VERSO BOOKS

(P/B) IF THEY COME IN THE MORNING...
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. One of America's most historic political trials is undoubtedly that of Angela Davis. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Davis, and including contributions from numerous radicals such as Black Panthers George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins, this book is not only an account of Davis's incarceration and the struggles surrounding it, but also perhaps th...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(H/B) A Short History of Trans Misogyny
There is no shortage of voices demanding everyone pay attention to the violence trans women suffer. But one frighteningly basic question seems never to be answered: why does it happen? If men are not inherently evil and trans women do not intrinsically invite reprisal―which would make violence unstoppable―then the psychology of that violence had to arise at a certain place and time. The trans panic had to be invented. Award-winning historian Jules Gill-Peterson takes us from the bustling port cities of New York and New Orleans to the stree...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) Classes
Questions of class, power and distribution have reemerged as central concerns in the public discourse. When we talk about class, we don't always know what is meant. Is class about income or affect or the ownership of the means of production? Perhaps it is about authority or autonomy? But what happens when, as is often the case in complex advanced economies, people can occupy social and economic roles that seem to indicate membership in more than one class? And what does this mean for the supposed relationship between class and potential po...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) Carbon Democracy
Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy. Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

Cannibal Capitalism
A trenchant look at contemporary capitalism's insatiable appetite - and a rallying cry for everyone who wants to stop it from devouring our world. Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life-guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In this tightly argued and urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devasta...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) History and Class Consciousness
History and Class Consciousness was the most important of Georg Lukacs's early theoretical writings, published in Germany in 1923. The subject of high praise and passionate criticism, it had a major impact on all the Marxist debates that followed, introducing key new concepts such as 'totality', 'reification' and 'imputed class consciousness'. This centenary edition, with a new preface by Michael Lowy, comprises a series of essays exploring, among other topics, the definition of orthodox Marxism, the question of legality and illegality, Ro...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) Forbidden Fruit
What is incest? Is it universally prohibitied? Does this prohibition concern only "biological" kinships or does it extend to various "social" kinships, such as those that are formed today in so-called blended families but which also exist in many other societies? This prohibition plays a fundamental role in the functioning of the multiple kinship systems studied throughout the world. But where does it come from? Can we think, with Claude L?vi-Strauss, that the prohibition of incest alone marks the passage from nature to culture? And how ca...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) How Did We Get Into This Mess?
George Monbiot is one of the most vocal, and eloquent, critics of the current consensus. How Did We Get into this Mess?, based on his powerful journalism, assesses the state we are now in: the devastation of the natural world, the crisis of inequality, the corporate takeover of nature, our obsessions with growth and profit and the decline of the political debate over what to do. While his diagnosis of the problems in front of us is clear-sighted and reasonable, he also develops solutions to challenge the politics of fear. How do we stand u...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) Late Fascism
In a world shaken by ecological, economic and political crises, the forces of authoritarianism and reaction seem to have the upper hand. How should we name, map and respond to this state of affairs? Late Fascism turns to theories of fascism produced in the past century, testing their capacity to illuminate our moment and challenging many of the commonplaces that debate on this extremely charged term devolves into. It can be tempting for any contemporary assessment of fascism to reach for historical analogy. Fascism is defined by returns an...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) The Good Die Young
Kissinger is dead but his blood-soaked legacy endures. If the American foreign policy establishment is a grand citadel, Henry Kissinger is the specter haunting its dusty hallways. For half a century, he was an omnipresent figure in war rooms and at press briefings, dutifully shepherding the American empire through successive attempts at expansion. For multiple generations of antiwar activists, Kissinger personified the depravity of the US war machine. The Good Die Young assesses a career too frequently applauded in essays from respected sc...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) The Last Man Takes LSD
In May 1975, Michel Foucault took LSD in the desert in southern California. He described it as the most important event of his life which would lead him to completely rework his History of Sexuality. His focus now would not be on power relations but on the experiments of subjectivity, and the care of the self. Through this lens he would reinterpret the social movements of May 68 and position himself politically in France in relation to the emergent ant-totalitarian and anti-welfare state currents. He would also come to appreciate the possi...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) The State of Capitalism
Thinking beyond pandemic capitalism. The health emergency that broke out in 2020 is a landmark event in the development of capitalism, confirming the underlying change signalled by the Great Crisis of 2007-9. The Pandemic Crisis has catapulted the state to the centre of economic activity. However, a historic impasse is steadily becoming apparent at the core of the world economy. Productive accumulation is flaccid, as both profitability and labour productivity are weak. Financialisation has entered a new phase, as "shadow banking" grew rela...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) Towers of Ivory and Steel
How Israeli universities collaborate in Israeli state violence against Palestinians Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, Maya Wind shatters this myth and documents how Israeli universities are directly complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights. As this book shows, Israeli universities serve as pillars of Israel's system of oppression against Palestinians. Academic disciplines...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) LACAN
Jacques Lacan continues to be subject to the most extravagant interpretations. Angelic to some, he is demonic to others. To recall Lacan's career, now that the heroic age of psychoanalysis is over, is to remember an intellectual and literary adventure that occupies a founding place in our modernity. Lacan went against the current of many of the hopes aroused by 1968, but embraced their paradoxes, and his language games and wordplay resonate today as so many injunctions to replace rampant individualism with a heightened social consciousness...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THE INFORMATION BOMB
Virilio's exploration of the relationship between technology, war and information technology. ?Civilization or the militarization of science?? With this typically hyperbolic and provocative question as a starting point, Paul Virilio explores the dominion of techno-science, cyberwar and the new information technologies over our lives . . . and deaths. After the era of the atomic bomb, Virilio posits an era of genetic and information bombs which replace the apocalyptic bang of nuclear death with the whimper of a subliminally reinforced eugen...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) The Origin of Capitalism
How did the dynamic economic system we know as capitalism develop among the peasants and lords of feudal Europe? In The Origin of Capitalism, a now-classic work of history, Ellen Meiksins Wood offers readers a clear and accessible introduction to the theories and debates concerning the birth of capitalism, imperialism, and the modern nation state. Capitalism is not a natural and inevitable consequence of human nature, nor simply an extension of age-old practices of trade and commerce. Rather, it is a late and localized product of very spec...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(H/B) After Work
Does it ever feel like you have no free time? You come home after work and instead of finding a space of rest and relaxation, you're confronted by a pile of new tasks to complete - cooking, cleaning, looking after the kids, and so on. In this ground-breaking book, Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek lay out how unpaid work in our homes has come to take up an ever-increasing portion of our lives - how the vacuum of free time has been taken up by vacuuming. Examining the history of the home over the past century - from running water to white goods...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) THE COMMUNIST HORIZON
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 manifes...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(P/B) AUTOMATION AND THE FUTURE OF WORK
A consensus-shattering account of automation technologies and their effect on workplaces and the labor market In this consensus-shattering account of automation technologies, Aaron Benanav investigates the economic trends that will shape our working lives far into the future. Silicon Valley titans, politicians, techno-futurists, and social critics have united in arguing that we are on the cusp of an era of rapid technological automation, heralding the end of work as we know it. But does the much discussed "rise of the robots" really explai...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...

(H/B) NEVER ENDING NIGHTMARE
How do we explain the strange survival of the forces responsible for the 2008 economic crisis, the worst since 1929? How is it that the economic policies that created the Great Recession emerged stronger than ever? When the system broke, a number of the world's most prominent economists hastened to announce that neoliberalism was over. But reports of its death were greatly exaggerated. For Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, neoliberalism is no mere dogma. Supported by powerful oligarchies, it is a veritable politico-institutional system, o...
Διαβάστε περισσότερα...