Blog

What does it mean to write about immortality in relation to communism, Mao Zedong Thought, and people’s experiences of life under the Chinese Communist Party? 

An extract from the Introduction to this year’s Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, the journal of the Raymond Williams Society. Robert Spencer and Christopher Vardy are editors of the special issue on ‘Crisis’ and argue below for urgent critical, theoretical, and political questions to be posed to greater understand how crises are understood and narrativized. 

As the scale of the impending climate crisis is increasingly clear to all, we are left with a stark choice: eco-socialism or eco-fascism. Max Ajl surveys the landscape of ecological politics, and argues for an genuinely internationalist eco-socialism as the only way to defeat eco-fascism.

The Global Detention Project has identified more than 2,000 detention centers worldwide. For corporate powers and global elites borders have been erased, but migrants fleeing violence and economic insecurity are faced with deportation or detainment in inhumane detention centers. Todd Miller responds to the crisis at the border and exposes the contradictions in the government justifying the use of concentration camps to detain migrants.

In place of conventional warfare, securocratic wars, waged to protect and secure not individual nations but the international class of wealthy nations, insert themselves into the yawning gaps of global inequalities. Wars on drugs, on terror, on immigrants have created never-ending battlescapes, often along borders. 

The United States is outsourcing its border patrol abroad—and essentially expanding its borders in the process.

We are very excited to announce the launch of Verso Fiction, coming this September!

Books from the leading Marxist critic, alongside related reading including Sartre, Adorno, and Žižek.

Organizer and writer Alyssa Battistoni selects five authors who have shaped her relationship to political organizing.

Andy Beckett on why he believes, despite being in power on both sides of the Atlantic, conservatism is in decline and how conservative ideology is proving itself unable to adjust to the challenges of the 21st century, with Alex Doherty on the Politics Theory Other podcast. 

"How can we make sense of the passage of the party from serving up fierce class warriors determined to put the labour movement and the working class in its place, to a transparently self-serving charlatan happy to 'fuck business'?" Phil Burton-Cartledge on the election of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, and what it says about a Conservative Party in terminal decline.

How can we make sense of the passage of the Conservative party from serving up fierce class warriors determined to put the labour movement and the working class in its place, to a transparently self-serving charlatan happy to “fuck business” and drive the UK economy over a cliff in pursuit of the fancies and phantasms of a no deal Brexit? Phil Burton-Cartledge analyses what Boris Johnson, Britain's new prime minister, means for the Conservative party.