Politics/Current Affairs

Class Power On Zero-Hours

Angry Workers

The Debt System. A History of Sovereign Debts and Their Repudiation

Éric Toussaint

For as long as there have been rich nations and poor nations, debt has been a powerful force for maintaining the unequal relations between them. Treated as sacrosanct, immutable, and eternally binding, it has become the yoke of choice for imperial powers in the post-colonial world to enforce their subservience over the global south. In this ground-breaking history, renowned economist Éric Toussaint argues for a radical reversal of this balance of accounts through the repudiation of sovereign debt. Éric Toussaint, Senior Lecturer at the University of Liège, is President of Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debts, Belgium. He is the co-author of Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank, Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers.

Vagabonds 002. The Hologram. Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post- Pandemic Future

Cassie Thornton

A radical new approach to health and caregiving in the age of COVID-19.

Essential Work Disposable Workers. Migration, Capitalism, Class

Mostafa Henaway

In recent years, waves of migration from the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa to Europe and North America have been met with a corresponding rise in anti-immigrant, far-right populism in host countries, placing the question of migration at the forefront of politics and social movements. In this sweeping account, Henaway seeks to understand these patterns through contextualizing global migration within a history of global capitalism, class formation, and the financialization of migration. As globalization intensifies, workers everywhere are forced to compete for wages - not through foreign investment and outsourcing, but through an increasingly mobile working class. Henaway rejects the dominant responses of restricting or "managing" migration through temporary worker programs, proposing that stopping a race to the bottom for all working people involves building solidarity with migrant worker struggles for decent work and justice. Through examining the organizing strategies of migrant workers at giants like Amazon and Wal-Mart as well as discount retailers like Dollarama and Sports Direct, the immense power and agency of precarious workers in global companies like UBER or Airbnb, the successful resistance of taxi drivers or fast food workers around the world, and the contemporary mass labour movement organized by new unions and workers' centres, Henaway shows how migrant demands and strategies can help shape radical working class politics.

Crisis and Control. The Militarization of Protest Policing

Lesley J. Wood

Crisis and Control explains how neoliberal shifts in political and economic systems are transforming the policing of protest, based on a compelling empirical study of police agencies and practices from 1995 until the present. Lesley J. Wood shows that the increasing role of the security and defense industries, professional police associations, anti-terrorism initiatives and the diffusion of 'best practices' amongst policing networks have accelerated the use of less lethal weapons, pre-emptive arrests and barricading strategies against protesters. Crisis and Control uses novel theoretical and methodological approaches and a unique range of empirical data to make an important and radical contribution to a growing field.

Thinking Beyond War. Civil-Military Relations and Why America Fails to Win the Peace

Isaiah Wilson

This book argues that a major reason for America's propensity to 'lose the peace' is the way the nation defines war and how the U.S. military is currently organized for warfare. The author offers new propositions and operational approaches to war-planning that give new hope and practical solutions to overcoming the paradox of American Way of War.

From #Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

An indispensable contribution to the movement for racial justice in postracial America."

The Fair Trade Scandal. Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich

Ndongo S. Sylla

The Fair Trade Scandal takes aim at an a consumer movement which many assume to be entirely benign. Through a razor-sharp analysis based on insider knowledge, Ndongo Sylla shows that there is a big gap between the rhetoric of fair trade and its practical results. Sylla shows empirically that Fair Trade excludes those who need it the most and that its benefits are essentially captured by the wealthiest groups in the supply chain. Based on his experience of working for Fairtrade International Sylla shows the flaws in the Fair Trade system which compromise its ethical mission. The Fair Trade Scandal is both a provocative and deeply informative exploration of the Fair Trade phenomenon, suitable for specialists and non-specialists alike.

Us Politics in an Age of Uncertainty. Essays on a New reality

Lance Selfa (ed)

As Black As Resistance. Finding the Conditions for Liberation

Zoé Samudzi & William C. Anderson

Into The Tempest. Essays on the New Global Capitalism

William I. Robinson

These ten essays provide a comprehensive introduction and overview of the theory of global capitalism and its application to a wide range of contemporary issues that will be accessible to activists and the general public yet also satisfying for scholars.

Scattered Sand. The Story of China's Rural Migrants

Hsiao-Hung Pai

Each year, 200 million workers from China’s vast rural interior travel between cities and provinces in search of employment: the largest human migration in history. This indispensable army of labour accounts for half of China’s GDP, but is an unorganized workforce—‘scattered sand’, in Chinese parlance—and the most marginalized and impoverished group of workers in the country. For two years, the award-winning journalist Hsiao-Hung Pai travelled across China, visiting labourers on Olympic construction sites, in the coal mines and brick kilns of the Yellow River region, and at the factories of the Pearl River Delta. She witnessed the outcome of the 2009 riots in the Muslim province of Xinjiang; saw towns in rubble more than a year after the colossal earthquake in Sichuan; and was reunited with long-lost relatives, estranged since her mother’s family fled for Taiwan during the Civil War. Scattered Sand is the result of her travels: a finely wrought portrait of those left behind by China’s dramatic social and economic advances.

Rubbish Belongs to the Poor. Hygienic Enclosure and the Waste Commons.

Patrick O'Hare

An ethnography of Uruguayan waste-pickers that reconceptualizes rubbish as a form of modern-day commons.

