Rise of The Super Furry Animals


Ric Rawlins - 2015
    Wasting no time, they bought an army tank and equipped it with a techno sound-system, caused national security alerts with 60-foot inflatable monsters, went into the Colombian jungle with armed Guerrilla fighters, and drew up plans to convert an aircraft carrier into a nightclub.Yet SFA's crazed adventures only tell half the story. By mixing up electronic beats, surf rock, Japanese culture and more, the band recorded some of the most acclaimed albums of the millennium, all the while documenting the mobile phone revolution in their uniquely surreal way.Written with the band’s own participation and housed in a jacket designed by Pete Fowler, the man behind some of SFA’s most iconic album covers, this is the remarkable story of their ascent to fame.

Isn't That Rich?: Life Among the 1 Percent


Richard Kirshenbaum - 2015
    Pot dealers draped in Dolce. Divorce settlements that include the Birkins at their current retail price. Air kisses, landing strips, and lounge-chair bribery. For most of us, the idea of life inside the golden triad of Park Avenue, Sagaponack, and St. Barths is just as exotic as the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle. Luckily, Richard Kirshenbaum has a VIP pass to the Upper East Side and is willing to share the wealth—of gossip. His New York Observer column on uptown social life provides a fascinating glimpse behind the gilded curtain into the swanky restaurants and eye-popping vacation destinations where the 1 percent gathers.Isn’t That Rich? features highlights from Kirshenbaum’s monthly column as well as several brand-new essays. From cash-strapped blue bloods willing to trade their good names for a taste of nouveau riche treasure to the fine art of donning a cashmere sweater in Capri, our intrepid correspondent exposes the preoccupations of the posh. His insider sources may be anonymous, but “his up-to-the-minute portrait of today’s 1 percent is both insightful and a joy to read, no matter what tax bracket you’re in.” (Mortimer Zuckerman)

Judge Dredd: America


John Wagner - 2015
    But how do the citizens really feel about a system where they are powerless? America Jara and Bennett Beeny grow up as best friends, living a fairly trouble-free life in a dangerous city… bar the odd encounter with a Judge. Time draws them apart, and when they are brought back together, Beeny is a successful singer and America has become involved with a terrorist organisation – with the Judges in its sights! Written by John Wagner (A History of Violence) with art by Colin MacNeil (Judge Dredd: The Chief Judge’s Man) this dark and complex tale is a true 2000 AD classic!

The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries


Kathi Weeks - 2011
    While progressive political movements, including the Marxist and feminist movements, have fought for equal pay, better work conditions, and the recognition of unpaid work as a valued form of labor, even they have tended to accept work as a naturalized or inevitable activity. Weeks argues that in taking work as a given, we have “depoliticized” it, or removed it from the realm of political critique. Employment is now largely privatized, and work-based activism in the United States has atrophied. We have accepted waged work as the primary mechanism for income distribution, as an ethical obligation, and as a means of defining ourselves and others as social and political subjects. Taking up Marxist and feminist critiques, Weeks proposes a postwork society that would allow people to be productive and creative rather than relentlessly bound to the employment relation. Work, she contends, is a legitimate, even crucial, subject for political theory.

Arguments for Socialism


Tony Benn - 1979
    

Hard at Work: Life in Singapore


Gerard Sasges - 2020
    But that simple fact encompasses an incredibly wide range of experiences. Hard at Work takes readers into the day-to-day work experiences of more than fifty working people in Singapore who hold jobs that run from the ordinary to the unusual: from ice cream vendors, baristas, police officers and funeral directors to academic ghostwriters, temple flower sellers, and Thai disco girl agents. Through first-person narratives based on detailed interviews, vividly augmented with color photographs, Hard at Work reminds us of the everyday labor that continually goes on around us, and that every job can reveal something interesting if we just look closely enough. It shows us too the ways inequalities of status and income are felt and internalized in this highly globalized society.

