resource for activists and scholars.

•• Launch events on both coasts involving activists and scholars.

•• Endorsements from leading scholars like Cornel West, Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander.

•• Preface by Barbara Ransby, awardwinning and best-selling historian.

67

AUGUST

NEW EDITION

Philosophy and Revolution From Kant to Marx Stathis Kouvelakis

MARX 200

Translated by G.M. Goshgarian Preface by Fredric Jameson

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

Politics / History 456 pages 235 x 156mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 578 5 £16.99 / $24.95 / $33CAN Editions la Frabrique 978 1 85984 471 7

In this ambitious and original study, Stathis Kouvelakis paints a rich panorama of the key intellectual and political figures in the effervescence of German thought before the 1848 revolutions. He shows how the attempt to chart a moderate, reformist path entered into crisis, generating two antagonistic perspectives within the progressive currents of German society. On one side were those socialists – such as Moses Hess and the young Friedrich Engels – who sought to discover a principle of harmony in social relations. On the other side, the poet Heinrich Heine and the young Karl Marx developed a new perspective, articulating revolutionary rupture, thereby redefining the very notion of politics itself. This new edition of the book includes a long interview with Kouvelakis which puts the work in context.

Stathis Kouvelakis is Reader in Political Theory at King’s College London, and author and editor of many books.

AUGUST

NEW IN PAPERBACK

Collected Works Volume 2 V.I. Lenin Among the most influential political and social forces of the twentieth century, modern communism rests firmly on philosophical, political, and economic underpinnings developed by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, later known as Lenin.

For anyone who seeks to understand capitalism, the Russian Revolution, and the role of communism in the tumultuous political and social movements that have shaped the modern world, the works of Lenin offer unparalleled insight and understanding.

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS

Politics 544 pages 198 x 129mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 631 7 £29.99 / $45 / $60CAN Verso

This second volume contains Lenin’s works from 1895 to 1897. Included are Lenin’s early economic and political writings, as well as his prescriptions for the program and strategy of Russian Marxism.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870–1924), better known by the alias Lenin, was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He played a leading role in the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917.

68

AUGUST

The highly acclaimed intellectual memoir of the groundbreaking theorist of nationalism NEW IN PAPERBACK

A Life Beyond Boundaries A Memoir Benedict Anderson Benedict Anderson was one of the most respected thinkers on the history of nationalism. His acclaimed Imagined Communities is one of the most cited works in social science.

In A Life Beyond Boundaries, Anderson recounts a life spent open to the world. Born in China, he spent his childhood in California and Ireland, was educated in England and finally found a home at Cornell University, where he immersed himself in the growing field of Southeast Asian studies.

Here he reveals the joys of learning languages, the importance of fieldwork, the pleasures of translation, the influence of the New Left on global thinking, the satisfactions of teaching, and a love of world literature. He discusses the ideas and inspirations behind his bestknown works.

Benedict Anderson (1936–2015) was Aaron L. Binenkorp Professor of International Studies Emeritus at Cornell University. He was editor of the journal Indonesia and author of Java in a Time of Revolution, The Spectre of Comparisons, The Age of Globalization and Imagined Communities. He died in Java in December 2015.

“Benedict Anderson transformed the study of nationalism … and was renowned not only for his theoretical contributions but also for his detailed examinations of language and power in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.” New York Times “Throughout his memoir, Anderson’s writing is gentlemanly, kind, laced with jokes and vignettes.” Guardian “Anderson … had an intuitive sympathy for nationalism’s anti-imperial origins … Not only his training but also his family background had equipped him, in ways his posthumously published memoir A Life Beyond Boundaries makes clear, to understand nationalism’s extraordinary insurgent appeal.”

Financial Times “[A Life Beyond Boundaries is] a primer for cosmopolitanism and an argument for traversing geographical, historical, linguistic, and disciplinary borders.” Scott Sherman, Nation

69

CATEGORY

Biography

EXTENT

224 pages

SIZES

210 x 140mm

FORMAT

Trade Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78663 015 5

PRICES

£9.99 / $16.95 / $22.99CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

PREVIOUS EDITION

978 1 78478 456 0

•• Memoir by one of the towering intellectual figures of the era.

