Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

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In modern Britain, the working class has become an object of fear and ridicule. From Little Britain's Vicky Pollard to the demonization of Jade Goody, media and politicians alike dismiss as feckless, criminalized and ignorant a vast, underprivileged swathe of society whose members have become stereotyped by one, hate-filled word: chavs. In this acclaimed investigation, Owen Jones explores how the working class has gone from `salt of the earth` to `scum of the earth.` Exposing the ignorance and prejudice at the heart of the chav caricature, he portrays a far more complex reality. The chav stereotype, he argues, is used by governments as a convenient figleaf to avoid genuine engagement with social and economic problems and to justify widening inequality. Based on a wealth of original research, Chavs is a damning indictment of the media and political establishment and an illuminating, disturbing portrait of inequality and class hatred in modern Britain. This updated edition includes a new chapter exploring the causes and consequences of the UK riots in the summer of 2010.

Walter Benjamin, Early Writings

Walter Benjamin, Early Writings

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Walter Benjamin became a published writer at the age of seventeen. Yet the first stirrings of this most original of critical minds—penned during the years in which he transformed himself from the comfortable son of a haute-bourgeois German Jewish family into the nomadic, uncompromising philosopher-critic we have since come to appreciate—have until now remained largely unavailable in English. Early Writings, 1910-1917 rectifies this situation, documenting the formative intellectual experiences of one of the twentieth century's most resolutely independent thinkers.Here we see the young Benjamin in his various roles as moralist, cultural critic, school reformer, and poet-philosopher. The diversity of interest and profundity of thought characteristic of his better-known work from the 1920s and 30s are already in evidence, as we witness the emergence of critical projects that would occupy Benjamin throughout his intellectual career: the role of the present in historical remembrance, the relationship of the intellectual to political action, the idea of truth in works of art, and the investigation of language as the veiled medium of experience. Even at this early stage, a recognizably Benjaminian way of thinking comes into view—a daring, boundary-crossing enterprise that does away with classical antitheses in favor of the relentlessly-seeking critical consciousness that produced the groundbreaking works of his later years. With the publication of these early writings, our portrait of one of the most significant intellects of the twentieth century edges closer to completion.

Antonis Vradis, Dimitris Dalakoglou, Revolt and Crisis in Greece: Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future Still to Come

Antonis Vradis, Dimitris Dalakoglou, Revolt and Crisis in Greece: Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future Still to Come

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How does a revolt come about and what does it leave behind? What impact does it have on those who participate in it and those who simply watch it? Is the Greek revolt of December 2008 confined to the shores of the Mediterranean, or are there lessons we can bring to bear on social action around the globe? Revolt and Crisis in Greece: Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future Still to Come is a collective attempt to grapple with these questions. A collaboration between anarchist publishing collectives Occupied London and AK Press, this timely new volume traces Greece's long moment of transition from the revolt of 2008 to the economic crisis that followed. In its twenty chapters, authors from around the world including those on the ground in Greece analyse how December became possible, exploring its legacies and the position of the social antagonist movement in face of the economic crisis and the arrival of the International Monetary Fund. In the essays collected here, over two dozen writers offer historical analysis of the factors that gave birth to December and the potentialities it has opened up in face of the capitalist crisis. Yet the book also highlights the dilemmas the antagonist movement has been faced with since: the book is an open question and a call to the global antagonist movement, and its allies around the world, to radically rethink and redefine our tactics in a rapidly changing landscape where crises and potentialities are engaged in a fierce battle with an uncertain outcome. Contributors include Vaso Makrygianni, Haris Tsavdaroglou, Christos Filippidis, Christos Giovanopoulos, TPTG, Metropolitan Sirens, Yannis Kallianos, Hara Kouki, Kirilov, Some of Us, Soula M., Christos Lynteris, Yiannis Kaplanis, David Graeber, Christos Boukalas, Alex Trocchi, Antonis Vradis, Dimitris Dalakoglou and the Occupied London Collective. Art and design by Leandros, Klara Jaya Brekke and Tim Simons. Edited by Antonis Vradis and Dimitris Dalakoglou of Occupied London.

