Reading list

Political Theory: Verso Student Reading

Featuring Walter Rodney, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Theodor Adorno, Erik Olin Wright, Nancy Fraser, and Benedict Anderson. Up to 40% off as part of our student reading sale.

Verso Books24 August 2023

With the rise of global economic instability, the looming threat of catastrophic climate change, and capitalism close to breaking point, the time has never been more ripe to arm yourself with the political theory you need for the struggles ahead.

Student reading sale: ends September 30
30% off if you buy 3 or more titles
40% off if you buy 4 or more titles
Discount will be applied in cart. Separate orders can't be combined.
See all our Student Reading here.

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See all our recommended Student Reading here.

Mute Compulsion

by Søren Mau

Despite insoluble contradictions, intense volatility and fierce resistance, the crisis-ridden capitalism of the 21st century lingers on. To understand capital’s paradoxical expansion and entrenchme...

The Origin of Capitalism

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

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, im...

The Automatic Fetish

by Beverley Best

The Automatic Fetish traces Marx’s analysis of capital, step by step, through the material compiled posthumously as the third volume of Capital. Identifying the critique of value as the central thr...

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

by Walter Rodney

Foreword by Angela Davis

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, R...

Towards a Green Democratic Revolution

by Chantal Mouffe

In recent years, the promises of the populist moment have faltered, as seen in the defeats of Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, Jean-Luc Melenchon. In addition, the pandemic has brought about a strong...

Democracy in the Political Present

by Isabell Lorey

‘Presentist democracy is without a people and without nation. Rather than regimes of borders and migration, its borders are sexism and racism, homo- and transphobia, colonialism and extractivism.’I...

A Companion To Marx's Capital

by David Harvey

In recent years, we have witnessed a surge of interest in Marx’s work in the effort to understand the origins of our current predicament. For nearly forty years, David Harvey has written and lectur...

Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism

by Anna Kornbluh

Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of "disintermediation": cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but f...

Communism and Strategy

by Isabelle Garo

If the question of communism is making a comeback today, this renewed interest is often accompanied by an abandonment of any concrete political perspective. Critical philosophies are flourishing an...

Classes

by Erik Olin Wright

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 ...

Late Fascism

by Alberto Toscano

The rich archive of twentieth-century debates on fascism can steer a path through an increasingly authoritarian present. Developing anti-fascist theory is an urgent and vital task. From the ‘Great ...

Cannibal Capitalism

by Nancy Fraser

Shortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize 2023Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life-guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for e...

Power and Resistance

by Yoshiyuki Sato

The "structuralist" theories of power show that the subject is produced and reproduced by the investment of power: but how then can we think of the subject's resistance to power? Based on this fund...

Abolition Geography

by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore's work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, of...

Decolonial Marxism

by Walter Rodney

Foreword by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Early in life, Walter Rodney became a major revolutionary figure in a dizzying range of locales that traversed the breadth of the Black diaspora: in North America and Europe, in the Caribbean and o...

Imperium

by Frédéric Lordon

What should we do with the ideals of internationalism, the withering away of state and horizontality? Probably start by thinking seriously about them. That is to say, about their conditions of poss...

Workers and Capital

by Mario Tronti

Workers and Capital is universally recognised as the most important work produced by operaismo, a current of political thought emerging in the 1960s that revolutionised the institutional and extra-...

Neither Vertical nor Horizontal

by Rodrigo Nunes

A decade ago, a wave of mass mobilisations described as “horizontal” and “leaderless” swept the planet, holding the promise of real democracy and justice for the 99%. Many saw its subsequent ebb as...

How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century

by Erik Olin Wright

Capitalism has transformed the world and increased our productivity, but at the cost of enormous human suffering. Our shared values equality and fairness, democracy and freedom, community and solid...

History and Class Consciousness

by Georg Lukács

Preface by Michael Löwy

Translated by Rodney Livingstone

History and Class Consciousness was the most important of Georg Lukács’s early theoretical writings, published in Germany in 1923. The subject of high praise and passionate criticism, it had a majo...

The Political Writings

by Karl Marx

Karl Marx was not only the great theorist of capitalism, he was also a superb journalist, politician and historian. For the first time ever, this book brings together all of his essential political...

The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born

by Nancy Fraser

Across the globe politics as usual are being rejected and faith in neoliberalism is fracturing beyond repair. Leading political theorist Nancy Fraser, in conversation with Jacobin publisher Bhaskar...

The New Spirit of Capitalism

by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello

Translated by Gregory Elliott

In this major work, sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello go to the heart of the changes in contemporary capitalism. Via an unprecedented analysis of the latest management texts that have fo...

Imagined Communities

by Benedict Anderson

What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and tran...

Reading Capital

by Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancière

Translated by Ben Brewster and David Fernbach

Originally published in 1965, Reading Capital is a landmark of French thought and radical theory, reconstructing Western Marxism from its foundations. Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosophe...

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy

by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe

In this hugely influential book, Laclau and Mouffe examine the workings of hegemony and contemporary social struggles, and their significance for democratic theory. With the emergence of new soci...

A Social History of Western Political Thought

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

In this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood rewrites the history of political theory, from Plato to Rousseau. Treating canonical thinkers as passionately engaged human beings, Wood examines th...

Democracy Against Capitalism

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

Historian and political thinker Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that theories of “postmodern” fragmentation, “difference”, and contingency can barely accommodate the idea of capitalism, let alone subjec...

For a Left Populism

by Chantal Mouffe

We are seeing the rise of a populist moment around the world on both the left and the right. Movements like Bernie Sander, Jeremy Corbyn, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have emerged in the midst of the ...

The Double Shift

by Jason Read

Even as the rewards of work decline and its demands on us increase, many people double-down on their commitment to wage slavery—working harder, doing overtime, and learning to hustle. To paraphrase...

On the Reproduction of Capitalism

by Louis Althusser

Louis Althusser’s renowned short text "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" radically transformed the concept of the subject, the understanding of the state and even the very frameworks o...

Red Africa

by Kevin Ochieng Okoth

Red Africa makes the case for a revolutionary Black politics inspired by Marxist anticolonial struggles in Africa. Contemporary debates on Black radicalism and decolonisation have lost sight of the...

Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility

by Kojin Karatani

Introduction by Gavin Walker

Edited by Gavin Walker

Translated by Gavin Walker

Originally published in 1974, Kojin Karatani’s Marx: Towards the Centre of Possibility has been among his most enduring and pioneering works in critical theory. Written at a time when the political...

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