Not-So-Light Reads

Book strip #1

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  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...
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  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...
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  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...
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  Rosa Luxemburg

  by J.P. Nettl

  This biography, first published half a century ago, remains the most detailed and comprehensive study of Rosa Luxemburg. Nettl’s extensive knowledge of the social and political context of the Europ...
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  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...
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  The Hidden God

  by Lucien Goldmann

  Preface by Michael Löwy

  Translated by Philip Thody

  This remarkable text, first published in 1964, was a landmark of its era and remains, in the words of Michael Löwy, a work of “remarkable richness.” Drawing on Georg Lukács’ History and Class Consc...
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  Capital

  by Kenneth Goldsmith

  Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources—histories, me...
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  The Prophet Armed

  by Isaac Deutscher

  Few political figures of the twentieth century have aroused as much controversy as the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky’s extraordinary life and extensive writings have left an indelible...
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  The Prophet Unarmed

  by Isaac Deutscher

  Few political figures of the twentieth century have aroused as much controversy as the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky’s extraordinary life and extensive writings have left an indelible...
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  The Prophet Outcast

  by Isaac Deutscher

  Few political figures of the twentieth century have aroused as much controversy as the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky’s extraordinary life and extensive writings have left an indelible...
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  Everything to Nothing

  by Geert Buelens

  The First World War changed the map of Europe forever. Empires collapsed, new countries were born, revolutions shocked and inspired the world. This tumult, sometimes referred to as ‘the literary wa...
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  Absolute Recoil

  by Slavoj Žižek

  At the outset of the twentieth century, Lenin argued that materialism has to change its form with each new scientific discovery. Today, argues Slavoj Zizek in this major new work, we should apply t...
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  Lineages of the Absolutist State

  by Perry Anderson

  Forty years after its original publication, Lineages of the Absolutist State remains an exemplary achievement in comparative history. Picking up from where its companion volume, Passages from Antiq...
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  Frantz Fanon

  by David Macey

  Born in Martinique, Frantz Fanon (1925–61) trained as a psychiatrist in Lyon before taking up a post in colonial Algeria. He had already experienced racism as a volunteer in the Free French Army, i...
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  Trampling Out the Vintage

  by Frank Bardacke

  In its heyday, the United Farm Workers was an embodiment of its slogan “Yes, we can”—in the form “¡Sí, Se Puede!”—winning many labor victories, securing collective bargaining rights for farm worker...
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  Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?

  by Arno Mayer

  Was the extermination of the Jews part of the Nazi plan from the very start? Arno Mayer offers astartling and compelling answer to this question, which is much debated among historians today.In doi...
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  Sex-pol

  by Wilhelm Reich

  Introduction by Bertell Ollman

  Edited by Lee Baxandall

  Translated by Anna Bostock

  This volume contains the first complete translations of Wilhelm Reich’s writings from his Marxist period. Reich, who died in 1957, had a career with a single goal: to find ways of relieving human s...
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  The Contours of American History

  by William Appleman Williams

  Introduction by Greg Grandin

  William Appleman Williams was one of America’s greatest critics of US imperialism. The Contours of American History, first published in 1961, reached back to seventeenth-century British history to ...
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  Adam Smith in Beijing

  by Giovanni Arrighi

  In the late eighteenth century, the political economist Adam Smith predicted an eventual equalization of power between the West and the territories it had conquered. In this magisterial new work, G...
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  Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol. 1

  by Jean-Paul Sartre

  Foreword by Fredric Jameson

  Edited by Jonathan Ree

  Translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith

  At the height of the Algerian war, Jean-Paul Sartre embarked on a fundamental reappraisal of his philosophical and political thought. The result was the Critique of Dialectical Reason, an intellect...
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  Politics and Letters

  by Raymond Williams

  Introduction by Geoff Dyer

  Raymond Williams made a central contribution to the intellectual culture of the Left in the English-speaking world. He was also one of the key figures in the foundation of cultural studies in Bri...
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  The Social Structure of the Early Christian Communities

  by Dimitris Kyrtatas

  Introduction by G. E. M. de Ste. Croix

  The Social Structure of the Early Christian Communities deals with a small number of topics which, in one way or another, have long attracted the attention of students of early Christianity. Above ...
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  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...
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  Claiming the City

