Michel Valensi, director of Editions de l'éclat, talks political publishing, the evolution of book production with the rise of the internet, and what it means to be a political publisher.
Climate fascism is percolating through the cracks of global capitalist crisis. The Zetkin Collective's foreword to the forthcoming Spanish-language edition of White Skin, Black Fuel offers a concise analysis of the current juncture and outlines what must be done to resist the forward march of climate fascism.
We live, as we're constantly reminded, in uncertain times. But what does uncertainty actually entail? And do some certainties bolster the unjust system in which we live? And could the late philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein help us find a way to think through certainty and uncertainty politically?
"The moment of Fukuyama had arrived. There seemed to be an undeniable internal relationship between capitalism and democracy.
How did the left react?"
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"The representative, especially of a subordinate group, always stands in an ambiguous position. She tries to speak on behalf of the group’s interests. This raises the whole well-chewed complex of arguments about how the principal (the group) can control its agent (the representative). But there is a more basic problem that needs addressing. This is the interest that the agent has in the preservation of the group as it positively exists."
If the celebrated existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre is remembered today it is likely to be for his novels and fiction, or for his post-war classic Being and Nothingness. Less often discussed is his groundbreaking work of Marxist philosophy, Critique of Dialectical Reason, and the philosophy of praxis he develops in it. But, as Lorenzo Buti argues, it is in this work that his true political power lies.
Verso editor Jessie Kindig remembers socialist feminist activist and author Meredith Tax, and we reprint the 2021 introduction to Tax's classic of socialist feminist labor history, The Rising of the Women.
"There are two great examples of the attempt to replace politics with what André Singer calls “the republican experiment (ensaio republicano)”: the Italian Mani pulite and the Brazilian Lava Jato. These were efforts to create a political movement on the basis of anticorruption. The first ended in the spectacular failure and inversion of the Berlusconi years. The second was a decisive cause of Bolsonaro’s rise."
No work of art, no thought, has a chance of survival, unless it bear within it repudiation of false riches and high-class production.
A list of new and old Marxist classics for the age of pandemic, the anthropocene, tech giants, and late global capitalism.
In this excerpt from Self Defense: A Philosophy of Violence, Elsa Dorlin traces the lineage of the model citizen vigilante in the American tradition. In defense of a nation, she tells us, the vigilante enacts a form of racial justice that seeks to execute the natural enemies of private property, the family, and white society. What is bred? The Racial State.