Why does the left talk so much about work? Verso Student Reading on Labor and Marxism

Why is every workplace tyrannical? Why must capitalists constantly intensify their exploitation of labour? And how can workers best fight today to gain power?

The demands of workers continue to be scoffed at, and yet in the past year the labour movement has continued to score victories — from the unionization of Amazon and Starbucks workers in the US to the transport worker strikes in the UK.

Given that the basic social relations have not changed since the dawn of capitalism, studying the history of labor's victories in the past might provide clues to how gains can be won in the future.

All books are 40% off as part of our Student Reading Sale. Ends September 30 at 11:59PM EST. See all our student reading lists here.

All of Marx’s essential political writing in one volume.

Marx and Engels’s enduring insights into the capitalist system: its devastating impact on all aspects of human existence; its susceptibility to enormous convulsions and crises; and its fundamental weakness. 

Karl Marx recognized that the best way to understand the economy is to study the most advanced practice of production. Today that practice is no longer conventional manufacturing: it is the radically innovative vanguard known as the knowledge economy.

Degrowth perspectives offer a way to step off the treadmill of an alienating, expansionist, and hierarchical system.

An exhilarating challenge to the way we think about work, technology, progress, and what we want from the future.

A radical and pragmatic manifesto for tackling the interconnected crises of contemporary capitalism: work, care and the environment. The time we spend at work is neither natural nor inevitable. Instead the amount of time we spend working is a political, cultural and economic question. 

In Revolting Prostitutes, sex workers Juno Mac and Molly Smith bring a fresh perspective to questions that have long been contentious. Situating their argument firmly within wider questions of migration, work, feminism, and resistance to white supremacy, they make clear that anyone committed to working towards justice and freedom should be in support of the sex worker rights movement.

Capitalism is a moral, political, and ecological disaster; it is also an incredibly powerful social system that seems to only get stronger. How do we think about an alternative that is possible within this system? Why is socialism still the most practical alternative to our alienated society? 

Tracing the history of some of socialism’s highs and lows—from the creation of Germany’s Social Democratic Party through bloody communist revolutions to the predicaments of midcentury social democracy—Sunkara contends that, in our global age, socialism is still the only way forward. Drawing on history and his own experience in left-wing activism, Sunkara explains how socialists can win better wages and housing and create democratic institutions in workplaces and communities.

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-parliamentary Left in Italy and beyond. 

This volume presents a depth of learning to a broader audience, guiding first-time readers through a fascinating and deeply rewarding text. A Companion to Marx’s Capital offers fresh, original, and sometimes critical interpretations of a book that changed the course of history and, as Harvey intimates, may do so again. 

In this elegant book, Erik Olin Wright has distilled decades of work into a concise and tightly argued manifesto analysing the varieties of anti-capitalism, assessing different strategic approaches, and laying the foundations for a society dedicated to human flourishing.

A systematic reconstruction of the core values and feasible goals for Left theorists and political actors, Envisioning Real Utopias lays the foundations for a set of concrete, emancipatory alternatives to the capitalist system. Characteristically rigorous and engaging, this will become a landmark of social thought for the twenty-first century. 

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? 

A bracing riposte to the conventional wisdom concerning the irresistible power of globalization, Workers in a Lean World is a definitive account of contemporary labor relations on a global scale. 

Ellen Meiksins Wood criticizes postmodern turns away from "grand narratives" and re-establishes the tradition of Marxism as the most consistent, empirically powerful theory of capitalist society. 

The decline of the American union movement—and how it can revive, by a leading analyst of labor 

In Automation and the Future of Work, Aaron Benanav uncovers the structural economic trends that will shape our working lives far into the future.  

In this established classic, sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello get to the heart of contemporary capitalism. Delving deep into the latest management texts informing the thinking of employers, the authors trace the contours of a new spirit of capitalism. 

In Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani conjures a vision of extraordinary hope, showing how we move to energy abundance, feed a world of 9 billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology, and establish meaningful freedom for everyone. Rather than a final destination, such a society merely heralds the real beginning of history. 

All books are 40% off as part of our Student Reading Sale. Ends September 30 at 11:59PM EST. See all our student reading lists here.

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 Communist Manifesto

by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx

Introduction by Eric Hobsbawm

In the two decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, global capitalism became entrenched in its modern, neoliberal form. Its triumph was so complete that the word “capitalism” itself fell out ...

The Knowledge Economy

by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Adam Smith and Karl Marx recognized that the best way to understand the economy is to study the most advanced practice of production. Today that practice is no longer conventional manufacturing: it...

The Future is Degrowth

by Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan and Andrea Vetter

Economic growth isn’t working, and it cannot be made to work. Offering a counter-history of how economic growth emerged in the context of colonialism, fossil-fueled industrialization, and capitalis...

Breaking Things at Work

by Gavin Mueller

In the Nineteenth-century, English textile workers responded to the introduction of new technologies on the factory floor by smashing them to bits. For years the Luddites roamed the English country...

Overtime

by Kyle Lewis and Will Stronge

Overtime is about the politics of time, and specifically the amount of time that we spend labouring within capitalist society. It argues that reactivating the longstanding demand for shorter workin...

Revolting Prostitutes

by Juno Mac and Molly Smith

How the law harms sex workers - and what they want insteadDo you have to endorse prostitution in order to support sex worker rights? Should clients be criminalized, and can the police deliver justi...

The ABCs of Socialism

Illustrated by Phil Wrigglesworth

Contributions by Nicole Aschoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Jonah Birch, Vivek Chibber, Danny Katch, Chris Maisano, Nivedita Majumdar, Michael McCarthy, Joseph M. Schwartz, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Adaner Usmani and Erik Olin Wright

Edited by Bhaskar Sunkara

The remarkable run of self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders for president of the United States has prompted—for the first time in decades and to the shock of many—a national convers...

The Socialist Manifesto

by Bhaskar Sunkara

The success of Jeremy Corbyn’s left-led Labour Party and Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign revived a political idea many had thought dead. But what, exactly, is socialism? And what would ...

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-...

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...

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...

Envisioning Real Utopias

by Erik Olin Wright

Rising inequality of income and power, along with recent convulsions in the finance sector, have made the search for alternatives to unbridled capitalism more urgent than ever. Yet few are attempti...

Prisoners of the American Dream

by Mike Davis

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 industriall...

Workers in a Lean World

by Kim Moody

In this comprehensive study of current labour relations worldwide, Kim Moody surveys both sides of the picket lines. He provides a measured assessment of multinational managements’ strategies to do...

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...

The Death and Life of American Labor

by Stanley Aronowitz

Union membership in the United States has fallen below 11 percent, the lowest rate since before the New Deal. Labor activist and scholar of the American labor movement Stanley Aronowitz argues that...

Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell)

by Jane McAlevey and Bob Ostertag

In 1995, in the first contested election in the history of the AFL-CIO, John Sweeney won the presidency of the nation’s largest labor federation, promising renewal and resurgence. Today, less than ...

Automation and the Future of Work

by Aaron Benanav

Silicon Valley titans, politicians, techno-futurists and social critics have united in arguing that we are living on the cusp of an era of rapid technological automation, heralding the end of work ...

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...

Fully Automated Luxury Communism

by Aaron Bastani

Fully Automated Luxury Communism promises a radically new left future for everyone. New technologies will liberate us from work, providing the opportunity to build a society beyond both capitalism ...

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