As we enter the age of AI, we are in danger of being reduced to what Cory Doctorow dubs the 'reverse centaur'. With that term he conjures a human being conscripted as the assistant to a dominant machine. It could be a driver made to deliver nonstop, all day long; a warehouse worker packing shelves without bathroom or food breaks; or a programmer reviewing impossible amounts of AI-produced code.Don't fall for the hype! The billionaires managing the rise of AI are putting on a command performance for the bosses and investors, not for the ordinary people who might use the products. When this latest tech bubble bursts, will there be something useful for us in the wreckage?In The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, Doctorow examines why we find ourselves in this mess and how we can get out of it. Life after AI should mean the tools work for us, not the other way around.

What happens when politics is everywhere, yet nothing seems to change? From the abandoned dance floors of Thatcher's London to the mass mobilizations of Black Lives Matter, Anton Jäger traces how pub­lic life has become infused with protest, spectacle, and moral urgency - while the old infrastructure of parties, unions, and civic solidarity has been hollowed out.Hyperpolitics revisits the illusions of the "end of history" and dissects the strange energies that replaced them: viral outrage, endless culture wars, and the digital rush of causes that flare and vanish overnight. Jäger shows how the promises of post-Cold War liberalism gave way to a restless, unsteady public sphere where private pas­sions overflow into politics but rarely build enduring power.Ranging from Guy Debord and Wolfgang Tillmans to Houellebecq's disenchanted fictions, Hyperpolitics makes sense of a world in which collective action remains fragmented and the social fabric thinner than ever. For anyone trying to grasp why our age feels so charged yet so incon­sequential, this book offers a vital map through the new contradictions of our hyperpolitical moment.

*** Longlist for the FT and Schroder Business Book of the Year 2025 ***** Named word of the year in US, UK and Australia ***'Enshittification' will be the most talked about tech book of the year.* "Enshittification" is Doctorow's word to describe the decay of online platforms. It captures the feeling of a world that is ever worsening. Enshittification is not a technical glitch. It is a technique that every platform - from X to TikTok, Amazon to Apple, has adopted. First they lure users onto their platforms, then attract businesses who might profit from this newly formed public, and then finally squeeze both for their own profit. Tech giants lure users in with convenience and then degrade their services over time, draining profit at the cost of user experience. In the meantime our public squares have turned somewhere between the mall and a dumpster fire, that is unfit to deal with the problems of our times.What is to be done? Like a surgeon, Doctorow sets out the symptoms, the diagnosis and the cure to these metastasizing platforms. We need to question the monopolies that dominate so much of our online lives, we must demand regulation and our privacy back, allow for interoperability, and win tech workers' rights.

In this series of accessible lectures, Fredric Jameson explores German philosophy and critical theory as it de­veloped in the wake of World War Two. Focusing on key thinkers - Horkheimer, Adorno, Heidegger, Habermas, Marcuse, Beuys, Enzensberger, Kluge, and Sloterdijk - Jameson weaves close readings of texts with anecdotes and aperçus to craft a narrative about the uses of the­ory. He delves into world-historical phenomena, such as the legacy of Nazism and the formation of the European Union, in a story that stretches from the postwar division of Germany to its reunification at the end of the Cold War.After Year Zero is a vital account of the German critical tradition, as understood by the "most significant Marxist thinker in American culture."

What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest "to solve intelligence" - a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind or in the deep physiology of the brain, such as in its complex neural networks. The Eye of the Master argues, to the contrary, that the inner code of AI is shaped not by the imitation of biological intelligence, but the intelligence of labour and social relations, as it is found in Babbage's "calculating engines" of the industrial age as well as in the recent algorithms for image recognition and surveillance. The idea that AI may one day become autonomous (or "sentient", as someone thought of Google's LaMDA) is pure fantasy. Computer algorithms have always imitated the form of social relations and the organisation of labour in their own inner structure and their purpose remains blind automation. The Eye of the Master urges a new literacy on AI for scientists, journalists and new generations of activists, who should recognise that the "mystery" of AI is just the automation of labour at the highest degree, not intelligence per se.