Joshua B. Freeman, Working Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II

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Neil Smith, Essay Collection

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Smith N - 'Academic War over the Field of Geography' - The Elimination of Geography at Harvard, 1947-1951

Smith N - Blind Man's Buff, or Hamnett's Philosophical Individualism in Search of Gentrification
Smith N - Bowman's New World and the Council on Foreign Relations

Smith N - Class Struggle on Avenue B - The Lower East Side as Wild West (Chap. 1 from The New Urban Fronteir)
Smith N - Contours of a Spatialized Politics - Homeless Vehicles and the Production of Geographical Scale

Smith N - For a History of Geography - Response to Comments
Smith N - Gentrification and the Rent Gap

Smith N - Gentrification and Uneven Development
Smith N - Geography, Difference and the Politics of Scale

Smith N - Geography, Empire and Social Theory
Smith N - Geust Editorial - Another Revolution is Possible - Foucault, Ethics and Politics

Smith N - Giuliani Time - The Revanchist 1990s
Smith N - Global Executioner

Smith N - History and Philosophy of Geography - Real Wars, Theory Wars
Smith N - Is a Critical Geopolitics Possible - Foucault, Class and the Vision Thing

Smith N - Is Gentrification a Dirty Word (Chap. 2 from The New Urban Frontier)
Smith N - Retro Modern or Revolutionary - Scale Shifts and Political Reaction in Twenty-First Century Urbanism

Smith N - The Endgame of Globalization
Smith N - The Region is Dead! Long Live the Region!

Smith N - The Satanic Geographies of Globalization - Uneven Development in the 1990s
Smith N - What Happened to Class

Smith N - Which New Urbanism - The Revanchist '90s
Smith N and Dennis - The Restructuring of Geographical Scale - Coalescence and Fragmentation of the Northern Core Region

Smith N and Schaffer - The Gentrification of Harlem

Neil Smith, Selected Essays

On geography, capital, development, and gentrification

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Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space [3rd Ed.]

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[book] 2008/1990/1984, U of Georgia ; living classic of critical Human Geography w/ 2 prefaces, 2 afterwords and a foreword by David Harvey.

From University of Georgia, 

"In Uneven Development, a classic in its field, Neil Smith offers the first full theory of uneven geographical development, entwining theories of space and nature with a critique of capitalist development. Featuring pathbreaking analyses of the production of nature and the politics of scale, Smith's work anticipated many of the uneven contours that now mark neoliberal globalization. This third edition features an afterword updating the analysis for the present day." 

Neil Smith, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City

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"Why have so many central and inner cities in Europe, North America and Australia been so radically revamped in the last three decades, converting urban decay into new chic? Will the process continue in the twenty-first century or has it ended? What does this mean for the people who live there? Can they do anything about it?

This book challenges conventional wisdom, which holds gentrification to be the simple outcome of new middle-class tastes and a demand for urban living. It reveals gentrification as part of a much larger shift in the political economy and culture of the late twentieth century. Documenting in gritty detail the conflicts that gentrification brings to the new urban 'frontiers', the author explores the interconnections of urban policy, patterns of investment, eviction, and homelessness.

The failure of liberal urban policy and the end of the 1980s financial boom have made the end-of-the-century city a darker and more dangerous place. Public policy and the private market are conspiring against minorities, working people, the poor, and the homeless as never before. In the emerging revanchist city, gentrification has become part of this policy of revenge." 

John Summers, The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills

John Summers, The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills

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C. Wright Mills was a radical public intellectual, a tough-talking, motorcycle-riding anarchist from Texas who taught sociology at Columbia University. Mills's three most influential books--The Power Elite, White Collar, and The Sociological Imagination--were originally published by OUP and are considered classics. The first collection of his writings to be published since 1963, The Politics of Truth contains 23 out-of-print and hard-to-find writings which show his growth from academic sociologist to an intellectual maestro in command of a mature style, a dissenter who sought to inspire the public to oppose the drift toward permanent war. Given the political deceptions of recent years, Mills's truth-telling is more relevant than ever. Seminal papers including "Letter to the New Left" appear alongside lesser known meditations such as "Are We Losing Our Sense of Belonging?" John Summers provides fresh insights in his introduction, which gives an overview of Mills's life and career. Summers has also written annotations that establish each piece's context and has drawn up a comprehensive bibliography of Mills's published and unpublished writings.

Herbert Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism

Herbert Marcuse, Heideggerian Marxism

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The Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) studied with Martin Heidegger at Freiburg University from 1928 to 1932 and completed a dissertation on Hegel’s theory of historicity under Heidegger’s supervision. During these years, Marcuse wrote a number of provocative philosophical essays experimenting with the possibilities of Heideggerian Marxism. For a time he believed that Heidegger’s ideas could revitalize Marxism, providing a dimension of experiential concreteness that was sorely lacking in the German Idealist tradition. Ultimately, two events deterred Marcuse from completing this program: the 1932 publication of Marx’s early economic and philosophical manuscripts, and Heidegger’s conversion to Nazism a year later. Heideggerian Marxism offers rich and fascinating testimony concerning the first attempt to fuse Marxism and existentialism. These essays offer invaluable insight concerning Marcuse’s early philosophical evolution. They document one of the century’s most important Marxist philosophers attempting to respond to the “crisis of Marxism”: the failure of the European revolution coupled with the growing repression in the USSR. In response, Marcuse contrived an imaginative and original theoretical synthesis: “existential Marxism.”

Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings

Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings

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In the uprisings of the Arab world, Alain Badiou discerns echoes of the European revolutions of 1848. In both cases, the object was to overthrow despotic regimes maintained by the great powers—regimes designed to impose the will of financial oligarchies. Both events occurred after what was commonly thought to be the end of a revolutionary epoch: in 1815, the final defeat of Napoleon; and in 1989, the fall of the Soviet Union. But the revolutions of 1848 proclaimed for a century and a half the return of revolutionary thought and action. Likewise, the uprisings underway today herald a worldwide resurgence in the liberating force of the masses—despite the attempts of the ‘international community’ to neutralize its power.

Badiou’s book salutes this reawakening of history, weaving examples from the Arab Spring and elsewhere into a global analysis of the return of emancipatory universalism.

Isaak Illich Rubin, A History of Economic Thought

Isaak Illich Rubin, A History of Economic Thought

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This is an important and unparalleled work which situated Marx's economic theory in relation to the economic theories that pre-date him - from mercantilism to John Stuart Mill. First published in 1929, the book dates from the fertile period of Marxist economic theory that produced the works of Preobrazhensky, Kondratiev and Bukharin. However as a review of pre-Marxist economics it stands out from the many books which dwell only on the contemporary industrialisation debates. This is a selective reading of economic thought, offering analysis of those elements in past economics that accord with the areas of interest to Marxism. Each section gives a brief analysis of a specific school of thought, with particular attention to the social and ideological climate within which it evolved. The book differs from orthodox accounts in not merely mentioning historical background but using it as a central explanation of the evolution of economic theories. As a counterpoint to Rubin, Catherine Colliot-Thelene has written a daring essay which locates a crucial flaw in the logical structure of Marx's Capital.

Slavoj Zizek, How to Read Lacan

Slavoj Zizek, How to Read Lacan

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“The only thing of which one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one’s desire.”—Jacques Lacan
The How to Read series provides a context and an explanation that will facilitate and enrich your understanding of texts vital to the canon. These books use excerpts from the major texts to explain essential topics, such as Jacques Lacan's core ideas about enjoyment, which re-created our concept of psychoanalysis. Lacan’s motto of the ethics of psychoanalysis involves a profound paradox. Traditionally, psychoanalysis was expected to allow the patient to overcome the obstacles which prevented access to "normal" sexual enjoyment; today, however, we are bombarded by different versions of the injunction "Enjoy!" Psychoanalysis is the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy. Slavoj Žižek’s passionate defense of Lacan reasserts Lacan’s ethical urgency. For Lacan, psychoanalysis is a procedure of reading and each chapter reads a passage from Lacan as a tool to interpret another text from philosophy, art or popular ideology.

Radwan Ziadeh, Power and Policy in Syria: Intelligence Services, Foreign Relations and Democracy in the Modern Middle East

Radwan Ziadeh, Power and Policy in Syria: Intelligence Services, Foreign Relations and Democracy in the Modern Middle East

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In an unstable Middle East, beset by regional tensions and repercussions of the global war on terror, Syria is a key player. The bloodless coup by General Hafez al-Assad, in 1970, put in place a powerful autocratic machinery at the core of the state which continues till today under the control of his son Bashar. Here Radwan Ziadeh presents a fresh and penetrating analysis of Syria’s political structure -- a "despotic" state monopoly, a bureaucratic climate marked by fear, and the administrative structure through which centralized control is exercised. With a focus on Syria’s intelligence services which have significant influence in legal and policy decisions, and the conditions and patterns of foreign policy decision-making, particularly vis-à-vis the US, Power and Policy in Syria is essential reading for all those interested in Syria, the modern Middle East, International Relations and Security Studies.

Hesham Al-Awadi, In Pursuit of Legitimacy: The Muslim Brothers and Mubarak, 1982-2000

Hesham Al-Awadi, In Pursuit of Legitimacy: The Muslim Brothers and Mubarak, 1982-2000

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Hesham Al-Awadi argues that the growing impact of the Muslim Brotherhood on Egyptian politics and society is part of the movement's struggle to gain official legitimacy since its ban in 1954. The movement's remarkable presence in syndicates, student unions, investment companies and parliament was the outcome of its highly organized structure, consolidated during the earlier years of President Mubarak. Although the Brotherhood failed to secure the recognition of the state, they did secure a degree of informal legitimacy, based on their services to middle class beneficiaries. This "social" legitimacy was soon employed politically against the regime as Mubarak, haunted by the sudden rise of Islamists in Algeria and his failure to legitimate his leadership, was impelled to revoke his policies in the nineties.

Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization

Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization

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An American Empire, constructed over the last century, long ago overtook European colonialism, and it has been widely assumed that the new globalism it espoused took us "beyond geography." Neil Smith debunks that assumption, offering an incisive argument that American globalism had a distinct geography and was pieced together as part of a powerful geographical vision. The power of geography did not die with the twilight of European colonialism, but it did change fundamentally. That the inauguration of the American Century brought a loss of public geographical sensibility in the United States was itself a political symptom of the emerging empire. This book provides a vital geographical-historical context for understanding the power and limits of contemporary globalization, which can now be seen as representing the third of three distinct historical moments of U.S. global ambition.The story unfolds through a decisive account of the career of Isaiah Bowman (1878-1950), the most famous American geographer of the twentieth century. For nearly four decades Bowman operated around the vortex of state power, working to bring an American order to the global landscape. An explorer on the famous Machu Picchu expedition of 1911 who came to be known first as "Woodrow Wilson's geographer," and later as Frankin D. Roosevelt's, Bowman was present at the creation of U.S. liberal foreign policy. A quarter-century later, Bowman was at the center of Roosevelt's State Department, concerned with the disposition of Germany and heightened U.S. access to European colonies; he was described by Dean Acheson as a key "architect of the United Nations." In that period he was a leader in American science, served as president of Johns Hopkins University, and became an early and vociferous cold warrior. A complicated, contradictory, and at times controversial figure who was very much in the public eye, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine. Bowman's career as a geographer in an era when the value of geography was deeply questioned provides a unique window into the contradictory uses of geographical knowledge in the construction of the American Empire. Smith's historical excavation reveals, in broad strokes yet with lively detail, that today's American-inspired globalization springs not from the 1980s but from two earlier moments in 1919 and 1945, both of which ended in failure. By recharting the geography of this history, Smith brings the politics--and the limits--of contemporary globalization sharply into focus.

Samir Amin, Eurocentrism

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Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale

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Samir Amin, Unequal Development

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Samir Amin, Neocolonialism in West Africa

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Samir Amin, The Law of Worldwide Value

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Samir Amin, Ending the Crisis of Capitalism

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Samir Amin, Class and Nation

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Samir Amin, Global History: A View from the South

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Samir Amin, The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World

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Samir Amin, Eurocentrism: Modernity, Religion and Democracy

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Samir Amin, Empire of Chaos

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Samir Amin, Beyond US Hegemony?: Assessing the Prospects for a Multipolar World

Samir Amin rejects the notion that the current form of neoliberal capitalism is an inevitable future for humanity. He analyzes tendencies within the US, Europe and Japan, the rising powers of China and India, the likely future trajectory of post-Soviet Russia, and the developing world. He explores whether other hegemonic blocs may emerge to circumscribe American power, and force free market capitalism to adjust to demands other than its narrow central economic logic. He identifies the key global campaigns that he feels progressives should launch, and warns that there is no alternative to winning political power.

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Assef Bayat, Workers and Revolution in Iran

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Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran

Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran

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In a reappraisal of Iran's modern history, Ervand Abrahamian traces its traumatic journey across the twentieth century, through the discovery of oil, imperial interventions, the rule of the Pahlavis and, in 1979, revolution and the birth of the Islamic Republic. In the intervening years, the country has experienced a bitter war with Iraq, the transformation of society under the clergy and, more recently, the expansion of the state and the struggle for power between the old elites, the intelligentsia and the commercial middle class. The author is a compassionate expositor. While he adroitly negotiates the twists and turns of the country's regional and international politics, at the heart of his book are the people of Iran. It is to them and their resilience that this book is dedicated, as Iran emerges at the beginning of the twenty-first century as one of the most powerful states in the Middle East.

Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom

Roy Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom

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Dialectic is now widely regarded as a classic of contemporary philosophy. This book, first published in 1993, sets itself three main aims: the development of a general theory of dialectic, of which Hegelian dialectic can be seen to be a special case; the dialectical enrichment and deepening of critical realism, viz. into the system of dialectical critical realism; and the outline of the elements of a totalizing critique of Western philosophy. The first chapter clarifies the rational core of Hegelian dialectic. Chapter two then proceeds to develop a general theory of dialectic. Isolating the fallacy of 'ontological monovalence', Roy Bhaskar then shows how absence and other negating concepts such as contradiction have a legitimate and necessary ontological employment. He then goes on to give a synoptic account of key dialectical concepts such as the concrete universal; to sketch the further dialectical development of critical naturalism through an account of what he calls four-planar social being; and following consideration of the dialectical critique of analytical reason, he moves on to the real definition of dialectic as absenting absence and in the human sphere, the axiology of freedom. Chapter three extends and deepens critical realism’s characteristic concerns with ontology, science, social science and emancipation not only into the realms of negativity and totality, but also into the fields of reference and truth, spatio-temporality, tense and process, the logic of dialectical universalizability and on to the plane of ethics, where it articulates a combination of moral realism and ethical naturalism, whereby consideration of elemental desire involves commitment to the eudaimonistic society. This is then followed by a sublime discussion of key moments in the trajectory of Western philosophy, the tradition of which can now be seen to be based on what the author calls the unholy trinity of the epistemic fallacy or the reduction of being to knowledge, primal squeeze or the collapse of structure and alethic truth, and ontological monovalence.

