Blog post

Red May at Verso!

We're extending the spirit of May Day through the entire month with a site-wide book sale – up to 50% off all titles!

Verso Books 1 May 2023

Red May at Verso!

After a long period of dormancy, the labor movement has seen a wave of dynamism in recent years. The fall of real-terms wage value (despite rising profits at the top) has led to a huge increase in strike action in the UK (despite the governments attempts to destroy union power), and the US has seen a significant uptick in union organizing across all industries.

May 1st marks International Workers' Day, a festival of working-class self-organization stretching back over 130 years. We're extending the spirit of May Day through the whole month with our Red May sale! 

For all of May, we're offering:
30% off all titles in our catalog
40% off if you buy 4
50% off if you buy 5
Discount will be applied in cart. Separate orders can't be combined.

To help you get started, we've hand selected the below titles, packed with important texts for your May Day celebrations. Keep your eyes peeled for videos, reading lists, and ebook giveaways throughout the month!

As a friendly reminder: Verso Book Club members enjoy 50% off all titles year-round on purchases of any size. It's a great deal and the best way to support radical publishing!

[book-strip index="1"]

[book-strip index="2"]

Mute Compulsion
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...
Our Lives in Their Portfolios
Banks have taken a backseat since the global financial crisis over a decade ago. Today, our new financial masters are asset managers, like Blackstone and BlackRock. And they don't just own financia...
Communism and Strategy
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...
Troublemaking
There has been an explosion of organising among workers many assumed to be unorganisable, from delivery drivers in London to tech workers in Silicon Valley. The culmination of years of conversation...
The Politics of Immunity
Our contemporary political condition is obsessed with immunity. The immunity of bodies and the body politic; personal immunity and herd immunity; how to immunize the social system against breakdown...
The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life
The texts in this volume represent Kristin Ross's attempt to think the question of the everyday across a range of discourses, practices and knowledges, from philosophy to history, from the visual a...
Classes
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 ...
A Companion to Marx's Grundrisse
When leading scholar of Marx, Roman Rosdolsky, first encountered the virtually unknown text of Marx's Grundrisse - his preparatory work for his masterpiece Das Capital - in the 1950s in New York Pu...
Power and Resistance
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...
The Origin of Capitalism
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...
Red Valkyries
Through a series of lively and accessible biographical essays, Red Valkyries explores the history of socialist feminism century Eastern Europe. By examining the revolutionary careers of five promi...
Henri Lefebvre and the Theory of the Production of Space
Shortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize 2023This book presents an encompassing, detailed and thorough overview and reconstruction of Lefebvre’s theory of space and of the urban. Henri Lefebvre...
Hit Parade of Tears

Hit Parade of Tears

A new collection of stories from the cult author of Terminal Boredom.Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of t...
Imperium
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...
May Day Manifesto 1968
The original publication of the May Day Manifesto in 1967 collected together the most influential radical voices of the era. Among the seventy signatories were Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, Stu...
Abolition Geography
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...
Keystroke Capitalism

Keystroke Capitalism

Contemporary capitalism produces more and more money, debt, and inequality. These three trends have a common cause: the privilege of private banks to create money by means of accounting - by the st...
After Black Lives Matter
Why did a movement as powerful as the one inspired by the murder of George Floyd fall short of securing its most militant demands? After Black Lives Matter argues that the core of the movement itse...
Cannibal Capitalism
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...
Red Friends
China's resistance to Imperial Japan was the other great internationalist cause of the 'red 1930s', along with the Spanish Civil War. These desperate and bloody struggles were personified in the li...
October
In February of 1917 Russia was a backward, autocratic monarchy, mired in an unpopular war; by October, after not one but two revolutions, it had become the world’s first workers’ state, straining t...
The Destruction of Reason

The Destruction of Reason

A classic of Western Marxism, The Destruction of Reason is Georg Lukács's trenchant criticism of German philosophy after Marx and the role it played in the rise of National Socialism. Originally pu...
Critique of Everyday Life
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...
Making the Revolution Global
Making the Revolution Global shows how black radicals transformed socialist politics in Britain in the years before decolonisation. African and Caribbean activist-intellectuals, such as Amy Ashwood...
They Call It Love
They Call It Love investigates the work that makes a haven in a heartless world, examining who performs this labour, how it is organised, and how it might change. Drawing on the thought of the femi...
The End of Policing
The massive uprising following the police killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020--by some estimates the largest protests in US history--thrust the argument to defund the police to the forefr...
Images of Class
During the 1960s and 1970s, Workerism and Autonomia were prominent Marxist currents. However, it is rarely acknowledged that these movements inspired many visual artists such as the members of Arch...
Marx's Literary Style
In Marx’s Literary Style, the Venezuelan poet and philosopher Ludovico Silva argues that much of the confusion around Marx’s work results from a failure to understand his literary mode of expressio...
Not by Omission

