Recent Books

  • Earth Democracy

    Price: $15.00

    Earth Democracy
    Justice, Sustainability, and Peace
    Vandana Shiva
    Boldly confronting the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, world-renowned physicist/activist Vandana Shiva responds with Earth Democracy, or, as she prophetically names it, “The People’s Project for a New Planetary Millennium.” A leading voice in the struggle for global justice and sustainability, here Shiva describes what earth democracy could look like, outlining the bedrock principles for building living economies, living cultures, and living democracies.

    Starting from the initial enclosure of the commons-the privatization of 6 million acres of public land in 18th-century Britain—Shiva goes on to reveal how the “commons” continue to shrink as more and more natural resources are patented and fenced. Accompanying this displacement from formerly accessible territory, she argues, is a growing attitude of disposability that erodes our natural resources, ecological sustainability, and cultural diversity. Worse, human beings are by no means safe from this assignment of disposability. Through the forces of neoliberal globalization,...

    Read more about: Earth Democracy  »
  • SCUM Manifesto

    Price: $15.00

    SCUM Manifesto
    Valerie Solanas
    Introduction by Avital Ronell

    SCUM Manifesto was considered one of the most outrageous, violent and certifiably crazy tracts when it first appeared in 1968. Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, self-published this work just before her rampage against the king of Pop Art made her a household name and resulted in her confinement to a mental institution. But the Manifesto, for all its vitriol, is impossible to dismiss as just the rantings of a lesbian lunatic. In fact, the work has indisputable prescience, not only as a radical feminist analysis light-years ahead of its time…predicting artificial insemination, ATMs, a feminist uprising against under-representation in the arts…but also as a stunning testament to the rage of an abused and destitute woman.

    The focus of this edition is not on the nostalgic appeal of the work, but on Avital Ronell’s incisive introduction, “Deviant Payback: The Aims of Valerie Solanas.” Here is a reconsideration of Solanas’s infamous text in light of her social milieu,...

    Read more about: SCUM Manifesto  »
  • Books for Burning

    Price: $25.00

    Books for Burning
    Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy
    Antonio Negri
    Long before Antonio Negri became famous around the world for his groundbreaking volume Empire, he was infamous across Europe for the incendiary writings contained in this book. Books for Burning consists of five pamphlets that Negri wrote between 1971 and 1977, which attempt to identify and draw lessons from new conditions of class struggle that emerged in the course of the 1970s.

    Conceived as organizational hypotheses intended for debate among the members of the political movements Workers’ Power (Potere operaio) and Organized Autonomy (Autonomia organizzata), these texts were later misread and misrepresented by the Italian state in its attempt to frame Negri as responsible for the assassination of former Italian president Aldo Moro, as the leader of the Red Brigades, and as the mastermind of an armed insurrection against the state. In the more than twenty-five years since their first publication, these texts have lost none of their originality,...

    Read more about: Books for Burning  »
  • Soma

    Price: $15.95

    Soma
    An Anarchist Therapy
    50-minute documentary DVD ROM, produced by Nick Cooper
    With difficulty walking, and half-blinded from torture by the Brazilian military dictatorship, 79 year-old Roberto Freire continues to develop somatherapy, completing his life’s work. Incorporating the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, the politics of anarchism, and the culture of capoeira angola, Soma is used by therapists organized in anarchist collectives to fight the psychological effects of authoritarianism. Nick Cooper travelled to Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Bahia, and São Paulo to find the exercises, principles, voices, and movement of somatherapy.

    A Review from Slingshot:

    In 1964, the military in Brazil carried out a coup d’etat supported by the CIA and local right-wing groups, inaugurating a bloody dictatorship. It was during the dictatorship that a clandestine anarchist activist named Roberto Freire, who also was a psychoanalyst, (anti)psychiatrist and author of books and plays, confirmed the destructive effects of repression on people’s behavior and psychological and mental health....

    Read more about: Soma  »
  • Thinking Past Terror

    Price: $22.00

    Thinking Past Terror
    Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left
    Susan Buck-Morss

    Renowned critical theorist Susan Buck-Morss argues convincingly that a global public needs to think past the twin insanities of terrorism and counter-terrorism in order to dismantle regressive intellectual barriers. Surveying the widespread literature on the relationship of Islam to modernity, she reveals that there is surprising overlap where scholars commonly and simplistically see antithesis. Thinking Past Terror situates this engagement with the study of Islam among critical contemporary discourses—feminism, post-colonialism and the critique of determinism.

    Reminding us powerfully that domination and consensus are maintained not by the lack of opposing ideas but by the disorganization of dissent, Thinking Past Terror presents the empowering idea of a global counter-culture as a very real possibility. If the language of a global, radically cosmopolitan Left is not presumed but its attainment struggled for, if the Leftist project is itself this struggle, then democracy defines its very core....

    Read more about: Thinking Past Terror  »
  • Histories

    Price: $19.95

    Histories
    French Constructions of the Past
    Postwar French Thought, Volume 1

    Edited by Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt
    The period from 1945 to the present has been one of the most intellectually fruitful in French history. Entirely new approaches to a number of fields have been developed, and the influence of French thinkers has resonated throughout the West, in many ways reformulating our approach to modern knowledge. This 654-page volume traces developments in French historiography from questions of social history and global history (1945-1960s), structuralism (mid-1960s through mid-1970s), the territory of the historian (1970s through mid-1980s), to criticisms and reformulations (1980s to the present). Featuring work by Francois Furet, Michel de Certeau, Michelle Perrot, Pierre Nora, Roger Chartier, Ernest Labrousse, Fernand Braudel, Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Jacques Le Goff, Pierre Bourdieu, and others, this volume illuminates the most important controversies about historical method in the twentieth century.

    ... Read more about: Histories  »