•• Insightful account of the joys and dangers of academic life.

•• When the author died in 2015 there were extensive obituaries throughout the world media.

AUGUST

NEW IN PAPERBACK

The Tailor of Ulm A History of Communism Lucio Magri The Italian Communist Party was once one of the most powerful and vibrant parties of the West. In this detailed and probing work, Lucio Magri, one of the towering intellectual figures of the Italian left, assesses the causes for its demise. The PCI survived almost a century of Italian history, from its founding in 1921 to the partisan resistance, the turning point of Salerno in 1944 to the de-Stalinization of 1956, the long ’68 to the "historic compromise," and to the opportunity – missed forever – of democratic transformation.

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

Biography 448 pages 235 x 156mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 554 9 £19.99 / $29.95 / $39.99CAN il Saggiatore Spa 978 1 84467 698 9

With rigor and passion, The Tailor of Ulm merges an original and enlightening interpretation of Italian communism with the experience of a militant "heretic" into a riveting read – capable of broadening our insights into contemporary Italy and the twentieth-century communist experience.

Lucio Magri (1932–2011) was one of Europe’s leading leftist intellectuals.

“A highly intelligent, melancholy retrospect on the PCI’s eventual self-destruction.”

Eric Hobsbawm, London Review of Books

AUGUST

NEW IN PAPERBACK

Towards a New Manifesto Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer Towards a New Manifesto shows Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in a uniquely spirited and free-flowing exchange of ideas. This book is a record of their discussions over three weeks in the spring of 1956, recorded with a view to the production of a contemporary version of The Communist Manifesto. A philosophical jam-session in which the two thinkers improvise freely, often wildly, on central themes of their work – theory and practice, labour and leisure, domination and freedom – in a political register found nowhere else in their writing. A thrilling example of philosophy in action and a compelling map of a possible passage to a new world.

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

Philosophy 128 pages 198 x 129mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 553 2 £7.99 / $12.95 / $16.95CAN Suhrkamp 978 1 84467 819 8

Theodor Adorno was director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt from 1956 until his death in 1969. His works include In Search of Wagner, Aesthetic Theory, Negative Dialectics, and (with Max Horkheimer) Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) was a philosopher and sociologist.

“Much of their interesting conversation about work, happiness, leisure, and society is germane to our time.” Steven Poole, Guardian

70

AUGUST

New edition of Brenner’s now classic survey of the world economy from 1950 to the present NEW IN PAPERBACK

The Economics of Global Turbulence The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945–2005 Robert Brenner For years, the discipline of economics has been moving steadily away from the real world toward formalised axioms and mathematical models with only a precarious bearing on actuality.

Commentators seek to fill the gap as best they can, but in the absence of real background scholarship, journalism is vulnerable to the myopias of fashion and immediacy. The deeper enigmas of post war development remain in either case largely untouched.

Bringing together the strengths of both the economist and the historian, Robert Brenner rises to this challenge. In this work, a revised and newly introduced edition of his acclaimed New Left Review special report, he charts the turbulent post war history of the global system and unearths the mechanisms of over production and over competition which lie behind its long-term crisis since the early 1970s, thereby demonstrating the thoroughly systematic factors behind wage repression, high unemployment and unequal development, and raising disturbing and far-reaching questions about its future trajectory.

In this new edition, Brenner brings the story up to date, taking into account the great financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath.

Robert Brenner is Director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA. He is the author of The Boom and the Bubble, Merchants and Revolution, and co-editor of Rebel Rank and File.

“A brilliant economic overview of the world’s current economic state.”

Nation “Here, at last ... something good out of the left.” Wall Street Journal “Robert Brenner [is] arguably capital’s most lucid contemporary historian.”

Los Angeles Review of Books “Ambitious, informative and compelling.” Thomas Kollman, Tribune

71

CATEGORY

Economics/Politics

EXTENT

432 pages

SIZES

235 x 156mm

FORMAT

Trade Paperback

ISBN

978 1 84467 362 9

PRICES

£12.99 / $19.99 / $25.95CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

PREVIOUS EDITION

978 1 85984 730 5

•• A superb study by an acclaimed historian and economist.