Vered Amit, Noel Dyck, Claiming Individuality: The Cultural Politics of Distinction

Vered Amit, Noel Dyck, Claiming Individuality: The Cultural Politics of Distinction

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Individuality is often interpreted as a force for the separation and autonomy of the individual. This book takes a different approach: the contributors explore the expression of individuality as a form of social action inextricably linked to questions of belonging. This book addresses a continuing effort within anthropology to interrogate sociality.Using case studies from North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, the contributors examine a wide range of topics. Covering everything from studies of childhood and family relations to patterns of movement for tourism, work, and religious pilgrimage; from the spinning of fashions to the sculpting of life narratives, the contributors analyse the shifting forms of the cultural politics of distinction. The book illustrates the variation and ingenuity with which people in various settings claim diverse forms of individuality, their motivations for doing so, and the outcomes of their actions. 

John Gledhill, Power And Its Disguises, Anthropological Perspectives on Politics

John Gledhill, Power And Its Disguises, Anthropological Perspectives on Politics

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In this fully updated edition of Power and Its Disguises, John Gledhill explores both the complexities of local situations and the power relations that shape the global order. He shows how historically informed anthropological perspectives can contribute to debates about democratisation by incorporating a ‘view from below’ and revealing forces that shape power relations behind the formal facade of state institutions. Examples are drawn from Brazil, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Indonesia, India, Mexico, Peru, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Sri Lanka, amongst others.

Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies

Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies

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In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by the well-known political economist which cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the New York Tribune, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with our conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well.   Marx at the Margins ultimately argues that alongside his overarching critique of capital, Marx created a theory of history that was multi-layered and not easily reduced to a single model of development or revolution. Through highly-informed readings on work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond.

Uli Linke, Danielle Taana Smith, Cultures of Fear: A Critical Reader

Uli Linke, Danielle Taana Smith, Cultures of Fear: A Critical Reader

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In Cultures of Fear, a truly world-class line up of scholars explore how governments use fear in order to control their citizens. The "social contract" gives modern states responsibility for the security of their citizens, but this collection argues that governments often nurture a culture of fear within their contries. When people are scared of "terrorist" threats, or "alarming rises" in violent crime they are more likely to accept oppressive laws from their rulers. Cultures of Fear is and interdisciplinary reader for students of anthropology and politics. Contributors include Noam Chomsky, Slavoj Zizek, Jean Baudrillard, Catharine MacKinnon, Neil Smith, Cynthia Enloe, David L. Altheide, Cynthia Cockburn and Carolyn Nordstrum.

Prof. Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Ellen Bal, Oscar Salemink, A World of Insecurity: Anthropological Perspectives of Human Security

Prof. Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Ellen Bal, Oscar Salemink, A World of Insecurity: Anthropological Perspectives of Human Security

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Human security is a key element in the measure of well-being and is a hot topic in anthropology and development studies. A World of Insecurity outlines a new approach to the subject. The contributors expose a contradiction at the heart of conventional accounts of what constitutes human security namely that without taking non-material considerations such as religion, ethnicity and gender into account, discussions of human security, academically and in practical terms, are incomplete, inconclusive and deeply flawed. A variety of compelling case studies indicate that, in fact, material security alone cannot adequately explain or fully account for human activity in a range of different settings, and exposd to a variety of different threats. This forceful intervention will expand and deepen the entire concept of human security, in the process endowing it with political relevance. It is an essential book for students of development studies and anthropology.

Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest Vol. 0 Issue 0

Contention: The Multidisciplinary Journal of Social Protest Vol. 0 Issue 0

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Contention is a multidisciplinary peer-reviewed and open access journal dedicated to research on and about different forms of social protest. Contention aims to go beyond the fences drawn between different Social Sciences and across Social Sciences and Humanities. Contention accepts contributions from different fields and areas.

