Salvage Editions – serie

What if we could do better than the family?We need to talk about the family. For those who are lucky, families can be filled with love and care, but for many they are sites of pain: from abandonment and neglect, to abuse and violence. Nobody is more likely to harm you than your family.Even in so-called happy families, the unpaid, unacknowledged work that it takes to raise children and care for each other is endless and exhausting. It could be otherwise: in this urgent, incisive polemic, leading feminist critic Sophie Lewis makes the case for family abolition.Abolish the Family traces the history of family abolitionist demands, beginning with nineteenth century utopian socialist and sex radical Charles Fourier, the Communist Manifesto and early-twentieth century Russian family abolitionist Alexandra Kollontai. Turning her attention to the 1960s, Lewis reminds us of the anti-family politics of radical feminists like Shulamith Firestone and the gay liberationists, a tradition she traces to the queer marxists bringing family abolition to the twenty-first century. This exhilarating essay looks at historic rightwing panic about Black families and the violent imposition of the family on indigenous communities, and insists: only by thinking beyond the family can we begin to imagine what might come after.

Class is more central to understanding what is happening in the UK than it has been for decades. But what does it mean to be working class today? And how should we define it? For some, it is a cultural definition, untethered from its traditional links to labourism. For others, the divisions are found between generations based around the opportunities of home ownership.Jonas Marvin argues that such simple definitions are not enough. Visiting two communities - Tottenham in north London, and Stoke in the Midlands, he shows that while there is a common experience of work, the differences in housing and everyday life are palpable, resulting in a profound bifurcation in proletarian consciousness. Ultimately, the book charts the demolition of the conscious, political subject whose emergence E.P. Thompson traced more than half a century ago: the English working class.

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.

To understand the scale of what faces us and how it ramifies through every corner of our lives is to marvel at our inaction. Why aren't we holding emergency meetings in every city, town and village every week?What is to be done to create a planet where a communist horizon offers a new dawn to replace our planetary twilight? What does it mean to be a communist after we have hit a climate tipping point?The Tragedy of the Worker is a brilliant, stringently argued pamphlet reflecting on capitalism's death drive, the left's complicated entanglements with fossil fuels, and the rising tide of fascism. In response, the authors propose Salvage Communism, a programme of restoration and reparation that must precede any luxury communism. They set out a new way to think about the Anthropocene. The Tragedy of the Worker demands an alternative future - the Proletarocene - one capable of repairing the ravages of capitalism and restoring the world.