•• New edition includes an update taking in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

CHRISTOPHER HILL CL A SSICS Christopher Hill was the preeminent figure of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English history, and one of the most distinguished historians of recent times. Fellow historian E.P. Thompson once referred to him as the dean and paragon of English historians. This series makes available key books from his oeuvre.

AUGUST

Reformation to Industrial Revolution Christopher Hill

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

History 320 pages 210 x 140mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 618 8 £14.99 / $24.95 / $33CAN A. M. Heath 978 0 14013 748 4

In 1530 England was a backward economy, yet by 1780 it possessed a world empire and was just about to become the first industrialised power in the world. This book deals with the intervening 250 years, and tries to explain how England won its unique position in the world. This is a story that opens with the break with Europe and charts the tumultuous period of war, revolutions, and the cultural and scientific flowering that made up the early modern period.

Yet, during this period Britain also become the home to imperial ambitions and economic innovation. Hill excavates the conditions and ideas that underpin this age of extraordinary change, and shows how, and why, Britain became the most powerful nation in the world.

“The commanding interpreter of seventeenth century England.” Guardian “The dominant figure in studies of the period.” Daily Telegraph

AUGUST

Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England Christopher Hill

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

History 512 pages 210 x 140mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 621 8 £14.99 / $24.95 / $33CAN A. M. Heath 978 0 71266 816 3

In order to understand the English Revolution and Civil War we need to understand Puritanism. In this classic work of social history, Hill shows Puritanism as a living faith, one that responded to social as well as religious needs. It was a set of beliefs that answered the hopes and fears of yeomen and gentlemen, merchants and artisans in the tribulations of early modern Britain, a time of extraordinary turbulence. Over this period, Puritanism, he shows, was interwoven into daily life. He looks at how rituals such as oath-taking, the Sabbath, bawdy courts and poor relief, became ways to order the social upheaval. He even offers an explanation for the emergence of the seemingly paradoxical – the Puritan revolutionaries.

“The masterly application of the author’s enormous reading give vitality to every page … a delight to read.” C.V. Wedgwood, Daily Telegraph “The dean and paragon of English historians.” E.P. Thompson, author of The Making of the English Working Class

72

AUGUST

The acclaimed art fanzine’s psychogeographic drifts through a ruined city NEW EDITION

Savage Messiah Laura Oldfield Ford Savage Messiah collects the entire set of Laura Oldfield Ford’s fanzine to date. Part graphic novel, part artwork, the book is both an angry polemic against the marginalisation of the city’s working class and an exploration of the cracks that open up in urban space.

Laura Oldfield Ford, originally from Halifax, West Yorkshire, studied at the Royal College of Art and has become well known for her politically active and poetic engagement with London as a site of social antagonism. She exhibits and teaches across Europe and the United States.

“One of the most striking fanzines of recent years is Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah, focussing on the politics, psychology and pop-cultural past of a different London postcode. Ford’s prose is scabrous and melancholic, incorporating theoretical shards from Guy Debord and Marc Augé, and mapping the transformations to the capital that the property boom and neoliberalist economics have wrought. Each zine is a drift, a wander through landscape that echoes certain strands of contemporary psychogeography.

Ford – or a version of her, at least – is an occasional character, offering up narcotic memories of a forgotten metropolis. The images, hand-drawn, photographed and messily laid out, suggest both outtakes from a Sophie Calle project and the dust jacket of an early 1980s anarcho-punk compilation record: that is, both poetry and protest.” Sukhdev Sandhu, New Statesman “Oldfield Ford displays authentic gifts as a recorder and mapper of terrain.

She is a necessary kind of writer, smart enough to bring document and poetry together in a scissors-and-paste, post-authorial form.” Iain Sinclair, Guardian “This black-and-white, cut ‘n’ paste-style zine by the artist Laura Oldfield Ford, in which she traces her psychogeographical drifts around London’s grimey underbelly, has achieved cult status in art circles since its first issue in 2005. Be warned: this is a city you won’t find in any guidebook.”

