English books

In reality, competition between capitalist firms has never been soft, nor has international commerce been a factor of lasting peace. Contrary to common opinion (taken up before 1914 by certain socialists like Kautsky), the economic interdependence of great powers has never impeded war. Industrial and mercantile dynamism develops one zone at the expense of another, creates rival poles, each based on a territory with a State power that has military forces at its disposal.

An urgent and provocative account of the modern ‘militant’, a transformative figure at the front line of emancipatory politics. Around the world, recent events have seen the creation of a radical phalanx comprising students, the young, workers and immigrants. It is Badiou’s contention that the politics of such militants should condition the tasks of philosophy, even as philosophy clarifies the truth of our political condition.

Proudhon is famous for two reasons. First, he’s the author of What is Property? the book containing the immortal phrase “property is theft!” Second, he has emerged as the ‘first’ anarchist. This accolade is explained in part by his provocative reclamation of ‘anarchy’. Until Proudhon published his critique of property in 1840 the term had only been applied pejoratively. In the other part, it comes from his encounter with Marx. In 1846 Proudhon rebuffed Marx’s tentative advances and hinted that he found his proposals dogmatic. Text by Ruth Kinna and cover art is by Clifford Harper.

According to the united nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world. From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, and even from economic growth.

The current trend for writing about and describing actual experiences of sex work fuels a culture obsessed with the behaviour of sex workers. Rarely do these fearful dispatches come from sex workers themselves, and they never seem to deviate from the position that sex workers must be rescued from their condition, and the industry simply abolished - a position common among feminists and conservatives alike. In Playing the Whore, journalist Melissa Gira Grant turns these pieties on their head, arguing for an overhaul in the way we think about sex work.

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.

Forty years after the defeat of Nazism, and twenty years after the great wave of decolonization, how is it that racism remains a growing phenomenon? What are the special characteristics of contemporary racism? How can it be related to class divisions and to the contradictions of the nation-state? And how far, in turn, does racism today compel us to rethink the relationship between class struggles and nationalism?

Long before Occupy, cities were the subject of much utopian thinking. They are the centers of capital accumulation as well as of revolutionary politics, where deeper currents of social and political change rise to the surface. Do the financiers and developers control access to urban resources or do the people? Who dictates the quality and organization of daily life?

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there appeared in Central Europe a generation of Jewish intellectuals whose work was to transform modern culture. Drawing at once on the traditions of German Romanticism and Jewish messianism, their thought was organized around the cabalistic idea of the “tikkoun”: redemption. Redemption and Utopia uses the concept of “elective affinity” to explain the surprising community of spirit that existed between redemptive messianic religious thought and the wide variety of radical secular utopian beliefs held by this important group of intellectuals. The author outlines the circumstances that produced this unusual combination of religious and non-religious thought and illuminates the common assumptions that united such seemingly disparate figures as Martin Buber, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukács.

Carlo Cafiero (1846 - 1892) is undoubtedly one of the most important figures of the First International both in Italy, his home country, and in general throughout Europe. But this mild-mannered anarchist is all too often remembered only for some of the curious episodes in his life (his participation in the Benevento uprising, his "gift" of La Baronata to Bakunin and anarchist revolutionaries), rather than for his ideas and the enormous influence he had on the early socialist movement in Italy.