Apocalypse is in the air. And the far right knows it. Since the pandemic, it has successfully cultivated crises, conspiracy theories, and coalitions to fight a green energy transition. Mobilising online and in the streets, far-right actors cast decarbonisation measures as a 'war on cars' endangering individual liberty, the nuclear family, the nation, and western civilisation.In The Great Driving Right Show, the Zetkin Collective traces the evolution of these conflicts and shows how, as the climate crisis worsens, the political right constructs an 'inverted crisis' in which climate action - not climate change - represents the gravest existential threat. Rising through this shared strategy are movements and parties from anti-road-pricing saboteurs, 'freedom' convoys and farmers' protests, to the Trump-led opposition to electric vehicles. Powering such actors are not only fossil-fuel and automobile interests, but an ever-expanding cycle of moral panics about climate and racial justice protesters, trans people, and migrants.With the planet at stake, we must confront the new climate denialism and the violent mobility regime fuelling the rise of fossil fascism.

What happens when an idea born of genuine suffering is weaponized as a tool of social control? Traumatized is the story of how shell shock became PTSD, how Oprah turned pain into profit, and how "authenticity" became the ultimate brand. It is a history of surveillance cap­italism's greatest coup: convincing us that wounds define us and that accom­modating each other's trauma is more important than challenging the powerful.Catherine Liu delivers an unflinching diagnosis of our current crisis, rooted as it is in the collapse of liberal politics, the ascendance of performance fragil­ity, and the rise of emotional display as a surrogate for political action. Sharp, provocative, and urgently necessary, Traumatized argues that we must re­ject a politics of permanent victimhood since it destroys solidarity and leaves us defenseless against the systems that cause real harm.

Three Palestinian men embark on a brutal and treacherous odyssey across the Iraqi desert to Kuwait, not for liberation but material betterment. Under the indifferent brutality of border bureaucracy and the blank aggression of the sun, things grow increasingly oppressive. Breezily conversational and disarmingly lyrical, this short novel delivers a shuddering dose of horror. Collected here alongside the titular novella are six short stories, including the timeless, resonant 'Letter from Gaza', Kanafani's first published work.

*** Longlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year 2025 ***Misogyny, conspiratorialism, surveillance, manipulation, fraud, and AI slop are drowning the internet. For the monopolists who dominate online - X, TikTok, Amazon, Meta, Apple - this is all part of the playbook. The process is what leading tech critic Cory Doctorow has dubbed 'enshittification'. First, the platform attracts users with some bait, such as free access; then the activity is monetized, bringing in the business customers and degrading the user experience; then, once everyone is trapped and competitors eradicated, the platform wrings out all the value and transfers it to their executives and shareholders.As a result, online public squares have become places of torment, and online retailers are hellish dumpster fires. The virtual gathering places where we once imagined the world's problems might be resolved are now a sewer of hatred and abuse - thoroughly enshittified.Doctorow enumerates the symptoms, lays out the diagnosis, and identifies the best responses to these diseased platforms: the monopolies online must be shattered. Companies too big to fail or to jail - and much too big to care - must be cut down to size. Only an attack on corporate power will permit effective regulation and real privacy. Tech unions must protect the workers who should, in turn, defend us against their bosses' sadism and greed.Praise for The Internet Con:"One of the Internet's most interesting writers." -- Edward Snowden"This book fills me with hope that a radical yet plausible alternative to computational tyranny can be developed and deployed." -- Douglas Rushkoff, author of Survival of the Fittest"This book is the instruction manual Big Tech doesn't want you to read. It deconstructs their crummy products, undemocratic business models, rigged legal regimes, and lies. Crack this book and help build something better." -- Astra Taylor"A brilliant barn burner of a book. Cory is one of the sharpest tech critics, and he shows with fierce clarity how our computational future could be otherwise." -- Kate Crawford, author of The Atlas of AI

