Verso at The World Transformed 2019
To celebrate the launch of The World Transformed 2019 programme we're offering 50% off all our essential Labour reading!
The World Transformed 2019 will be a four day fringe festival from September 21st-24th alongside the Labour Party Conference in Brighton. Across ten venues there will be a series of talks, skill shares, debates, plays and parties that’ll redefine what it means to do politics and debate new ideas that’ll soon shape the future of Britain.
The programme has just been released online and Jeremy Corbyn says it’s the “most exciting yet”. Speaking at this year's The World Transformed are Verso authors John McDonnell, Ann Pettifor, Maya Goodfellow, Molly Smith and Juno Mac, Lynne Segal, Danny Dorling, Richard Seymour, Aaron Bastani, Paul Mason, Nisha Kapoor, Tariq Ali, Owen Jones, Leo Panitch, Bhaskar Sunkara, George Monbiot and Frances Ryan.
Over the course of the four days, hundreds of festival attendees will build a ‘Manifesto For The Movement’ - a radical document that will be presented to MPs at the end of the festival. We’ll hear from #AbolishEton on their viral campaign to end private education, radical US union National Nurses Unite on how to resist the Americanisation of the NHS, and Labour for a Green New Deal on how we can bring a Green New Deal to the UK.
If you can't make it though, fear not as we're offering 50% off all our essential Labour Party reading on our website until Tuesday 24th!
50% off until September 24 (23.59 BST)
A different kind of politics for a new kind of society—beyond work, scarcity and capitalism.
[book-strip index="2" style="buy"]Erik Olin Wright has distilled decades of work into this concise and tightly argued manifesto: analyzing the varieties of anticapitalism, assessing different strategic approaches, and laying the foundations for a society dedicated to human flourishing. How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century is an urgent and powerful argument for socialism, and an unparalleled guide to help us get there
[book-strip index="3" style="buy"]Our economy is rigged in favour of a wealthy elite. We need a new approach: an economics for the many.
[book-strip index="4" style="buy"]How the law harms sex workers—and what they want instead.
[book-strip index="5" style="buy"]The austerity crisis and threat to disability rights.
[book-strip index="6" style="buy"]Fully updated new edition: Why we cannot afford the rich in post Brexit Britain.
[book-strip index="7" style="buy"]For the first time in decades, socialism is back on the agenda—and for the first time in Labour’s history, it defines the leadership.
[book-strip index="8" style="buy"]The anatomy of Britain on the edge of Brexit, by Orwell Prize–winning journalist.
[book-strip index="9" style="buy"]The extradition of terror suspects reveals the worst features of the security state.
[book-strip index="10" style="buy"]Bestselling investigation into the myth and reality of working-class life in contemporary Britain.
[book-strip index="11" style="buy"]From one of the most prominent voices on the American left, a galvanizing argument for why we need socialism today.
[book-strip index="12" style="buy"]What does the good life—and the good society—look like in the twenty-first century?
[book-strip index="13" style="buy"]Argues against the assertion that there is no alternative to neo-liberalism.
[book-strip index="14" style="buy"]A passionate call to rediscover the political and emotional joy that emerges when we share our lives.
[book-strip index="15" style="buy"]Why we misunderstand the nature of money, and what we can do about it.
[book-strip index="16" style="buy"]How can we reinvent politics for the twenty-first century? Srnicek and Williams' urgent manifesto for a new politics has been one of the most influential books on the left in recent years.
Against the confused understanding of our high-tech world by both the right and the left, this book claims that the emancipatory and future-oriented possibilities of our society can be reclaimed. Instead of running from a complex future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams demand a postcapitalist economy capable of advancing standards, liberating humanity from work and developing technologies that expand our freedoms.
[book-strip index="17" style="buy"]Eyewitness reporting and shrewd analysis from the many centers of the global movement for liberation.
[book-strip index="18" style="buy"]Owen Hatherley explodes the creation of a false history: a rewriting of the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw the development of a welfare state while the nation crawled out of the devastations of war. This period has been recast to explain and offer consolation for the violence of neoliberalism, an ideology dedicated to the privatisation of our common wealth.
In a brilliant polemical rampage, with subjects ranging from Ken Loach’s documentaries, London vernacular architecture, and Jamie Oliver’s cooking—Hatherley issues a passionate challenge to the injunction to keep calm and carry on.
