Reading list

Jacobin Bookshelf

The Jacobin series is back! To celebrate, we're offering 40% off the entire series through Sunday, January 26th

Verso Books12 March 2019

Jacobin Bookshelf

Published in collaboration with Jacobin magazine, the Jacobin series offers short interrogations of politics, economics, and culture from a socialist perspective. For the hardened lefty and socialist-curious alike, these sharp and accessible books intervene in the latest political debates and offer analysis on a range of important issues, from housing to sex worker rights to public education.

To celebrate the publication of All American Nativism, ALL Jacobin books at 40% off until Sunday, January 26th at 11:59PM EST.

[book-strip index="1" style="buy"]

The profound forces of all-American nativism have, in fact, been pushing politics so far to the right over the last forty years that, for many people, Trump began to look reasonable. As Daniel Denvir argues, issues as diverse as austerity economics, free trade, mass incarceration, the drug war, the contours of the post 9/11 security state, and, yes, Donald Trump and the Alt-Right movement are united by the ideology of nativism, which binds together assorted anxieties and concerns into a ruthless political project.

[book-strip index="2" style="buy"]

A Planet to Win explores the political potential and concrete first steps of a Green New Deal. It calls for dismantling the fossil fuel industry, building beautiful landscapes of renewable energy, and guaranteeing climate-friendly work, no-carbon housing, and free public transit. And it shows how a Green New Deal in the United States can strengthen climate justice movements worldwide.

[book-strip index="3" style="buy"]

Jenny Brown uncovers a century of legal abortion in the United States until 1873, recalls women’s experiences in the illegal days, and shows how the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s really won abortion rights. She draws inspiration and lessons from the radicals of Redstockings, the Army of Three, and the Jane Collective, putting together a road map for today’s organizers from the black feminist argument for reproductive justice, the successful fight to make the morning-after pill available over the counter, and the recent mass movement to repeal Ireland’s abortion ban.

[book-strip index="4" style="buy"]

Samuel Stein shows that this explosive transformation of urban life and politics has been driven not only by the tastes of wealthy newcomers, but by the state-driven process of urban planning. Planning agencies provide a unique window into the ways the state uses and is used by capital, and the means by which urban renovations are translated into rising real estate values and rising rents.

Capital City explains the role of planners in the real estate state, as well as the remarkable power of planning to reclaim urban life.

[book-strip index="5" style="buy"]

An engaging, polemical romp through economic theory, computational complexity, and the history of planning, The People’s Republic of Walmart revives the conversation about how society can extend democratic decision-making to all economic matters. With the advances in information technology in recent decades and the emergence of globe-straddling collective enterprises, democratic planning in the interest of all humanity is more important and closer to attainment than ever before.

[book-strip index="6" style="buy"]

“Democracy has been emptied of its content, and Building the Commune offers an alternative model for political organization: the Commune, whose roots are in 1871 Paris but whose contemporary emergence is in Venezuela. A sharp and important book that puts at center-stage the ambitions of ordinary people to govern themselves."
– Vijay Prashad, author of The Poorer Nations

[book-strip index="7" style="buy"]

“Megan Erickson knows the classroom is not a solvent for class society. But she remembers that it can be about something more than class reproduction. There may be no more trustworthy a guide to schooling in capitalist America than this book.” – Corey Robin, journalist and author of The Reactionary Mind and The History of a Political Idea

[book-strip index="8" style="buy"]

“Are the robots eating our jobs? Will technology set us free? These questions aren’t new, but Frase’s approach to answering them is refreshingly inventive. Four Futures is a thought-provoking work of political speculation. This incisive little book offers the vital reminder that nothing is set in stone—or silicon—and that in order to fight for a better world we first need to be able to imagine it.” – Astra Taylor, author of The People’s Platform

[book-strip index="9" style="buy"]

“A highly original and fascinating exploration of what we might think of as ‘changeless change’—the kind of innovation that simultaneously upends current practices and studiously protects existing wealth and power inequities. Through four well-chosen and emblematic case studies, Aschoff tackles this slippery subject with confidence and subtlety, providing readers with key intellectual tools to separate fact from fiction.” – Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

[book-strip index="10" style="buy"]

“An indispensable account of a strike that was badly misconstrued and underreported by the mainstream media. Uetricht not only tells the story lucidly, but explains why the struggle of teachers in Chicago should matter to all of us.” – Liza Featherstone, author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart

[book-strip index="11" style="buy"]

“An important contribution to debates around sex and work, and deserves to be read by anyone who wants to get beyond tired and damaging understandings of both.”” – Nina Power, author of One Dimensional Woman

[book-strip index="12" style="buy"]

“Benjamin Kunkel has pursued a lonely and taxing crash course in Marxist thought, the results of which, set forth here, are nimble, clear, and brave. He dedicates the book to anyone who can use it, which I’ll take a step further: it’s for anyone who cares about historical necessity, the crisis of capitalism, and our fate.” – Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers
 

COMING SOON!
 

[book-strip index="13" style="buy"]

Far from being a liberal stalwart, Biden often outdid even Reagan, Gingrich, and Bush, assisting the right-wing war against the working class, and ultimately paving the way for Trump.

The most comprehensive political biography of someone who has tried for decades to be president, Yesterday’s Man is an essential read for anyone interested in knowing the real Joe Biden and what he might do in office.

All-American Nativism
It is often said that with the election of Donald Trump nativism was raised from the dead. After all, here was a president who organized his campaign around a rhetoric of unvarnished racism and xen...
A Planet to Win
All politics are climate politics in the twenty-first century - and this bold book argues for a Green New Deal that confronts both climate change and inequalityThe age of climate gradualism is over...
Without Apology
With an anti-abortion majority on the Supreme Court, and several states with only one abortion clinic, many reproductive rights activists are on the defensive, hoping to hold on to abortion in a fe...
Capital City
Our cities are changing. Global real estate is now a $217 trillion dollar industry, 36 times the value of all the gold ever mined. It makes up 60 percent of the world's assets, and the most powerfu...
The People's Republic of Walmart
For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern s...
Building the Commune
Since 2011, a wave of popular mobilizations has swept the globe, from Occupy to the Arab Spring, 15M in Spain and the uprisings in Greece. Their demands were varied, but what they share is a commit...
Paperback
Class War
In an age of austerity, elite corporate education reformers have found new ways to transfer the costs of raising children from the state to individual families. Public schools, tasked with providin...
Paperback
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...
Paperback
The New Prophets of Capital
As severe environmental degradation, breathtaking inequality, and increasing alienation push capitalism against its own contradictions, mythmaking has become as central to sustaining our economy ...
Paperback
Strike for America
The Chicago Teachers Union strike was the most important domestic labor struggle so far this century—and perhaps for the last forty years—and the strongest challenge to the conservative agenda fo...
Paperback
Playing the Whore
The sex industry is an endless source of prurient drama for the mainstream media. Recent years have seen a panic over "online red-light districts," which supposedly seduce vulnerable young women ...
Utopia or Bust
After the financial crash and the Great Recession, the media rediscovered Karl Marx, socialist theory, and the very idea that capitalism can be questioned.But in spite of the publicity, the main...
Paperback
Yesterday's Man
Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden exposes the forgotten history of Joe Biden, one of the United States’ longest-serving politicians, and one of its least scrutinized.Over nearly fifty yea...

Filed under: political-economy, political-theory, us-politics, versoreadinglists