Today our world is under the watchful and tireless eye of computer vision, with cam­eras and monitors tracing our every move. Furthermore, generative AI is now able to render a synthetic world indistinguishable from reality for us to explore. Trevor Paglen goes in search of the ways and means of understanding this new visual universe. Instead of asking what these technologies "say" about the world, he teaches us to ask what they "do" and where such images come from.Exploring the esoteric worlds of psyops, UFO imagery, magicians, and public relation gurus, Paglen shows that this appar­ently alien realm is more human, but much stranger, than we imagine.

If crisis defines our era, we need a coherent socialist policy in response. St�le Holgersen delves into today''s economic and ecological crises to demonstrate that they are not exceptions to an otherwise functioning system but integral to its operation. It is naive to see these upheavals as opportunities for reform or revolution. They are the bedrock of the status quo. Fortunately, the vicious circle sustaining capitalism is not founded on an iron law. Our historical mission in the face of the climate crisis is to create a historical exception to the rule. It is time for ecosocialism against crisis.

Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault's biopower, has discovered the productive force of the psyche. In the course of discussing all the facets of neoliberal psychopolitics fueling our contemporary crisis of freedom, Han elaborates an analytical framework that provides an original theory of Big Data and a lucid phenomenology of emotion. But this provocative essay proposes counter models too, presenting a wealth of ideas and surprising alternatives at every turn.

In this absorbing chronicle of the role of race in US history, David R. Roediger explores how the idea of race was created and recreated from the 1600s to the present day. From the late seventeenth century-the era in which Du Bois located the emergence of "whiteness"-through the American revolution and the emancipatory Civil War, to the civil rights movement and the emergence of the American empire, How Race Survived US History reveals how race did far more than persist as an exception in a progressive national history. Roediger examines how race intersected all that was dynamic and progressive in US history, from democracy and economic development to migration and globalisation.

"Cultural Marxism" is one of the far right's favorite buzzwords. But despite its currency, the meaning and origins of the term are rarely investigated. This book uncovers the bizarre story of the cult leaders, right-wing intellectuals, and White House officials who believe a coterie of left-wing scholars and students is plotting to undermine Western civilization. Drawing on years of archival research and using the tools of critical theory, A.J.A. Woods reveals how a group of German thinkers known as the Frankfurt School was recast as the sinister orchestra-tors of a global conspiracy. Instead of simply debunking this conspiracy theory, Woods offers a sharp analysis and critique of the political movements that have declared war on all that passes for Cultural Marxism in the US, the UK, and Brazil.Only when we understand the practices and weaknesses of those reactionaries committed to fighting this illusory threat-a conflict causing real-world damage-can we effectively resist. This is an essential book for anyone seeking to understand the ideological currents shaping politics in the twenty-first century.

Architecture, as we know it, is in crisis. The authority of architects is crumbling, their methods no longer tenable. In a highly critical introspection, architect and writer Reinier de Graaf explores the tough choices ahead and the course of action that must follow.Architecture Against Architecture demands we rethink both how and why we build. With wit and insight, De Graaf lays out the future of the profession, challenging readers to question the fundamental assumptions of the discipline. How do we end the feudal veneration of starchitects? When will architects finally recognize that it is in their own best interest to unionize? Why aren't more practices collectively owned? Why do so many architects over sixty-seven refuse to retire? How do we stop buildings from being copy-righted? What will remain of architecture after AI? What can prevent iconic structures from being embroiled in money laundering? And the vital question: What projects should architects refuse on moral grounds?

A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe.In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and won the coveted Aujourd'hui Award in France, Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel's future.

