The marketplace now operates through every hour of the clock, pushing us into constant activity and eroding forms of community and political expression, damaging the fabric of everyday life.Jonathan Crary examines how this interminable non-time blurs any separation between an intensified, ubiquitous consumerism and emerging strategies of control and surveillance. He describes the ongoing management of individual attentiveness and the impairment of perception within the compulsory routines of contemporary technological culture. At the same time, he shows that human sleep, as a restorative withdrawal that is intrinsically incompatible with 24/7 capitalism, points to other more formidable and collective refusals of world-destroying patterns of growth and accumulation.

    Pan offers an unprecedented inside look at the momentous battle underway for China's future. On one side is the entrenched party elite determined to preserve its authoritarian grip on power. On the other is a collection of lawyers, journalists, entrepreneurs, activists, hustlers, and dreamers striving to build a more tolerant, open, and democratic China. The outcome of this dramatic, hidden struggle will shape China's rise to superpower status-and determine how it affects the rest of the world.From factories in the rusting industrial northeast to a tabloid newsroom in the booming south, from a small-town courtroom to the plush offices of the nation's wealthiest tycoons, Pan speaks with men and women fighting and sacrificing for change. An elderly surgeon exposes the government's cover-up of the SARS epidemic. A filmmaker investigates the execution of a student in the Cultural Revolution. A blind man is jailed for leading a crusade against forced abortions carried out under the one-child policy.Out of Mao's Shadow offers a startling perspective on China and its remarkable transformation, challenging conventional wisdom about the political apathy of the Chinese people and the notion that prosperity leads automatically to freedom. Like David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb, this is the moving story of a nation in transition, of a people coming to terms with their past.

    Since the economic liberalization of 1991, wealth has poured into India, and especially into Delhi. Capital bears witness to the extraordinary transmogrification of India’s capital city, charting its emergence from a rural backwater to the center of the new Indian middle class. No other city on earth better embodies the breakneck, radically disruptive nature of the global economy’s growth over the past twenty years. India has not become a new America, though. It more closely resembles post–Soviet Russia with its culture of tremendous excess and undercurrents of gangsterism. But more than anything else, India’s capital, Delhi, is an avatar for capitalism unbound. Capital is an intimate portrait of this very distinct place as well as a parable for where we are all headed. In the style of V. S. Naipaul’s now classic personal journeys, Dasgupta travels through Delhi to meet with extraordinary characters who mostly hail from what Indians call the new Indian middle class, but they are the elites, by any measure. We first meet Rakesh, a young man from a north Indian merchant family whose business has increased in value by billions of dollars in recent years. As Dasgupta interviews him by his mammoth glass home perched beside pools built for a Delhi sultan centuries before, the nightly party of the new Indian middle class begins. To return home, Dasgupta must cross the city, where crowds of Delhi’s workers, migrants from the countryside, sleep on pavements. The contrast is astonishing.  In a series of extraordinary meetings that reveals the attitudes, lives, hopes, and dreams of this new class, Dasgupta meets with a fashion designer, a tech entrepreneur, a young CEO, a woman who has devoted her life to helping Delhi’s forgotten poor—and many others. Together they comprise a generation on the cusp, like that of fin-de-siècle Paris, and who they are says a tremendous amount about what the world will look like in the twenty-first century.

    It traces the circumstances due to which the Maoist movement entrenched itself in about 10 states of India, carrying out deadly attacks against the Indian establishment in the name of the poor and the marginalised. It offers rare insight into the lives of Maoist guerillas and of the Adivasi tribals living in the Red zone.Based on extensive on-ground reportage and exhaustive interviews with Maoist leaders, including their supreme commander, Ganapathi; Kobad Ghandy; and others who are jailed or have been killed in police encounters, this book is a combination of firsthand storytelling and intrepid analysis.Hello, Bastar is the story of:How the idea of creating a guerilla base in Bastar came upWhat the rebels who entered Dandakaranya had to deal withThe Jagtial movement that created the ground for the Maoist movementThe first squad member who died for revolutionHow Maoists and their guerilla squads functionTheir goals, recruitment, party structure and fundingTheir 'urban agenda' for cities like Delhi, Mumbai and ChennaiTheir relationships with people and peoples' movementsMaoist supremo Ganapathi and other top leadersAnuradha Ghandy's journey from Bombay to Bastar

    While most untouchables are illiterate, her family was educated by Canadian missionaries in the 1930s, making it possible for Gidla to attend elite schools and move to America at the age of twenty-six. It was only then that she saw how extraordinary—and yet how typical—her family history truly was. Her mother, Manjula, and uncles Satyam and Carey were born in the last days of British colonial rule. They grew up in a world marked by poverty and injustice, but also full of possibility. In the slums where they lived, everyone had a political side, and rallies, agitations, and arrests were commonplace. The Independence movement promised freedom. Yet for untouchables and other poor and working people, little changed. Satyam, the eldest, switched allegiance to the Communist Party. Gidla recounts his incredible life—how he became a famous poet, student, labor organizer, and founder of a left-wing guerrilla movement. And Gidla charts her mother’s battles with caste and women’s oppression. Page by page, Gidla takes us into a complicated, close-knit family as they desperately strive for a decent life and a more just society.A moving portrait of love, hardship, and struggle, Ants Among Elephants is also that rare thing: a personal history of modern India told from the bottom up.

    Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller is a powerful and provocative book that explores what the new global economy will look like and what it will mean for all of us. In a compelling and accessible style, Jeff Rubin reveals that despite the recent recessionary dip, oil prices will skyrocket again once the economy recovers. The fact is, worldwide oil reserves are disappearing for good. Consequently, the amount of food and other goods we get from abroad will be curtailed; long-distance driving will become a luxury and international travel rare. Globalization as we know it will reverse. The near future will be a time that, in its physical limits, may resemble the distant past. But Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller is a hopeful work about how we can benefit-personally, politically, and economically-from this new reality. American industries such as steel and agriculture, for instance, will be revitalized. As well, Rubin prescribes priorities for President Obama and other leaders, from imposing carbon tariffs that will increase competition and productivity, to investing in mass transit instead of car-clogged highways, to forging "green" alliances between labor and management that will be good for both business and the air we breathe. Most passionately, Rubin recommends ways every citizen can secure this better life for himself, actions that will end our enslavement to chain-store taste and strengthen our communities and timeless human values.

    and much more—with essential lessons for today’s struggles.In the 40 years since the civil rights movement, many gains have been made—but there is still far to go to win genuine change. Here is a badly needed primer on the history and future of the struggle against racism.Ahmed Shawki is the editor of the International Socialist Review. A member of the National Writers Union, he is also a contributor to The Struggle for Palestine (Haymarket). He lives in Chicago, Illinois.

    It clearly serves the 1% far, far better than what it is doing to the vast mass of the people.Marx was a social critic for whom capitalism was not the end of human history. It was just the latest phase and badly needed the transition to something better. We offer this essay now because of the power and usefulness today of Marx’s criticism of the capitalist economic system.

    Drawing significantly from the case of India, Prasannan Parthasarathi shows that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the advanced regions of Europe and Asia were more alike than different, both characterized by sophisticated and growing economies. Their subsequent divergence can be attributed to different competitive and ecological pressures that in turn produced varied state policies and economic outcomes. This account breaks with conventional views, which hold that divergence occurred because Europe possessed superior markets, rationality, science, or institutions. It offers instead a groundbreaking rereading of global economic development that ranges from India, Japan and China to Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire and from the textile and coal industries to the roles of science, technology, and the state.

    Here, a reprinting of the seminal underground essay by Bob Black.

    These have offered us problems and claimed their solutions from us, the penalty of non-fulfilment being death or degradation.

    We have to see that the economy is itself the crisis. It's not that there's not enough work, it's that there is too much of it. The Coming Insurrection is an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe. Written by the anonymous Invisible Committee in the vein of Guy Debord—and with comparable elegance—it has been proclaimed a manual for terrorism by the French government (who recently arrested its alleged authors). One of its members more adequately described the group as “the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality.” The Coming Insurrection is a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine capable of “spreading anarchy and live communism.” Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and presaging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the “war on terror.” Hot-wired to the movement of '77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point, The Coming Insurrection formulates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized life forms. It is a philosophical statement that addresses the growing number of those—in France, in the United States, and elsewhere—who refuse the idea that theory, politics, and life are separate realms.

    Over the course of the next 47 years, the company's reach grew until almost all of India south of Delhi was effectively ruled from a boardroom in the city of London.

    Extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and state failure. In Tropic of Chaos, investigative journalist Christian Parenti travels along the front lines of this gathering catastrophe--the belt of economically and politically battered postcolonial nations and war zones girding the planet's midlatitudes. Here he finds failed states amid climatic disasters. But he also reveals the unsettling presence of Western military forces and explains how they see an opportunity in the crisis to prepare for open-ended global counterinsurgency.Parenti argues that this incipient "climate fascism"--a political hardening of wealthy states-- is bound to fail. The struggling states of the developing world cannot be allowed to collapse, as they will take other nations down as well. Instead, we must work to meet the challenge of climate-driven violence with a very different set of sustainable economic and development policies.

    With almost 200 million people, a 500,000-man army, nuclear weapons, and a large diaspora in Britain and North America, Pakistan is central to the hopes of jihadis and the fears of their enemies. Yet the greatest short-term threat to Pakistan is not Islamist insurgency as such, but the actions of the United States, and the greatest long-term threat is ecological change. Anatol Lieven's book is a magisterial investigation of this highly complex and often poorly understood country: its regions, ethnicities, competing religious traditions, varied social landscapes, deep political tensions, and historical patterns of violence; but also its surprising underlying stability, rooted in kinship, patronage, and the power of entrenched local elites. Engagingly written, combining history and profound analysis with reportage from Lieven's extensive travels as a journalist and academic, Pakistan: A Hard Country is both utterly compelling and deeply revealing.