Theory: Verso Student Reading

The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy

by A.J.A. Woods

“Cultural Marxism” is one of the far right’s favorite buzzwords. But despite its currency, the meaning and origins of the term are rarely investigated. This book uncovers the bizarre story of the c...
Hardback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95
Critique of Everyday Life

by Henri Lefebvre

The three-volume text by Henri Lefebvre is perhaps the richest, most prescient work about modern capitalism to emerge from one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and is now availabl...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $44.95
The End of Modern Literature

by Kojin Karatani

Edited by Hiroki Yoshikuni, Jonathan E. Abel and Yoshiki Tajiri

What comes after the death of literature? Kojin Karatani, winner of the 2022 Berggruen Prize, examines the corpse, investigates the cause of death, and offers glimpses of an afterlife from various ...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $29.95
Revolutionary Subjects

by Benjamin Kohlmann

Tracing the evolution of socialist world literature from the nineteenth century to the present, Benjamin Kohlmann uncovers the formal repertoires through which a set of political ideals found aesth...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $29.95
The Story of Capital

by David Harvey

For decades, David Harvey has been teaching Marx's work, particularly Capital, to great acclaim. He has analysed chapter by chapter - sometimes line-by-line - Marx's three volumes and the Grundriss...
Hardback

Add to cart Sale price $34.95
Capitalism in the Web of Life

by Jason W. Moore

Finance. Climate. Food. Class. How are the crises—and politics—of the twenty-first century connected? In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore argues that the sources of today’s global turb...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $29.95
Anthropocene Communism

by Paul Guillibert

Translated by Matt Reeck

In Anthropocene Communism, the philosopher and activist Paul Guillibert proposes a brand-new communism for life: biocommunism. With the aid of this system, he hopes to move us beyond the ecological...
Hardback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95
The Authoritarian Personality

by Theodor Adorno

What makes a fascist? Are there character traits that make someone more likely to vote for the far right? The Authoritarian Personality, written in the shadow of Fascism and the Holocaust, looked t...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $49.95
Workers and the World

by Lorenzo Feltrin

Workers are not doomed to be merely the victims of environmental devastation. As Lorenzo Feltrin shows, they can be key actors in preventing it. Because labour supports an unsustainable system of e...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95
The Literary Workshop

by Monique Wittig

Foreword by Sande Zeig

Translated by Ann Jefferson

The Literary Workshop takes readers inside Monique Wittig’s creative process, unlocking the practice of writing both in material and political terms. Wittig provides her most complete account of h...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $19.95
Labour, Nature, Value

by Emanuele Leonardi

Translated by Yari Lanci

The promise of a capitalist green economy is to transform ecological constraints on development into business opportunities. This may sound appealing but proves problematic on closer inspection. Em...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95
Working Nature

by Daniela Russ

Daniela Russ argues that the category of ‘energy’ is best understood not in terms of particular material things but as a social relation to nature forged over 200 years of capitalist industrializat...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95
The Alibi of Capital

by Timothy Mitchell

Today, extraordinary wealth seems to arrive from nowhere. The trick of conjuring this unearned wealth is, in fact, the key to understanding capitalism’s origins and a clue to why the catastrophe o...
Hardback

Add to cart Sale price $34.95
Leaving the Twentieth Century

by McKenzie Wark

The Situationist International, which leaped to the fore during the Paris tumult of 1968, has extended its revolutionary influence right up to the present day. In Leaving the Twentieth Century, the...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $29.95
A Social History of Analytic Philosophy

by Christoph Schuringa

Analytic philosophy is the leading form of philosophy in the English-speaking world. What explains its continued success? Christoph Schuringa argues that its enduring power can only be understood b...
Hardback

Add to cart Sale price $34.95
Marxist Modernism

by Gillian Rose

Afterword by Martin Jay

Edited by Robert Lucas Scott and James Gordon Finlayson

Marxist Modernism is a comprehensive yet concise and conversational introduction to the Frankfurt School. It is also a new resource from one of the twentieth century’s most important philosophers: ...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95
The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads

by Kevin B. Anderson

In his late writings, Marx went beyond the boundaries of capital and class in the Western European and North American contexts. Kevin Anderson carries out a systematic analysis of Marx’s Ethnologic...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $29.95
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...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $29.95
Walter Benjamin

by Terry Eagleton

This momentous study of Benjamin’s critical practice marks a sea change in Eagleton’s thought. Its goal is not merely to contemplate Benjamin’s approach to language, history, and art but to chart a...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95
The Concept of Nature in Marx

by Alfred Schmidt

Translated by Ben Fowkes

In The Concept of Nature in Marx, Alfred Schmidt examines humanity’s relation to the natural world as understood by the great philosopher-economist Karl Marx, who wrote that human beings are ‘par...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95
Representing 'Capital'

by Fredric Jameson

Representing Capital, Fredric Jameson's first book-length engagement with Marx's magnum opus, is a unique work of scholarship that records the progression of Marx's thought as if it were a musica...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95
The Spirit of Terrorism