Gideon Freudenthal, Peter McLaughlin, The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution: Texts by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann

Gideon Freudenthal, Peter McLaughlin, The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution: Texts by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann

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The volume collects classics of Marxist historiography of science, including a new translation of Boris Hessen’s “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia” (1931), Henryk Grossmann’s “The Social Foundation of Mechanistic Philosophy and Manufacture” (1935) and his Descartes’ New Ideal of Science. Universal Science vs. Science of an Elite, published here for the first time. These three papers, along with two very short pieces, present the classical Marxist analysis of the relation of science and technology. In a detailed introductory essay the editors analyze the main arguments of these authors. They show that Hessen and Grossmann never attempted to explain the rise of modern science by the utilitarian motives of the scientists. On the contrary, they argue not that science developed in order to improve technology but rather by means of the study of technology. Marshalling a wealth of historical evidence, Hessen and Grossmann argue that technology served as the laboratory of scientific mechanics. This is the reason thatin physics mechanics developed first and that thermodynamics and electrodynamics followed later when the respective technologies (steam engines and dynamos) had made other aspects of nature experimentally manageable. Finally, the editors address Hessen’s thesis, that ideological commitments in the age of Newton prevented the formation of a consistent materialist world view on the basis of the new science.

V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language

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Alain Badiou, Rhapsody For The Theatre: A Short Philosophical Treatise

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"For Alain Badiou, theatre—unlike cinema—is the place for the staging of a truly emancipatory collective subject. In this sense theatre is, of all the arts, the one strictly homologous to politics: both theatre and politics depend on a limited set of texts or statements, collectively enacted by a group of actors or militants, which put a limit on the excessive power of the state. This explains why the history of theatre has always been inseparable from a history of state repression and censorship.

This definitive collection includes not only Badiou’s pamphlet Rhapsody for the Theatre but also essays on Jean-Paul Sartre, on the political destiny of contemporary theatre, and on Badiou’s own work as a playwright, as author of the Ahmed Tetralogy."  

Robert Paul Resch, Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory

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"The writings of the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and his associates have figured prominently in the development of contemporary social theory. The Althusserian school of Structural Marxism is a startlingly original synthesis of Marxism and Modernism, which has produced a large body of work that extends across the human sciences and the humanities to engage a wide variety of cultures, theoretical problems, and political issues. Despite the fact that Althusser himself is widely recognized as a major figure, the breadth, coherence, and achievements of Structural Marxism as a whole have gone largely unrecognized.
In this, the most systematic and wide-ranging assessment of Structural Marxism in any language, Resch provides a comprehensive and thematic introduction to the work of Althusser, Nicos Poulantzas, Pierre Macherey, Etienne Balibar, Emmanuel Terray, Terry Eagleton, Göran Therborn, Renée Balibar, Perry Anderson, Pierre-Philippe Rey, Michel Pêchaux, Guy Bois, and others. Resch's sympathetic and critical study demonstrates the enormous significance of Althusser's modernist renewal of Marxist social theory and its ongoing challenge to post-Marxist movements such as postmodernism and neo-liberalism." 

Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend

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From Verso Books,

"“Striking elegance, economy, and argumentative power.”—Times Literary Supplement

“Marx did not reject the idea of a human nature. He was right not to do so.”

That is the conclusion of this passionate and polemical new work by Norman Geras. In it, he places the sixth of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbachunder rigorous scrutiny. He argues that this ambiguous statement—widely cited as evidence that Marx broke with all conceptions of human nature in 1845—must be read in the context of Marx’s work as a whole. His later writings are informed by an idea of a specifically human nature that fulfills both explanatory and normative functions.

The belief that Marx’s historical materialism entailed a denial of the conception of human nature is, Geras writes, “an old fixation, which the Althusserian influence in this matter has fed upon … Because this fixation still exists and is misguided, it is still necessary to challenge it.” One hundred years after Marx’s death, this timely essay—combining the strengths of analytical philosophy and classical Marxism—rediscovers a central part of his heritage." 

The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism

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"Continental philosophy has entered a new period of ferment. The long deconstructionist era was followed with a period dominated by Deleuze, which has in turn evolved into a new situation still difficult to define. However, one common thread running through the new brand of continental positions is a renewed attention to materialist and realist options in philosophy. Among the leaders of the established generation, this new focus takes numerous forms. It might be hard to find many shared positions in the writings of Badiou, DeLanda, Laruelle, Latour, Stengers, and Žižek, but what is missing from their positions is an obsession with the critique of written texts. All of them elaborate a positive ontology, despite the incompatibility of their results. Meanwhile, the new generation of continental thinkers is pushing these trends still further, as seen in currents ranging from transcendental materialism to the London-based speculative realism movement to new revivals of Derrida. As indicated by the title The Speculative Turn, the new currents of continental philosophy depart from the text-centered hermeneutic models of the past and engage in daring speculations about the nature of reality itself. This anthology assembles authors, of several generations and numerous nationalities, who will be at the centre of debate in continental philosophy for decades to come."  