For decades, David Harvey has been teaching Marx's work, particularly Capital, to great acclaim. He has analysed chapter by chapter - sometimes line-by-line - Marx's three volumes and the Grundrisse. This new book opens up the mental universe of that work for a general reader. In The Story of Capital, Harvey takes a synoptic approach to the conceptual architecture as a whole and guides us through the key moments, from labour and technology to the state and geopolitics, via the profit rate, social reproduction, the relationship to nature, fictitious capital and the return of the rentiers. In doing so, Harvey has produced a work which will become a key reference for all those trying to grasp the nature of contemporary capitalism.

If crisis defines our era, we need a coherent socialist policy in response. Ståle Holgersen delves into today's economic and ecological crises to demonstrate that they are not exceptions to an otherwise functioning system but integral to its operation. It is naive to see these upheavals as opportunities for reform or revolution. They are the bedrock of the status quo. Fortunately, the vicious circle sustaining capitalism is not founded on an iron law. Our historical mission in the face of the climate crisis is to create a historical exception to the rule. It is time for ecosocialism against crisis.

By walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name and a history ... The freedom in walking lies in not being anyone; for the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life.In A Philosophy of Walking, a bestseller in France, leading thinker Frédéric Gros charts the many different ways we get from A to B-the pilgrimage, the promenade, the protest march, the nature ramble-and reveals what they say about us. Gros draws attention to other thinkers who also saw walking as something central to their practice. On his travels he ponders Thoreau's eager seclusion in Walden Woods; the reason Rimbaud walked in a fury, while Nerval rambled to cure his melancholy. He shows us how Rousseau walked in order to think, while Nietzsche wandered the mountainside to write. In contrast, Kant marched through his hometown every day, exactly at the same hour, to escape the compulsion of thought. Brilliant and erudite, A Philosophy of Walking is an entertaining and insightful manifesto for putting one foot in front of the other.

Drawing on a wide range of unpublished material and observations gathered from his visit to Yugoslavia in 1999, Michael Parenti challenges mainstream media coverage of the war, uncovering hidden agendas behind the Western talk of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and democracy.

The science on climate change has been clear for a very long time now. Yet despite decades of appeals, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and peaceful demonstrations, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising emission levels, and a rising temperature. With the stakes so high, why haven't we moved beyond peaceful protest? In this lyrical manifesto, noted climate scholar (and saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines) Andreas Malm makes an impassioned call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics in the face of ecological collapse. We need, he argues, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop--with our actions, with our bodies, and by defusing and destroying its tools. We need, in short, to start blowing up some oil pipelines.Offering a counter-history of how mass popular change has occurred, from the democratic revolutions overthrowing dictators to the movement against apartheid and for women's suffrage, Malm argues that the strategic acceptance of property destruction and violence has been the only route for revolutionary change. In a braided narrative that moves from the forests of Germany and the streets of London to the deserts of Iraq, Malm offers us an incisive discussion of the politics and ethics of pacifism and violence, democracy and social change, strategy and tactics, and a movement compelled by both the heart and the mind. Here is how we fight in a world on fire.

What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, Rodney makes the unflinching case that African maldevelopment is not a natural feature of geography, but a direct product of imperial extraction from the continent, a practice that continues up into the present. Meticulously researched, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains an unshakably relevant study of the so-called "great divergence" between Africa and Europe, just as it remains a prescient resource for grasping the the multiplication of global inequality today. In this new edition, Angela Davis offers a striking foreword to the book, exploring its lasting contributions to a revolutionary and feminist practice of anti-imperialism.

In his iconoclastic and controversial study, Norman G. Finkelstein moves from an interrogation of the place the Holocaust has come to occupy in global culture to a disturbing examination of Holocaust compensation settlements. It was not until the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, when Israel's evident strength brought it into line with US foreign policy, that memory of the Holocaust began to acquire the exceptional prominence it has today.Recalling Holocaust fraudsters such as Jerzy Kosinski and Binjamin Wilkomirski, as well as the demagogic constructions of writers like Daniel Goldhagen, Finkelstein contends that the main danger posed to the memory of Nazism's victims comes from some of the very people who profess most passionately to defend it. Drawing on a wealth of untapped sources, he exposes the double shakedown of European countries and legitimate Jewish claimants, and concludes that the Holocaust industry has become an outright extortion racket