Monstrous Anger of the Guns. How the Global Arms Trade Is Ruining The World and What We Can Do About It

Rhona Michie, Andrew Feinstein & Paul Rogers

'Equips readers with the information they need to resist the lies that feed humanity's urge to commit suicide. Read it!' Yanis Varoufakis 'Devastating testimony. Faultless research. It's impossible to exaggerate the timeliness of this powerfully written book' Peter Oborne We are seeing injustices caused by war and occupation unfold in real-time via social media, and we are speaking out in our millions against these horrors. Yet, from Gaza to Ukraine, the bombs continue to fall. We must understand why this is happening if we are to end it. Monstrous Anger of the Guns lays bare the dark and deceitful world of the global arms trade, which, often funded in our name, is a business that counts its profits in billions and its losses in human lives. Leading activists and campaigners connect the dots, showing how notions of citizenship, democracy and trust in governments are misguided, and how we can fight back by building mass movements, using direct action and legal justice to end the flow of weapons and the environmental and human devastation they bring.

Solito, Solita. Crossing Borders with Youth Refugees from Central America.

Steven Mayers & Jonathan Freedman (eds)

They are a mass migration of thousands of young people from Central America, yet each one travels alone: solito, solita.

Chavs The Demonization of The Working Class

Owen Jones

Beyond Cop Cites. Dismantling State and Corporate-Funded Armies and Prisons.

Joy James (ed)

What happens when the police becomes an army?

The Zapatistas' Dignified Rage. Final Public Speeches of Subcommander Marcos

Nick Henck (ed)

The last speeches and communiques of Subcommander Marcos, delivered before he "ceased to exist."

Culpable. Deregulation, Austerity and the Causes of the Grenfell Tower Fire

Paul Hampton

A gripping exposé of the 2017 Grenfell Tower disaster and the systemic failures that led to Britain's worst residential fire since WWII

Vagabond 007. Pirate Care. Acts Against The Criminalization of Solidarity

Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, & Tomislav Medak

Inspiring stories of real life and often risky activism resisting the global criminalization of care

The Age of Inequality. Corporate America's War on Working People

Jeremy Gantz (ed)

The stories behind the inequality crisis—a forty-year investigation by In These Times With heart-wrenching reporting and incisive analysis, In These Times magazine has charted a staggering rise in inequality and the fall of the American middle class. Here, in a selection from four decades of articles by investigative reporters and progressive thinkers, is the story of our age. It is a tale of shockingly successful corporate takeovers stretching from Reagan to Trump, but also of brave attempts to turn the tide, from the Seattle global justice protests to Occupy to the Fight for 15. Featuring contributions from Michelle Chen, Noam Chomsky, Tom Geoghegan, Juan González, David Moberg, Salim Muwakkil, Ralph Nader, Frances Fox Piven, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Slavoj Žižek, and many others, The Age of Inequality is the definitive account of a defining issue of our time.

A-Z of green Capitalism. Corporate Watch

Corporate Watch

Capitalism thrives on crisis, and the multiple global environmental crises, including climate change and habitat and biodiversity loss, are creating new markets from which to generate profit. Those promoting green capitalism argue that if nature was valued correctly it will not only be protected, but even enhanced, along with the health of the economy and well-being in society. However, it is a contradiction in terms. Capitalism is fundamentally exploitative of people and the natural world, it is not and cannot be "green." Green capitalism involves various institutions, including governments, corporations, think tanks, charities and NGOs, implementing policies, practices and processes to incorporate nature into capitalist market systems. It takes the same capitalist ideas and values that create environmental crises--i.e. continual economic growth, private property, profit and 'free' markets--and applies them to the natural world as a way to solve those crises. It serves to maintain capitalism's dominance, both through finding new ways to generate profit, and as a way of protecting it from criticism of being environmentally destructive. This guide is intended as an introduction to the ideas surrounding green capitalism as well as the alternatives to it. We hope it will support attempts to resist the threat of green capitalism and create space for real ecological alternatives.

The Squatters' Movement in Europe. Commons and Autonomy as Alternatives to Capitalism

Claudio Cattaneo & Miguel A. Martinez

The Squatters' Movement in Europe is the first definitive guide to squatting as an alternative to capitalism. It offers a unique insider's view on the movement – its ideals, actions and ways of life. At a time of growing crisis in Europe of high unemployment, dwindling social housing and declining living standards squatting has become an increasingly popular option. The book is written by an activist-scholar collective, of which all members have direct experience of squatting and many are still squatters today. There are contributions from Holland, Spain, the USA, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and the UK. In an age of austerity and precarity this book contributes with in-depth reflections and practical examples of what has been achieved by this resilient social movement, which holds lessons for policy makers, activists and academics alike.

Squatting London. The Politics of Property

Samuel Burgum

Squatting in London has a rich and diverse history. Currently, squatters live a marginalized, stigmatized, and criminalized existence, yet they persist. Behind the glittering façade of shiny new buildings, London is a network of vacant offices, boarded-up shops, and dilapidated pubs that host some of the city's poorest and most determined citizens exiled and increasingly pushed to the margins. This book accounts for the real lives of the city's squatters: Their ambitions and struggles. Squatting is a challenge to the logic of property which underpins the city. Squats are political acts by finding refuge, staying put, creating spaces, and participating in counter-cultures. They directly oppose the speculation, gentrification, and regeneration that controls London today. From wasted office blocks transformed into a life-saving homeless shelter to temporary art exhibitions and raves; from an empty doctor's surgery to a library closed by cuts; from mutual aid networks set up during the pandemic to restaurants, shops, offices, and pubs - Squatting London is an alternative, underground and rebellious ethnographic account of a city you thought you knew already.