  by Shelton Stromquist

  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...
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  Henri Lefebvre and the Theory of the Production of Space

  by Christian Schmid

  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...
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  The Invention of the White Race

  by Theodore W. Allen

  When the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, there were no 'white' people there; nor, according to colonial records, would there be for another sixty years. Historical debate about the orig...
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  Set the Night on Fire

  by Mike Davis and Jon Wiener

  Histories of the US sixties invariably focus on New York City, but Los Angeles was an epicenter of that decade’s political and social earthquake. L.A. was a launchpad for Black Power—where Malcolm ...
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  The Metamorphoses of Kinship

  by Maurice Godelier

  Translated by Nora Scott

  With marriage in decline, divorce on the rise and the demise of the nuclear family, it is clear that the structures of kinship in the modern West are in a state of flux.In The Metamorphoses of Kins...
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  Potential History

  by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

  In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences.Azoulay ...
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  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-...
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  The Tailor of Ulm

  by Lucio Magri

  Translated by Patrick Camiller

  The Italian Communist Party was once one of the most powerful and vibrant parties of the West. In this detailed and probing work, Lucio Magri, one of the towering intellectual figures of the Italia...
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  A World to Win

  by Sven-Eric Liedman

  Translated by Jeff Skinner

  Karl Marx has fascinated and inspired generations of radicals in the past 200 years. In this new, definitive biography, Sven-Eric Liebman makes his work live once more for a new generation. Despite...
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  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...
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  Eleanor Marx

  by Yvonne Kapp

  Introduction by Sally Alexander

  Eleanor Marx is one of the most tragically overlooked feminist intellectuals in history, usually overshadowed by her father, Karl Marx. But not only did she edit, translate, transcribe and collabor...
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  J.D. Bernal

  Preface by Eric Hobsbawm

  Edited by Francis Aprahamian and Brenda Swann

  An eminent molecular physicist and path-breaking crystallographer, an eloquent and prescient writer on the social implications of science, an early foe of pseudo-scientific racism and an indefatiga...
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  The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain

  by Ron Ramdin

  This is the first comprehensive historical perspective on the relationship between Black workers and the changing patterns of Britain’s labour needs. It places in an historical context the developm...
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  The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume I

  by Rosa Luxemburg

  Edited by Peter Hudis

  Translated by David Fernbach, Joseph Fracchia and George Shriver

  This first volume in Rosa Luxemburg’s Complete Works, entitled Economic Writings 1, contains some of Luxemburg’s most important statements on the globalization of capital, wage labor, imperialism, ...
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  Collected Works, Volume 1

  by V. I. Lenin

  Among the most influential political and social forces of the twentieth century, modern communism rests firmly on philosophical, political, and economic underpinnings developed by Vladimir Ilyich U...
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  The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World

  by G. E. M. de Ste. Croix

  The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World is an original and provocative reconstruction of 1,400 years of classical antiquity. Sharply written, it is a major intervention in Marxist theories of...
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  The Jewelers of the Ummah

  by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

  Can we return to worlds destroyed by colonial violence? In a series of letters to her father, her great-grandmothers, and her children—and to thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Hannah Arendt—Ariella...
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  Revolution

  by Enzo Traverso

  This book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions by composing a constellation of “dialectical images”: Marx’s “locomotives of history,” Alexandra Kollontai’s sexua...
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  Walter Benjamin

  by Momme Brodersen

  Edited by Martina Dervis

  Translated by Malcolm R. Green and Ingrida Ligers

  Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is now generally recognized as one of the most original and influential thinkers of this century. In Britain and the United States in particular, he has acquired a statu...
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  Archaeologies of the Future

  by Fredric Jameson

  In an age of globalization characterized by the dizzying technologies of the First World, and the social disintegration of the Third, is the concept of utopia still meaningful? Archaeologies of the...
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  Valences of the Dialectic

  by Fredric Jameson

  After half a century exploring dialectical thought, renowned cultural critic Fredric Jameson presents a comprehensive study of a misunderstood yet vital strain in Western philosophy. The dialectic,...
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  Ideologies of Theory

  by Fredric Jameson

  Ideologies of Theory, updated and available for the first time in a single volume, brings together theoretical essays that span Fredric Jameson’s long career as a critic. They chart a body of work ...