Independent “Savage Messiah’s fractured narratives, clipped sloganeering and topographical poetics have been, for the last decade or so, a kind of solace for anyone who loathed the coked-up arrogance, the intellectual and political vacuity and compulsory amnesia of the boom. It was a constant reminder that bad times were just around the corner.” Owen Hatherley

73

CATEGORY

Graphic Novel / Art

EXTENT

464 pages

SIZES

210 x 140mm

FORMAT

Trade Paperback

ISBN

978 1 78663 785 7

PRICES

£14.99 / $22.95 / $29.95CAN

RIGHTS

Verso

PREVIOUS EDITION

978 1 84467 747 4

•• A new edition of the acclaimed collection of the artist Laura Oldfield Ford’s fanzine.

•• London on the margins brought to life in collage, narrative and drawing.

AUGUST

NEW EDITION

A People’s History of Scotland Chris Bambery A People’s History of Scotland looks beyond the kings and queens, the battles and bloody defeats of the past. It captures the history that matters today, stories of freedom fighters, suffragettes, the workers of Red Clydeside, and the hardship and protest of the treacherous Thatcher era.

This is a passionate cry for more than just independence but also for a nation based on social justice. Fully updated to include the rise of the SNP post 2014.

Chris Bambery is a writer, broadcaster, TV producer and founding member of the International Socialist Group in Scotland. He is the author of Scotland, A Rebel’s Guide to Gramsci and The Second World War. CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS PREVIOUS EDITION

History 336 pages 198 x 129mm Trade Paperback 978 1 78663 787 1 £9.99 / $16.95 / $22.99CAN Verso 978 1 78168 284 5

“Splendid ... The careful social and economic analysis in A People’s History of Scotland offers a close reading of the rise and fall of industry and mining, resulting in consequences which were scarcely cheerful.” Paul Buhle, Monthly Review “Offers a Scottish version of E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class.”

Scotsman

AUGUST

The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg Volume III Political Writings 1.

On Revolution: 1897–1905 Rosa Luxemburg Edited by Peter Hudis, Axel Fair-Schulz and William A. Pelz Translated by George Shriver, Alicia Mann and Henry Holland

CATEGORY EXTENT FORMAT SIZES ISBN PRICES RIGHTS

Politics 576 pages 235 x 156mm Hardback 978 1 78663 533 4 £70 / $120 / $157CAN Verso

This collection is the first of three volumes of the Complete Works devoted to the central theme of Rosa Luxemburg’s life and work – revolution. Spanning the years 1897 to the end of 1905, they contain speeches, articles, and essays on the strikes, protests, and political debates that culminated in the 1905 Russian Revolution – one of the most important social upheavals of modern times.

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) was a Polish-born Jewish revolutionary and one of the greatest theoretical minds of the European socialist movement. An activist in Germany and Poland, the author of numerous classic works, she participated in the founding of the German Communist Party and the Spartacist insurrection in Berlin in 1919. She was assassinated in January of that year and has become a hero of socialist, communist and feminist movements around the world.

74

200th Anniversary of the Birth of Karl Marx The Communist Manifesto / The April Theses

The Revolutions of 1848 Political Writings

Karl Marx Edited by David Fernbach Foreword by Tariq Ali

Friedrich Engels, V. I. Lenin, and Karl Marx Introduction by Tariq Ali

A new beautiful edition of the Communist Manifesto, combined with Lenin’s key revolutionary tract.

Volume 1 of Marx’s political writings, including The Communist Manifesto.

November 2016 240 pages • Hbk £7.99/$12.95/$16.95CAN • ISBN: 978 1 78478 690 8

August 2010 368 pages • Pbk £12.99/$19.95/$25CAN • ISBN: 978 1 84467 603 3

The Philosophy of Marx

Surveys from Exile

“A very intelligent and creative work–succinct and informative; it explores the ways in which Marxism as such challenges traditional philosophy (and the problems the latter possesses for it). It should certainly have a privileged place on the shelf of contemporary studies of Marx.” Fredric Jameson

Karl Marx Edited by David Fernbach Foreword by Tariq Ali

Political Writings

Etienne Balibar

January 2017 240 pages • Pbk £12.99/$19.95/$25.95CAN • ISBN: 978 1 78478 603 8

A Companion to Marx’s Capital David Harvey

“Harvey is a scholarly radical; his writing is free of journalistic clichés, full of facts and carefully thought-through ideas.” Richard Sennett

Volume 2 of Marx’s political writings, including The Eighteenth Brumaire.