by Jean Baudrillard

Translated by Chris Turner

Baudrillard sees the power of the terrorists as lying in the symbolism of slaughter—not merely the reality of death, but in a sacrifice that challenges the whole system. Where previously the old re...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $19.95
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...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $29.95
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...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95
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...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $29.95
The Eye of the Master

by Matteo Pasquinelli

What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest "to solve intelligence" - a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind or in the deep physiology of the brain, such as i...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95
On Ideology

by Louis Althusser

Translated by Ben Brewster

The publication of For Marx and Reading Capital established Louis Althusser as one of the most influential figures in the Western Marxist tradition. On Ideology charts Althusser’s critique of the t...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $17.95
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...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $39.95
Really Existing Nationalisms

by Erica Benner

Really Existing Nationalisms challenges the conventional view that Marx and Engels lacked the theoretical resources needed to understand nationalism. It argues that the two thinkers had a much bett...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $17.95
The Dialectics of Liberation

Contributions by Lucien Goldmann, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Sweezy, Gregory Bateson, Stokely Carmichael, John Gerassi, Paul Goodman, Jules Henry and R.D. Laing

Edited by David Cooper

The now legendary Dialectics of Liberation congress, held in London in 1967, was a unique expression of the politics of dissent. Existential psychiatrists, Marxist intellectuals, anarchists, and ...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95

Sensoria

by McKenzie Wark

As we face the compounded crises of late capitalism, environmental catastrophe and technological transformation, who are the thinkers and the ideas who will allow us to understand the world we live...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95

Reading Capital

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

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...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $49.95

The Left Hemisphere

by Razmig Keucheyan

Translated by Gregory Elliott

As the crisis of capitalism unfolds, the need for alternatives is felt ever more intensely. The struggle between radical movements and the forces of reaction will be merciless. A crucial battlefiel...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $22.95

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...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $24.95

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...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $16.95

Dark Matter

by Richard Langston

Collaborators for more than four decades, lawyer, author, filmmaker, and multimedia artist Alexander Kluge and social philosopher Oskar Negt are an exceptional duo in the history of Critical Theory...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $29.95

Splinters in Your Eye

by Martin Jay

Although successive generations of the Frankfurt School have attempted to adapt Critical Theory to new circumstances, the work done by its founding members continues in the twenty-first century to ...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $29.95

Capital Is Dead

by McKenzie Wark

In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that the all-pervasive presence of data in our networked society has given rise to a new mode of production, one not ruled over by capit...
Hardback

We are sorry this title is currently out of stock in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

Postmodernism

by Fredric Jameson

In his most wide-ranging and accessible work, Fredric Jameson argues that postmodernism is the cultural response to the latest systemic change in world capitalism. He seeks here to crystallize a de...
Paperback

We are sorry this title is currently out of stock in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

Critique of Everyday Life

by Henri Lefebvre

The three-volume text by Henri Lefebvre is perhaps the richest, most prescient work about modern capitalism to emerge from one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers and is now availabl...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $44.95

Precarious Life

by Judith Butler

In her most impassioned and personal book to date, Judith Butler responds in this profound appraisal of post-9/11 America to the current US policies to wage perpetual war, and calls for a deeper un...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $17.95

General Intellects

by McKenzie Wark

What happened to the public intellectuals that used to challenge and inform us? Who is the Sartre or De Beauvoir of the internet age? General Intellects argues that we no longer have such singular ...
Paperback

Add to cart Sale price $26.95

Grand Hotel Abyss

by Stuart Jeffries

In 1923, a group of young radical German thinkers and intellectuals came together to at Victoria Alle 7, Frankfurt, determined to explain the workings of the modern world. Among the most prominen...
Paperback

Forthcoming

Dialectic of Enlightenment

by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno

Contributions by John Cumming

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer are the leading figures of the Frankfurt School and this book is their magnum opus. Dialectic of Enlightenment is one of the most celebrated works of modern social...
Paperback

We are sorry this title is currently unavailable for purchase in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

Adorno, Foucault and the Critique of the West

by Deborah Cook

Adorno, Foucault, and the Critique of the West argues that critical theory continues to offer valuable resources for critique and contestation during this turbulent period in our history. To assess...
Paperback

We are sorry this title is currently out of stock in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

Foucault's Analysis of Modern Governmentality

by Thomas Lemke

Translated by Erik Butler

Lemke offers the most comprehensive and systematic account of Michel Foucault’s work on power and government from 1970 until his death in 1984. He convincingly argues, using material that has only ...
Paperback

We are sorry this title is currently out of stock in your selected territory. Please check back or contact us for more information.

Book strip #1

Book strip #11

Book strip #12

Book strip #13

Book strip #14

Book strip #15

Book strip #16

Book strip #17

Book strip #18

Book strip #19

Book strip #20

Book strip #21

Book strip #22

Book strip #23

Book strip #24

Book strip #25

Book strip #26