The 2015 general election may well be looked-back on as the defining moment for the politics of the "Extreme Centre," that indistinguishable middle ground fought over by all the main parties. Tariq Ali's prescient account of the school of TINA ('there is no alternative') looks at the people and the events that have informed this moment of political suicide: corruption in Westminster; the failures of the EU and NATO; and the soft power of the American Empire that dominates the world stage uncontested.
[book-strip index="20" style="buy"]The BBC is one of the most important institutions in Britain; it is also one of the most misunderstood. Despite its claim to be independent and impartial, and the constant accusations of a liberal bias, the BBC has always sided with the elite. As Tom Mills demonstrates, we are only getting the news that the Establishment wants aired in public.
[book-strip index="21" style="buy"]George Monbiot is one of the most vocal, and eloquent, critics of the current consensus. How Did We Get into this Mess?, based on his powerful journalism, assesses the state we are now in: the devastation of the natural world, the crisis of inequality, the corporate takeover of nature, our obsessions with growth and profit and the decline of the political debate over what to do.
[book-strip index="22" style="buy"]An icon of the Left, and champion of democracy and social justice, Tony Benn entered the Commons in 1950 and with Ted Heath held the record for post-war service as an MP. Parliament, People and Power features a selection of his interviews with the New Left Review, as Benn sets out his radical agenda for society, and reflects on a life in politics.
[book-strip index="23" style="buy"]This collection of classic essays from Britain's leading Marxist historian is one of the best sources we have to understand "The Origins of the Present Crisis." Perry's seminal essay, written in 1964, traces the lack of a revolutionary opposition in British politics to England's premature revolutions of the 1640s and its constitutional establishment in 1688. The problem of the English has never been more thoroughly analysed, and the Nairn-Anderson thesis feels as relevant as ever in our crisis prone national landscape.
[book-strip index="24" style="buy"]In How Will Capitalism End?, the acclaimed analyst of contemporary politics and economics Wolfgang Streeck argues that the world is about to change. The marriage between democracy and capitalism, ill-suited partners brought together in the shadow of World War Two, is coming to an end. The regulatory institutions that once restrained the financial sector’s excesses have collapsed and, after the final victory of capitalism at the end of the Cold War, there is no political agency capable of rolling back the liberalization of the markets.
[book-strip index="25" style="buy"]Working Class Politics in Crisis contains Panitch's major essay 'The Impasse of Social Democratic Politics', the most substantial critique of Eric Hobsbawm's political writings yet to have appeared.
[book-strip index="26" style="buy"]Labour would be unwise to ignore the words of parliamentary socialism's most trenchant critic Ralph Miliband. This classic collection of essays from "The Man Who Hated Britain," recently republished with a new introduction by Tariq Ali, covers Miliband's most famous pronouncements on the state, socialism and the Labour party.
[book-strip index="27" style="buy"]"The best book on the Thatcher era", according to Naomi Klein, The Enemy Within reveals the astonishing lengths to which her government and its intelligence machine were prepared to go to destroy the power of Britain’s miners’ union. In this 30th anniversary edition new material brings the story up to date with further revelations about the secret war against organized labour and political dissent, and the devastating price paid for the Thatcher administration's onslaught by communities across Britain.
See our forthcoming essential Labour Party reading:
[book-strip index="28" style="buy"]Critics on all sides have been quick to observe that the GND is a pipe dream that could never be implemented, and would cost the earth. But, as Ann Pettifor shows, we need to rethink the function of money, and how it works within the global system. How can we bail out the banks but not the planet? We have to stop thinking about the imperative of economic growth—nothing grows for ever. The program will be a long term project but it needs to start immediately.
[book-strip index="29" style="buy"]The UK government proudly calls the aim of its immigration policy to be the creation of a “hostile environment, ” while refugees drown in the Mediterranean and Britain votes to leave the EU against claims that “swarms”of migrants are entering Britain. Meanwhile, study after study confirms that immigration is not damaging the UK’s economy, nor putting a strain on public services, but immigration is blamed for all of Britain’s ills. Yet concerns about immigration are deemed “legitimate” across the political spectrum, with few exceptions. How did we get here?
[book-strip index="30" style="buy"]The remarkable advance of “Corbynism” did not emerge from nowhere. It is the product of developments in socialist and working-class politics over the past forty years and more. The Thatcher era witnessed a wholesale attack on the postwar consensus and welfare state, through a regime of deregulation, attacks on the unions, privatisations, and globalisation. However, at the same time, there existed a persistent resistance to the growing powers of neo-liberalism. This side of the story is rarely told as it was considered to be a history of defeat. Yet out of this struggle emerged a thoroughly modern socialism.