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives


Elizabeth S. Anderson - 2017
    We normally think of government as something only the state does, yet many of us are governed far more--and far more obtrusively--by the private government of the workplace. In this provocative and compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson argues that the failure to see this stems from long-standing confusions. These confusions explain why, despite all evidence to the contrary, we still talk as if free markets make workers free--and why so many employers advocate less government even while they act as dictators in their businesses.In many workplaces, employers minutely regulate workers' speech, clothing, and manners, leaving them with little privacy and few other rights. And employers often extend their authority to workers' off-duty lives. Workers can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. Yet we continue to talk as if early advocates of market society--from John Locke and Adam Smith to Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln--were right when they argued that it would free workers from oppressive authorities. That dream was shattered by the Industrial Revolution, but the myth endures.Private Government offers a better way to talk about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom.Based on the prestigious Tanner Lectures delivered at Princeton University's Center for Human Values, Private Government is edited and introduced by Stephen Macedo and includes commentary by cultural critic David Bromwich, economist Tyler Cowen, historian Ann Hughes, and philosopher Niko Kolodny.

Work: A History of How we spend our Time


James Suzman - 2020
    It determines our status, and dictates how, where, and with whom we spend most of our time. It mediates our self-worth and molds our values. But are we hard-wired to work as hard as we do? Did our Stone Age ancestors also live to work and work to live? And what might a world where work plays a far less important role look like?To answer these questions, James Suzman charts a grand history of "work" from the origins of life on Earth to our ever more automated present, challenging some of our deepest assumptions about who we are. Drawing insights from anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary biology, zoology, physics, and economics, he shows that while we have evolved to find joy meaning and purpose in work, for most of human history our ancestors worked far less and thought very differently about work than we do now. He demonstrates how our contemporary culture of work has its roots in the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago. Our sense of what it is to be human was transformed by the transition from foraging to food production, and, later, our migration to cities. Since then, our relationships with one another and with our environments, and even our sense of the passage of time, have not been the same.Arguing that we are in the midst of a similarly transformative point in history, Suzman shows how automation might revolutionize our relationship with work and in doing so usher in a more sustainable and equitable future for our world and ourselves.

To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936


Murray Bookchin - 1996
    These articles describe, analyze, and evaluate the last great proletarian revolution of the past two centuries. They form indispensable supplements to Bookchin's larger work, The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868–1936. Read together, these works constitute a highly informative and theoretically significant assessment of the anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist movements in Spain. They are invaluable for any reader concerned with the place of the Spanish Revolution in history and with the accomplishments, insights, and failings of the anarcho-syndicalist movements.

London Labour and the London Poor


Henry Mayhew - 1861
    Mayhew aimed simply to report the realities of the poor from a compassionate and practical outlook. This penetrating selection shows how well he succeeded: the underprivileged of London become extraordinarily and often shockingly alive.

We Make the Road by Walking: Conversations on Education and Social Change


Myles Horton - 1990
    Throughout their highly personal conversations recorded here, Horton and Freire discuss the nature of social change and empowerment and their individual literacy campaigns. The ideas of these men developed through two very different channels: Horton's, from the Highlander Center, a small, independent residential education center situated outside the formal schooling system and the state; Freire's, from within university and state-sponsored programs. Myles Horton, who died in January 1990, was a major figure in the civil rights movement and founder of the Highlander Folk School, later the highlander Research and Education Center. Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, established the Popular Culture Movement in Recife, Brazil's poorest region, and later was named head of the New National Literacy Campaign until a military coup forced his exile from Brazil. He has been active in educational development programs worldwide. For both men, real liberation is achieved through popular participation. The themes they discuss illuminate problems faced by educators and activists around the world who are concerned with linking participatory education to the practice of liberation and social change. How could two men, working in such different social spaces and times, arrive at similar ideas and methods? These conversations answer that question in rich detail and engaging anecdotes, and show that, underlying the philosophy of both, is the idea that theory emanates from practice and that knowledge grows from and is a reflection of social experience.

Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet


Jeffrey Rosen - 2016
    Brandeis was “the Jewish Jefferson,” the greatest critic of what he called “the curse of bigness,” in business and government, since the author of the Declaration of Independence. Published to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of his Supreme Court confirmation on June 1, 1916, Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet argues that Brandeis was the most farseeing constitutional philosopher of the twentieth century. In addition to writing the most famous article on the right to privacy, he also wrote the most important Supreme Court opinions about free speech, freedom from government surveillance, and freedom of thought and opinion. And as the leader of the American Zionist movement, he convinced Woodrow Wilson and the British government to recognize a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Combining narrative biography with a passionate argument for why Brandeis matters today, Rosen explores what Brandeis, the Jeffersonian prophet, can teach us about historic and contemporary questions involving the Constitution, monopoly, corporate and federal power, technology, privacy, free speech, and Zionism.

Trump's Prophetic Destiny: A Purpose Driven Prophecy for America


John Whitman - 2019
     Trump’s Prophetic Destiny also offers step-by-step guidance for learning how to live in the presence of the Holy Spirit and recognize God's voice on a daily basis. Through this understanding, you will be able to partner with the Kingdom and live in the miraculous power of Jesus each day. Dwelling in the supernatural will give you insider information for the election season and also permanent breakthrough in your life. Devour the inspiration within these pages and allow the Holy Spirit to do the unexpected! Additionally, you will learn: - How to outwit the devil and his conspiracy -How to access God's presence every day -How to develop your own ability to prophesy -How to pray for Donald Trump and America -Strategies for restoring morals in popular culture in America -The truth about America's destiny and a great revival Don't be one who misses out! Grab this book and give it a read—you have nothing to lose and your prophetic destiny to gain!

Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit


Vandana Shiva - 2002
    The water wars of the twenty-first century may match—or even surpass—the oil wars of the twentieth. In Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution and Profit, Vandana Shiva, "the world's most prominent radical scientist" (the Guardian), shines a light on activists who are fighting corporate maneuvers to convert this life-sustaining resource into more gold for the elites.In Water Wars, Shiva uses her remarkable knowledge of science and society to outline the emergence of corporate culture and the historical erosion of communal water rights. Using the international water trade and industrial activities such as damming, mining, and aquafarming as her lens, Shiva exposes the destruction of the earth and the disenfranchisement of the world's poor as they are stripped of rights to a precious common good.In her passionate, feminist style, Shiva celebrates the spiritual and traditional role water has played in communities throughout history, and warns that water privatization threatens cultures and livelihoods worldwide. Shiva calls for a movement to preserve water access for all, and offers a blueprint for global resistance based on examples of successful campaigns.Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental leader and recipient of the 1993 Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Right Livelihood Award). She is author of several books, including Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (South End Press, 2000); Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (South End Press, 1997); and Staying Alive (St. Martin's Press, 1989). Shiva is a leader, along with Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin, in the International Forum on Globalization. Before becoming an activist, Shiva was one of India's leading physicists.

Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula


Laleh Khalili - 2020
    A parade of ships full of raw commodities -iron ore, coal, oil- arrive in its ports, and fleets of container ships leave with manufactured goods in all directions. The oil that fuels China's manufacturing comes primarily from the Arabian Peninsula. Much of the material shipped from China are transported through the ports of Arabian Peninsula, Dubai's Jabal Ali port foremost among them. China's 'maritime silk road' flanks the Peninsula on all sides. Sinews of War and Trade is the story of what the making of new ports and shipping infrastructures has meant not only for the Arabian Peninsula itself, but for the region and the world beyond. The book is the account of how maritime transportation is not simply an enabling adjunct of trade, but central to the very fabric of global capitalism. The ports that serve maritime trade, logistics, and hydrocarbon transport create racialised hierarchies of labour, engineer the lived environment, aid the accumulation of capital regionally and globally, and carry forward colonial regimes of profit, law and administration.