384 pages • Pbk £12.99/$19.95/$25CAN • ISBN: 978 1 84467 607 1

The First International and After Political Writings

Karl Marx Edited by David Fernbach Foreword by Tariq Ali

March 2010 368 pages • Pbk £11.99/$19.95/$25CAN • ISBN: 978 1 84467 359 9

Volume 3 of Marx’s political writings, including The Civil War In France.

August 2010 416 pages • Pbk £12.99/$19.95/$25CAN • ISBN: 978 1 84467 605 7

A Companion to Marx’s Capital, Volume 2 David Harvey

The definitive guide to the second volume of Capital.

An Unfinished Revolution Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln

Robin Blackburn, Abraham Lincoln, and Karl Marx

August 2013 384 pages • Pbk £11.99/$21.95/$24.95CAN • ISBN: 978 1 78168 121 3

The impact of the American Civil War on Karl Marx, and Karl Marx on America.

Karl Marx

For Marx

Werner Blumenberg Foreword by Gareth Stedman Jones

“One reads him with excitement. There is no mystery about his capacity to inspire the intelligent young.”

Eric Hobsbawm

May 2011 272 pages • Pbk £17.99/$29.95/$38.95CAN • ISBN: 978 1 84467 722 1

An Illustrated History

Louis Althusser

“Blumenberg describes the facts of Marx’s life without pulling any punches ... an excellent book.”

Times Literary Supplement

October 2005 259 pages • Pbk £11.99/$21.95/$25.95CAN • ISBN: 978 1 84467 052 9

May 2000 188 pages • Pbk £13.99/$20/$22CAN • ISBN: 978 1 85984 254 6

75

MARX 200

1968

50th Anniversary of 1968 The Beach Beneath the Street

The Dialectics of Liberation

The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International

Stokely Carmichael, Herbert Marcuse, R. D. Laing and Paul Sweezy Edited by David Cooper

McKenzie Wark

A revolutionary compilation of speeches which produced a political groundwork for many of the radical movements in the following decades

“Wark is a marvellous guide to the micro-society of the Situationists ... He brings to the task a necessary sympathy, an encyclopedic knowledge, and a certain stylistic irrepressibility.”

Alex Danchev, Times Literary Supplement

August 2010 • 210 pages • Pbk £9.99/$16.95/$19.95CAN • ISBN: 9781781688915

March 2015 • 208 pages • Pbk £11.99/$18.95/$22.99CAN • ISBN: 9781781688380

The Situationists and the City

If They Come in the Morning …

Edited by Tom McDonough

George Jackson, Bettina Aptheker, Bobby Seale, James Baldwin, Ruchell Magee, Julian Bond, Huey P. Newton, Erika Huggins, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette Edited by Angela Y. Davis

A Reader

Voices of Resistance

Key Situationist texts on the city, strikingly illustrated January 2010 • 288 pages • Pbk £16.99/$26.95/$33.50CAN • ISBN: 9781844673643

With race and the police once more burning issues, this classic work from one of America’s giants of black radicalism has lost none of its prescience or power October 2016 • 288 pages • Pbk £9.99/$17.95/$23.95CAN • ISBN: 9781784787691

The Beginning of the End

States of Emergency

Tom Nairn and Angelo Quattrocchi Preface by Tariq Ali

Robert Lumley

France, May 1968

Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978

March 1998 • 160 pages • Pbk £11.99/$19.95/$26CAN • ISBN: 9781859842904

“Shows an extraordinary capacity to combine cultural, intellectual and social history... A fascinating account of the wonders and follies of the most important period of collective action in twentiethcentury Italian history.” Paul Ginsborg

Redemption Song

We Want Everything

Mike Marqusee Foreword by Dave Zirin

Nanni Balestrini Introduction by Rachel Kushner

A classic book that traces Muhammad Ali’s political development in the sixties

“A fine example of a literary use of expressions that were then burgeoning in factories and mass meetings, caught between student unrest and worker fury.”

Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose

Two superbly written accounts of the events of May 1968 “An unconsciously situationist text.” Guy Debord

March 1990 • 396 pages • Pbk £23.99/$34.95/$29.99CAN • ISBN: 9780860919698

Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties

A Novel

February 2017 • 352 pages • Pbk £12.99/$19.95/$25.95CAN • ISBN: 9781786632425

May 2016 • 224 pages • Hbk £14.99/$24.95/$33CAN • ISBN: 9781784783686

Anti-Systemic Movements

Books for Burning

Peerless examination of the rise of social movements against the global capitalist system, conducted by the leading exponents of the “world systems” perspective

Antonio Negri

Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy

Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein

Subversive political writings by the acclaimed author of Empire

January 2012 • 144 pages • Pbk £10.99/$15.95/$20CAN • ISBN: 9781844677863

September 2005 • 299 pages • Pbk £16/$25/$35CAN • ISBN: 9781844670345

76

Bestsellers ART CRITICISM

HISTORY

Portraits

From the Stone Age to the New Millennium

A People’s History of the World

NEW IN PAPERBACK

John Berger on Artists

Chris Harman

John Berger Edited by Tom Overton “A volume whose breadth and depth bring it close to a definitive self-portrait of one of Britain’s most original thinkers” Financial Times November 2017 • 544 pages • Pbk £14.99/$24.95/$33CAN • ISBN: 978 1 78478 179 8

"I have had many people ask me if there is a book which does for world history what my book A People’s History of the United States does for this country.

I always respond that I know of only one book that accomplishes this extremely difficult task, and that is Chris Harman’s A People’s History of the World. It is an indispensible volume on my reference bookshelf."

Howard Zinn 2017 • 760 pages • Pbk £12.99/$19.95/$22CAN • ISBN: 978 1 178663 081 0

ART CRITICISM

HISTORY

Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

The Invention of the Jewish People

Artificial Hells

NEW IN PAPERBACK

Claire Bishop A searing critique of participatory art by an iconoclastic historian July 2012 • 390 pages • Pbk £19.99/$29.95/$31.50CAN • ISBN: 978 1 84467 690 3

Shlomo Sand

Best-selling new analysis of Jewish history by leading Israeli historian.

"Shlomo Sand has written a remarkable book. In cool, scholarly prose he has, quite simply, normalised Jewish history. Anyone interested in understanding the contemporary Middle East should read this book."

Tony Judt 2010 • 360 pages • Pbk £11.99/$19.95/$22.95CAN • ISBN: 978 1 84467 623 1

BIOGRAPHY

PHILOSOPHY/HISTORY

A Palestinian Story

Grand Hotel Abyss

In Search of Fatima

NEW IN PAPERBACK

The Lives of the Frankfurt School

Ghada Karmi Acclaimed and intimate memoir of exile and dispossession.

"This is an important memoir, beautifully written by an intelligent, sensitive woman ... It should help those of us who do not understand why growing numbers of Muslims and not a few Christians have lost faith with Western pretensions of fairness." Financial Times "Keenly observed, fierce, honest and yet light of touch."

Economist

Stuart Jeffries “A towering work of staggering scholarship.”

Irish Times September 2017 • 448 pages • Pbk £10.99/$16.95/$22.99CAN • ISBN: 978 1 78478 569 7

2009 • 452 pages • Pbk £10.99/$19.95/$23.95CAN • ISBN: 978 1 84467 368 1

ECONOMICS

PHILOSOPHY

How Will Capitalism End?

Reflections on Damaged Life

Minima Moralia

NEW IN PAPERBACK

Essays on a Failing System

Theodor Adorno

Wolfgang Streeck

"A volume of Adorno is equivalent to a whole shelf of books on literature." Susan Sontag A reflection on everyday existence in the "sphere of consumption of late Capitalism" this work is Adorno’s literary and philosophical masterpiece.

“Streeck writes devastatingly and cogently …

How Will Capitalism End? provides not so much a … forecast as a warning.” Martin Wolf, Financial Times November 2017 • 272 pages • Pbk £10.99/$16.95/$22.99CAN • ISBN: 978 1 78663 298 2

2010 • 256 pages • Pbk £10.99/$19.95/$23.95CAN • ISBN: 978 1 84467 051 2

GRAPHIC NOVEL/BIOGRAPHY

PHILOSOPHY

A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg

Frédéric Gros

Red Rosa

A Philosophy of Walking "A passionate affirmation of the simple life, and joy in simple things. And it’s beautifully written: clear, simple, precise." Carole Cadwalladr, Observer "A long walk, Gros suggests, allows us to commune with the sublime." New York Times

Kate Evans Edited by Paul Buhle “Utterly brilliant. The best book I’ve read this year.”