Not by Omission

In this book, first published in Hebrew in 1975 and now available in English for the first time with an introduction by Noam Chomsky, Amnon Kapeliouk traces the policies and attitudes that led to t...
Claiming the City
Winner of the International Labor History Association (ILHA) 2023 Book of the Year Award for labor historyFor more than a century, municipal socialism has fired the imaginations of workers fighting...
The Poverty of Ethics
The Poverty of Ethics stands the usual moral-political dichotomy on its head. It argues that moral principles do not in fact underlie or inform political decisions. It is, rather, the conceptual pr...
Humanitarian Borders
*Winner of the International Political Sociology book award for 2023*What does it mean when humanitarianism is the response to death, injury and suffering at the border? This book interrogates the ...
Is Mother Dead

Is Mother Dead

**Longlisted for The International Booker Prize 2023**'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed a...
Uncomputable
Narrating some lesser known episodes from the deep history of digital machines, Alexander R. Galloway explains the technology that drives the world today, and the fascinating people who brought the...
New Dark Age
From the highly acclaimed author of WAYS OF BEING. We live in times of increasing inscrutability. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically gener...
Paths of Revolution

Paths of Revolution

The Argentine-born writer Adolfo Gilly has directly observed many of Latin America’s most dramatic events, from the Bolivian Revolution of the 1950s and Cuba during the Missile Crisis to the guerri...
Set Fear on Fire
After the feminist art collective LASTESIS created their performance "A Rapist in Your Path" in their native Chile, it went viral across the globe, becoming the anthem of the grassroots feminist mo...
Racecraft
Praised by a wide variety of people from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Zadie Smith, Racecraft "ought to be positioned," as Bookforum put it, "at the center of any discussion of race in American life." Most p...
The Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing
For several years after 1968, Herbert Marcuse was one of the most famous philosophers in the world. He became the face of Frankfurt School Critical Theory for a generation in turmoil. His fame rest...
The Hidden Injuries of Class
In this reissue of the 1972 classic of social anatomy, Richard Sennets adds a new introduction to shows how the injuries of class persist into the 21st century. In this intrepid, groundbreaking boo...
The Verso Book of Dissent
Throughout the ages and across every continent, people have struggled against those in power and raised their voices in protest-rallying others around them or, sometimes, inspiring uprisings many y...
Microverses
Microverses comprises over a hundred short essays inviting us to think about society – and social theory – in new ways. Lockdown created the conditions for what Adorno once termed ‘enforced contemp...
The South
The last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow will soon disappear. They leave behind a collective memory of segregation shaped increasingly by its horrors and heroic defeat but ...
Minima Moralia

Minima Moralia

Written between 1944 and 1947, Minima Moralia is a collection of rich, lucid aphorisms and essays about life in modern capitalist society. Adorno casts his penetrating eye across society in mid-cen...
Modernism in the Streets
Marshall Berman was one of the great urbanists and Marxist cultural critics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and his brilliant, nearly sui generis book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air ...
Four Futures
“It is easier to imagine the end of the world,” the theorist Fredric Jameson has remarked, “than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Jacobin Editor Peter Frase argues that technological advancements...
Fully Automated Luxury Communism
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 ...
How Will Capitalism End?
After years of ill health, capitalism is now in a critical condition. Growth has given way to stagnation; inequality is leading to instability; and confidence in the money economy has all but evapo...
Prisoners of the American Dream
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...
How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century
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...
A Companion To Marx's Capital
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...
Everything, All the Time, Everywhere
But where do these ideas come from and how have they impacted on the world? In his brilliant history of a dangerous idea, Stuart Jeffries tells a narrative that starts in the early 1970s and cont...
The Choreography of Everyday Life
In this sparkling, innovative, fully-illustrated work, world-renowned choreographer Annie-B Parson translates the components of dance—time, proximity, space, motion and tone— into text. As we follo...
Miss Major Speaks
Miss Major Griffin-Gracy is a veteran of the infamous Stonewall Riots, a former sex worker, and a transgender elder and activist who has survived Bellevue psychiatric hospital, Attica Prison, the H...
Class War
A thrilling and vivid work of history, Class War weaves together literature and politics to chart the making and unmaking of social class through revolutionary combat. In a narrative that spans the...
Everything and Less
As the story goes: Jeff Bezos left a lucrative job to start something new in Seattle only after a deeply affecting reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. But if a novel gave usAmazon.com, ...
The Ancients and the Postmoderns
High modernism is now as far from us as antiquity was for the Renaissance. Such is the premise of Fredric Jameson’s major new work in which modernist works, this time in painting (Rubens) and music...

Filed under: red-may