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency

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"From the preface by Alain Badiou:

It is no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy, understood here as the history of what it is to know ... This remarkable "critique of critique" is introduced here without embellishment, cutting straight to the heart of the matter in a particularly clear and logical manner. It allows the destiny of thought to be the absolute once more.

 "This work is one of the most important to appear in continental philosophy in recent years and deserves a wide readership at the earliest possible date ... Après la finitude is an important book of philosophy by an authnted emerging voices in continental thought. Quentin Meillassoux deserves our close attention in the years to come and his book deserves rapid translation and widespread discussion in the English-speaking world. There is nothing like it."

—Graham Harman in Philosophy Today

 Quentin Meillassoux's remarkable debut makes a strikingly original contribution to contemporary French philosophy and is set to have a significant impact on the future of continental philosophy. Written in a style that marries great clarity of expression with argumentative rigour, After Finitude provides bold readings of the history of philosophy and sets out a devastating critique of the unavowed fideism at the heart of post-Kantian philosophy.

The exceptional lucidity and the centrality of argument in Meillassoux's writing should appeal to analytic as well as continental philosophers, while his critique of fideism will be of interest to anyone preoccupied by the relation between philosophy, theology and religion.

Meillassoux introduces a startlingly novel philosophical alternative to the forced choice between dogmatism and critique. After Finitude proposes a new alliance between philosophy and science and calls for an unequivocal halt to the creeping return of religiosity in contemporary philosophical discourse."  

Stanley Aronowitz and Jonathan Cutler, Post-Work: The Wages of Cybernation

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PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:

In "Post-Work", Stanley Aronowitz and Jonathan Cutler have collected essays from a variety of scholars to discuss the dreary future of work. The introduction, 'The Post-Work Manifesto', provides the framework for a radical reappraisal of work and suggests an alternative organization of labor. The provocative essays that follow focus on specific issues that are key to our reconceptualization of the notion and practice of work, with coverage of the fight for shorter hours, the relationship between school and work, and the role of welfare, among others.

Armed with an interdisciplinary approach, Post-Work looks beyond the rancorous debates around welfare politics and lays out the real sources of anxiety in the modern workplace. The result is an offering of hope for the future--an alternative path for a cybernation, where the possibility of less work for a better standard of living is possible.

REVIEW:

Where labor history and critical analysis of economic trends circulate, this interdisciplinary collection of essays (some original, others first presented at a conference sponsored by the Center for Cultural Studies--which sociologist Aronowitz heads--at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York) should find interested readers. Convinced that the labor movement's abandonment of shorter working hours as a goal laid the groundwork for the travails of our current globalized, downsized, outsourced workplaces, the authors discuss poverty, welfare policy, the recurring notion of a guaranteed income, "Why There Is No Movement of the Poor," the education-to-work controversy, attacks on the university tenure system, complex effects of computers on the positions of white-collar workers, and the difficulty of incorporating cultural concerns, including leisure time and other quality-of-life issues, into the dominant, rabidly free-market discourse of political economy. A demanding book but full of useful insights (Mary Carroll, Booklist)

Alain Badiou, The Incident at Antioch/L'Incident d'Antioche: A Tragedy in Three Acts/Tragédie en trois actes (French and English)

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NOTE: The format of this e-book has been modified. The printed book presented French and English text on facing pages. In the e-book, links at the beginning of each Act and Scene connect to French and English versions.

Translated by SUSAN SPITZER

Introduction by KENNETH REINHARD

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION:

"The Incident at Antioch" is a key play marking Alain Badiou's transition from classical Marxism to a "politics of subtraction" far removed from party and state. Written with striking eloquence and extraordinary poetic richness, and shifting from highly serious emotional and intellectual drama to surreal comic interlude, the work features statesmen, workers, and revolutionaries struggling to reconcile the nature and practice of politics. 

This bilingual edition presents "L'Incident d'Antioche" in its original French and an expertly executed English translation {the printed book version (perfect bound) is an ''en face'' bilingual edition}. 

Badiou adds a special preface, and an introduction by the scholar Kenneth Reinhard connects the play to Paul Claudel's 'The City', Saint Paul and the early history of the Church, and the innovative mathematical thinking of Paul Cohen. 

The translation includes Susan Spitzer's extensive notes clarifying allusions and quotations and hinting at Badiou's intentions. An interview with Badiou encompasses the play's settings, themes, and events, as well as his ongoing literary and conceptual experimentation on stage and off. 

KENNETH REINHARD is associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He also wrote the "Introduction" to Badiou's "Plato's Republic: A Dialogue in 16 Chapters". Reinhard is the coauthor of "The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology" and "After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis". 