Steve Bell, Guardian October 2015 • 224 pages • Pbk £9.99/$18.95/$24.95CAN • ISBN: 978 1 78478 099 9

April 2015 • 240 pages • Pbk £9.99/$16.95/$19.95CAN • ISBN: 978 1 78168 837 3

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Bestsellers PHILOSOPHY

POLITICS

Critique of Everyday Life

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy

The One-Volume Edition Henri Lefebvre

The Many Faces of Anonymous

Žižek analyses the end of the world at the hands of the “four riders of the apocalypse.”

“One of the great French intellectual activists of the twentieth century.” David Harvey

Gabriella Coleman "In Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy, Coleman reveals the group in all its complexity ... this in-depth account might leave readers in awe of the sheer scope of the group and how much they have achieved while shunning the traditional trappings of leaders, hierarchy and individual fame-seeking." Financial Times

April 2014 912 pages • Pbk £25/$44.95/$52CAN • ISBN: 978 1 78168 317 0

November 2015 • 464 pages • Pbk £9.99/$19.95/$25.95CAN • ISBN: 978 1 78168 983 7

PHILOSOPHY

POLITICS

Slavoj Žižek

Voices of Resistance

The Sublime Object of Ideology Žižek’s first book, a provocative and original exploration of human agency in a postmodern world.

2008 • 272 pages • Pbk £13.99/$24.95/$27.95CAN • ISBN: 978 1 84467 300 1

If They Come in the Morning …

Edited by Angela Y. Davis “Angela Davis taught me that I did not have to tolerate the racism I was suffering in the playground, she told me that I was not alone … it was in this book that I first came across the word ‘solidarity.’” Benjamin Zephaniah October 2016 288 pages • Pbk £9.99/$17.95/$23.99CAN • ISBN: 978 1 78478 769 1

POLITICS/MIDDLE EAST

POLITICS

ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution

The Demonization of the Working Class

The Rise of Islamic State

Chavs

Patrick Cockburn

Owen Jones

The essential “on the ground” report on the fastestgrowing new threat in the Middle East from the winner of the 2014 Foreign Affairs Journalist of the Year Award.

"Quite simply, the best Western journalist at work in Iraq today." Seymour Hersh

Bestselling investigation into the myth and reality of working-class life in contemporary Britain.

"A passionate and well-documented denunciation of the upper-class contempt for the proles that has recently become so visible in the British class system."

Eric Hobsbawm, Guardian

2015 • 192 pages • Pbk £9.99/$16.95/$19.95CAN • ISBN: 978 1 78478 040 1

2016 • 352 pages • Pbk £9.99/$15.95/$18.95CAN • ISBN: 978 1 78478 377 8

POLITICS

POLITICS

Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Politics, Equality, Nature

Imagined Communities

How Did We Get Into This Mess?

Benedict Anderson The world-famous work on the origins and development of nationalism September 2016 • 240 pages • Pbk £12.99/$19.95/$25.95CAN • ISBN: 978 1 78478 675 5

George Monbiot Leading political and environmental commentator on where we have gone wrong, and what to do about it March 2017 • 352 pages • Pbk £9.99/$16.95/$22.95CAN • ISBN: 978 1 78663 078 0

POLITICS

POLITICS

The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Corbyn

Precarious Life

NEW EDITION

The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics

Judith Butler “Judith Butler is quite simply one of the most probing, challenging, and influential thinkers of our time.”

J.M. Bernstein July 2006 • 168 pages • Pbk £10.99/$19.95/$25CAN • ISBN: 978 1 84467 544 9

Richard Seymour “Richard Seymour has a brilliant mind and a compelling style. Everything he writes is worth reading.” Gary Younge October 2017 • 272 pages • Pbk £9.99/$16.95/$22.99CAN • ISBN: 978 1 78663 299 9

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