As the new academic year approaches, we’ve discounted all books until the end of September.

• 30% off when you order 3 books
• 40% off when you order 4 or more books
• Sale ends September 30th 2024 11:59pm ET
• Discount applied at checkout.

Following the organising of encampments calling for an end to universities’ complicity in Israel’s ongoing genocide, it is clear that students are taking charge of their own political education. In solidarity with these groups, we have made the following ebooks free to download.

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Please note that the delivery of all print orders outside of North America is likely going to be delayed until early September. See more info on this in our FAQ.

We bundle the ebook, for free, with every print book purchase! That means you can start reading your ebook straight away, whilst waiting for your book to arrive in the mail.

As a friendly reminder: Verso Book Club members enjoy 50% off all titles year-round on all our books! It's the best way to support the future of Verso's radical publishing and our authors!

See all terms and conditions at the bottom of this post.

Reading Lists

Browse all our student reading guides here - where we’ve compiled a list of essentials across subject areas. Some highlights:

10 Books Every Student Should Read: must-read Verso classics.

Decolonise Your Bookshelf: books that challenge imperial narratives.

Key Debates in Theory: the most pressing debates in left theory from 50 years of radical publishing.

Western Marxist Theory: featuring Perry Anderson, Theodor Adorno, Fredric Jameson, and more.

Race, Class and History: featuring Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, Adolph Reed, and more.

Climate, Environment, and Ecology: from Andreas Malm to Noam Chomsky.

Should We All Log Off? Reflections on the politics of digital culture

Philosophy: Key Verso Reading: key Verso reading featuring Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, and Alain Badiou.

Author Bookshelves

You can find a collection of author bookshelves here. Some highlights:

Walter Rodney: A Lightning Rod of Black Working Class Power

Nancy Fraser: Reframing our Understanding of Marxist Theory

Theodor Adorno: A Leading Figure of the Frankfurt School

Ellen Meiksins Wood: Groundbreaking Marxist Historian and Political Thinker 

Erik Olin Wright: The Greatest Marxist Sociologist of His Time 

Mike Davis: Prophetic Marxist Historian and Activist

Walter Benjamin: An Indispensable Philosopher-Critic

Fredric Jameson: A Giant of Literary and Cultural Theory

Essential Verso Texts

Highlights from across our Student Reading:

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Terms and Conditions

The fulfilment of all orders outside of North America is likely going to be delayed until early September.

Sale will end at midnight (EDT) on September 30, 2023. It applies to all available books and ebooks on our website.

Each individual book page shows the various available formats of a book. Typically there will be a print edition, and an ebook edition listed on the page.

Not all books are available in all regions: it will be clear on the book page whether something is available for you to purchase.

Some books may be out of stock or out of print in your region. We are unable to retrospectively apply the discount if these books come back into stock outside of the sale period.

All print book purchases will include the bundled ebook edition for free! See all our ebook FAQs here.

Some older titles are not yet available in ebook format. We're working on it!

If you experience any issues please email: orders@versobooks.com (for US and Canada customers) or orders@verso.co.uk (for UK, Europe and Rest of World customers).

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Minima Moralia

by Theodor Adorno

Translated by Edmund F.N. Jephcott

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...

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...

Aesthetics and Politics

by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukács

Afterword by Fredric Jameson

No other country and no other period has produced a tradition of major aesthetic debate to compare with that which unfolded in German culture from the 1930s to the 1950s. In Aesthetics and Politics...

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...

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

by Andreas Malm

The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a...

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...

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...

Racecraft

by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields

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...

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...

If They Come in the Morning

by Angela Davis

The trial of Angela Davis is remembered as one of America's most historic political trials, and no one can tell the story better than Davis herself. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Ange...

A Companion to Marx's Grundrisse

by David Harvey

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...

Fortunes of Feminism

by Nancy Fraser

Second Wave feminism emerged as a struggle for women’s liberation and took its place alongside other radical movements. But feminism’s subsequent immersion in identity politics coincided with a dec...

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...

New Radical Enlightenment

by Marina Garcés

Translated by Julie Wark

Philosophy was born out of discussion, out of the rivalry between world views. From the philosophical ferment of the Enlightenment arose the idea of emancipation, a conflictual perspective which Ma...

Climate Change as Class War

by Matthew T. Huber

The climate crisis is not primarily a problem of ‘believing science’ or individual ‘carbon footprints’ – it is a class problem rooted in who owns, controls and profits from material production. As ...

The Destruction of Reason

by Georg Lukács

Introduction by Enzo Traverso

Translated by Peter Palmer

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State

by Friedrich Engels

Foreword by Jennifer Doyle

Introduction by Eleanor Burke Leacock

In this provocative and now-classic work, Friedrich Engels explores the interrelated development of the family and the state from ancient society to the Victorian era. Drawing on new anthropologica...

Ten Myths About Israel

by Ilan Pappe

In this groundbreaking book, the outspoken and radical Israeli historian Ilan Pappe examines the most contested ideas concerning the origins and identity of the contemporary state of Israel. This h...

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...

The Force of Nonviolence

by Judith Butler

Judith Butler’s new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a pas...

Imperialism and the National Question

by V. I. Lenin

Introduction by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Fired up by the outbreak of the First World War and outraged by the capitulation of most socialist parties to the demands of national bourgeoisies, Lenin sought to understand the deeper roots of th...

Inventions of a Present

by Fredric Jameson

A novel is an act, an intervention, which, most often, the naïve reader takes as a representation. The novel intervenes to modify or correct our conventional notions of a situation and, in the best...

Ideology

by Terry Eagleton

Ideology has never before been so much in evidence as a fact, and so little understood as a concept, as it is today. In this now classic work, originally written for both students and for those alr...

Engaging Erik Olin Wright

Contributions by Rina Agarwala, Gianpaolo Baiocchi, Ruy Braga, Harry Brighouse, Michael Burawoy, H. Jacob Carlson, Rodolfo Elbert, Greta R. Krippner, Stephanie Luce, João Alexandre Peschanski, Peter Ramand, Gay Seidman, Kwang-Yeong Shin and Marta Soler-Gallart

Edited by Michael Burawoy and Gay Seidman

When the renowned social scientist Erik Olin Wright passed away in 2019 at the height of his intellectual powers, he left behind an unfinished project intended to forge a connection between class a...

Happy Apocalypse

by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

Translated by David Broder

Being environmentally conscious is not nearly as modern as we imagine. As a mode of thinking it goes back hundreds of years. Yet we typically imagine ourselves among the first to grasp the impact h...

Springtime

Edited by Tania Palmieri and Clare Solomon

The autumn and winter of 2010 saw an unprecedented wave of student protests across the UK, in response to the coalition government’s savage cuts in state funding for higher education, cuts which fo...

Occupy!

Contributions by Judith Butler, Angela Davis, Jodi Dean, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Zoltán Glu?ck, Elizabeth Gumport, Doug Henwood, Christopher Herring, L.A. Kauffman, Svetlana Kitto, Kung Li, Audrea Lim, Manissa Maharawal, Thomas Paine, Marco Roth, Marina Sitrin, Rebecca Solnit, Stephen Squibb, Sunaura Taylor, Alex S. Vitale and Slavoj Žižek

Edited by Carla Blumenkranz, Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Sarah Leonard, Sarah Resnick, Nikil Saval, Eli Schmitt and Astra Taylor

In the fall of 2011, a small protest camp in downtown Manhattan exploded into a global uprising, sparked in part by the violent overreactions of the police. An unofficial record of this movement, O...

The Verso Book of Dissent

Preface by Tariq Ali

Edited by Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim

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...

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