Winner of the 2023 Walkley non fiction journalism prizeFinalist for the 2023 Moore Prize for Human Rights WritingIsrael's military industrial complex uses the occupied, Palestinian territories as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology that they then export around the world to despots and democracies. For more than 50 years, occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has given the Israeli state invaluable experience in controlling an "enemy" population, the Palestinians. It's here that they have perfected the architecture of control. Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein, author of Disaster Capitalism, uncovers this largely hidden world in a global investigation with secret documents, revealing interviews and on-the-ground reporting. This book shows in-depth, for the first time, how Palestine has become the perfect laboratory for the Israeli military-techno complex: surveillance, home demolitions, indefinite incarceration and brutality to the hi-tech tools that drive the 'Start-up Nation'. From the Pegasus software that hacked Jeff Bezos' and Jamal Khashoggi's phones, the weapons sold to the Myanmar army that has murdered thousands of Rohingyas and drones used by the European Union to monitor refugees in the Mediterranean who are left to drown. Israel has become a global leader in spying technology and defence hardware that fuels the globe's most brutal conflicts. As ethno-nationalism grows in the 21st century, Israel has built the ultimate model.

Shortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize 2023Capital is currently cannibalizing every sphere of life-guzzling wealth from nature and racialized populations, sucking up our ability to care for each other, and gutting the practice of politics. In this tightly argued and urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, from racial violence to the devaluing of care work. These crisis points all come to a head in Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the resistance we need to end the feeding frenzy. What we need, she argues, is a wide-ranging socialist movement that can recognize the rapaciousness of capital - and starve it to death.

Slavoj Zizek, the maverick philosopher, author of over 30 books, acclaimed as the "Elvis of cultural theory", and today's most controversial public intellectual. His work traverses the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory, taking in film, popular culture, literature and jokes-all to provide acute analyses of the complexities of contemporary ideology as well as a serious and sophisticated philosophy. His recent films The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema and Zizek! reveal a theorist at the peak of his powers and a skilled communicator. Now Verso is making his classic titles, each of which stand as a core of his ever-expanding life's work, available as new editions. Each is beautifully re-packaged, including new introductions from Zizek himself. Simply put, they are the essential texts for understanding Zizek's thought and thus cornerstones of contemporary philosophy.The Sublime Object of Ideology: Slavoj Zizek's first book is a provocative and original work looking at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. In a thrilling tour de force that made his name, he explores the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society.

The more we know about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we burn. How did we end up in this mess?In this masterful new history, Andreas Malm claims it all began in Britain with the rise of steam power. But why did manufacturers turn from traditional sources of power, notably water mills, to an engine fired by coal? Contrary to established views, steam offered neither cheaper nor more abundant energy-but rather superior control of subordinate labour. Animated by fossil fuels, capital could concentrate production at the most profitable sites and during the most convenient hours, as it continues to do today. Sweeping from nineteenth-century Manchester to the emissions explosion in China, from the original triumph of coal to the stalled shift to renewables, this study hones in on the burning heart of capital and demonstrates, in unprecedented depth, that turning down the heat will mean a radical overthrow of the current economic order.

In February of 1917 Russia was a backward, autocratic monarchy, mired in an unpopular war; by October, after not one but two revolutions, it had become the world's first workers' state, straining to be at the vanguard of global revolution. How did this unimaginable transformation take place?In a panoramic sweep, stretching from St Petersburg and Moscow to the remotest villages of a sprawling empire, Miéville uncovers the catastrophes, intrigues and inspirations of 1917, in all their passion, drama and strangeness. Intervening in long-standing historical debates, but told with the reader new to the topic especially in mind, here is a breathtaking story of humanity at its greatest and most desperate; of a turning point for civilisation that still resonates loudly today. China Miéville tells the extraordinary story of this pivotal moment in history.