SUSAN SPITZER is a frequent translator of Badiou’s works, most recently his "Plato's Republic: A Dialogue in 16 Chapters" and "Five Lessons on Wagner".

The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics

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"This volume brings together essays by different generations of Italian thinkers which address, whether in affirmative, problematizing or genealogical registers, the entanglement of philosophical speculation and political proposition within recent Italian thought. Nihilism and biopolitics, two concepts that have played a very prominent role in theoretical discussions in Italy, serve as the thematic foci around which the collection orbits, as it seeks to define the historical and geographical particularity of these notions as well their continuing impact on an international debate. The volume also covers the debate around ‘weak thought’ (pensiero debole), the feminist thinking of sexual difference, the re-emergence of political anthropology and the question of communism. The contributors provide contrasting narratives of the development of post-war Italian thought and trace paths out of the theoretical and political impasses of the present—against what Negri, in the text from which the volume takes its name, calls ‘the Italian desert’.


Contents:
Antonio Negri, 'The Italian Difference'
Pier Aldo Rovatti, 'Foucault Docet'
Gianni Vattimo, 'Nihilism as Emancipation'
Roberto Esposito, 'Community and Nihilism'
Matteo Mandarini, 'Beyond Nihilism: Notes Towards a Critique of Left-Heideggerianism in Italian Philosophy of the 1970s'
Luisa Muraro, 'The Symbolic Independence from Power'
Mario Tronti, 'Towards a Critique of Political Democracy'
Alberto Toscano, 'Chronicles of Insurrection: Tronti, Negri and the Subject of Antagonism'
Paolo Virno, 'Natural-Historical Diagrams: The ‘New Global’ Movement and the Biological Invariant'
Lorenzo Chiesa, 'Giorgio Agamben's Franciscan Ontology'" 

Susan J. Marks, Aqua Shock, Revised and Updated: Water in Crisis

Susan J. Marks, Aqua Shock, Revised and Updated: Water in Crisis

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An objective look at America's rapidly shrinking water supply once believed to be a problem limited to America's southwest, water shortages are now an issue coast to coast, from New England to California. In Aqua Shock: The Water Crisis in America, author Susan J. Marks provides a comprehensive analysis of the current conflicts being waged over dwindling water supplies. She presents the findings of university studies, think tanks, and research groups, as well as the opinions of water experts, including Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security. The book Explains where our water comes from and who controls it, as well as the cost of water on cash, commodities, and capitalism describes the risks of running out of water details how we can preserve and protect our most precious, yet most undervalued natural resource right now, battles over water supplies rage across the country. Aqua Shock is an objective look at how we arrived at this crisis point and what we can do-and should be doing-to solve the water crisis in America.

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

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From Amazon,

"The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it.
In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault's fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle's notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over "life" is implicit.
The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign's status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed—a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective "naked life" of all individuals." 

Roy L. Prosterman, Robert Mitchell, Timothy Hanstad, One Billion Rising: Law, Land and the Alleviation of Global Poverty

Roy L. Prosterman, Robert Mitchell, Timothy Hanstad, One Billion Rising: Law, Land and the Alleviation of Global Poverty

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In an age fueled by globalization and focused on the struggling citizens of the urban metropolis, it might come as a surprise to learn that most of the world’s 1.4 billion poorest people are still rural. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these populations lack ownership of—and rights to—the land that forms their principal source of livelihood. Although land reform and related legal work have transformed the lives of millions of families by providing secure land rights, not all such efforts have succeeded. That mix of success and failure has been a big part of the reason that, in recent years, the conventional wisdom concerning law and land tenure reform—what is needed, what is possible, and how such reform contributes to pro-poor development—has changed, sometimes in striking ways. In this timely and important volume, lawyers from the Rural Development Institute and the University of Washington’s School of Law in Seattle use four decades worth of research on the results of land tenure reform efforts around the world in order to address how we might better meet the struggles to understand and change the plight of the rural poor.

Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution

Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution

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Brilliantly researched and wonderfully written, LOVE AND CAPITAL is a heartbreaking and dramatic saga of the family side of the man whose works would redefine the world after his death. Drawing upon years of research, acclaimed biographer Mary Gabriel brings to light the story of Karl and Jenny Marx's marriage. We follow them as they roam Europe, on the run from governments amidst an age of revolution and a secret network of would-be revolutionaries, and see Karl not only as an intellectual, but as a protective father and loving husband, a revolutionary, a jokester, a man of tremendous passions, both political and personal. In LOVE AND CAPITAL, Mary Gabriel has given us a vivid, resplendent, and truly human portrait of the Marxes-their desires, heartbreak and devotion to each others ideals.