A Theology of Liberation


Gustavo Gutiérrez - 1971
    The book burst upon the scene in the early seventies, and was swiftly acknowledged as a pioneering and prophetic approach to theology which famously made an option for the poor, placing the exploited, the alienated, and the economically wretched at the centre of a programme where "the oppressed and maimed and blind and lame" were prioritized at the expense of those who either maintained the status quo or who abused the structures of power for their own ends. This powerful, compassionate and radical book attracted criticism for daring to mix politics and religion in so explicit a manner, but was also welcomed by those who had the capacity to see that its agenda was nothing more nor less than to give "good news to the poor", and redeem God's people from bondage.

Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature


John Bellamy Foster - 2000
    Or does it? This startling new account overturns conventional interpretations of Marx and in the process outlines a more rational approach to the current environmental crisis.Marx, it is often assumed, cared only about industrial growth and the development of economic forces. John Bellamy Foster examines Marx's neglected writings on capitalist agriculture and soil ecology, philosophical naturalism, and evolutionary theory. He shows that Marx, known as a powerful critic of capitalist society, was also deeply concerned with the changing human relationship to nature.Marx's Ecology covers many other thinkers, including Epicurus, Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus, Ludwig Feuerbach, P. J. Proudhon, and William Paley.By reconstructing a materialist conception of nature and society, Marx's Ecology challenges the spiritualism prevalent in the modern Green movement, pointing toward a method that offers more lasting and sustainable solutions to the ecological crisis.

Two Souls Of Socialism


Hal Draper
    

God and the State


Mikhail Bakunin - 1882
    Born into the Russian nobility, he renounced his hereditary rank in protest against Czarist oppression and fled to Western Europe. A colorful, charismatic personality, Bakunin quickly became central to the anarchism movement, and everyone involved either built upon or reacted to his ideas. Yet Bakunin, despite the power of his ideas, was primarily a man of action, and he wrote little. His only major work, God and the State, remained unfinished, although it is the torso of a giant.God and the State has been a basic anarchist and radical document for generations. It is one of the clearest statements of the anarchist philosophy of history: religion by its nature is an impoverishment, enslavement, and annihilation of humanity. It is the weapon of the state. It must be smashed, according to Bakunin, before the right of self-determination can be possible. As an introduction to anarchist thought, a manifesto of atheism, or as a summing-up of the thoughts of Bakunin, God and the State remains a mind-opening experience, even for those basically unsympathetic to its premise.

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right


Angela Nagle - 2017
    On one side the alt right ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian Milo Yiannopolous. On the other side, a culture of struggle sessions and virtue signalling lurks behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. The feminist side of the online culture wars has its equally geeky subcultures right through to its mainstream expression. Kill All Normies explores some of the cultural genealogies and past parallels of these styles and subcultures, drawing from transgressive styles of 60s libertinism and conservative movements, to make the case for a rejection of the perpetual cultural turn.

The Conquest of Bread


Pyotr Kropotkin - 1892
    A combination of detailed historical analysis and far-reaching Utopian vision, this is a step-by-step guide to social revolution: the concrete means of achieving it, and the world that humanity’s “constructive genius” is capable of creating. Includes a new introduction that historically situates and discusses the contemporary relevance of Kropotkin’s ideas.

Escape from Freedom


Erich Fromm - 1941
    This is the central idea of Escape from Freedom, a landmark work by one of the most distinguished thinkers of our time, and a book that is as timely now as when first published in 1941. Few books have thrown such light upon the forces that shape modern society or penetrated so deeply into the causes of authoritarian systems. If the rise of democracy set some people free, at the same time it gave birth to a society in which the individual feels alienated and dehumanized. Using the insights of psychoanalysis as probing agents, Fromm's work analyzes the illness of contemporary civilization as witnessed by its willingness to submit to totalitarian rule.

Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things


Ann Laura Stoler - 1995
    It has had an enormous impact on cultural studies and work across many disciplines on gender, sexuality, and the body. Bringing a new set of questions to this key work, Ann Laura Stoler examines volume one of History of Sexuality in an unexplored light. She asks why there has been such a muted engagement with this work among students of colonialism for whom issues of sexuality and power are so essential. Why is the colonial context absent from Foucault’s history of a European sexual discourse that for him defined the bourgeois self? In Race and the Education of Desire, Stoler challenges Foucault’s tunnel vision of the West and his marginalization of empire. She also argues that this first volume of History of Sexuality contains a suggestive if not studied treatment of race.Drawing on Foucault’s little-known 1976 College de France lectures, Stoler addresses his treatment of the relationship between biopower, bourgeois sexuality, and what he identified as “racisms of the state.” In this critical and historically grounded analysis based on cultural theory and her own extensive research in Dutch and French colonial archives, Stoler suggests how Foucault’s insights have in the past constrained—and in the future may help shape—the ways we trace the genealogies of race.Race and the Education of Desire will revise current notions of the connections between European and colonial historiography and between the European bourgeois order and the colonial treatment of sexuality. Arguing that a history of European nineteenth-century sexuality must also be a history of race, it will change the way we think about Foucault.

The Three Ecologies


Félix Guattari - 1989
    Extending the definition of ecology to encompass social relations and human subjectivity as well as environmental concerns, The Three Ecologies argues that the ecological crises that threaten our planet are the direct result of the expansion of a new form of capitalism and that a new ecosophical approach must be found which respects the differences between all living systems.This edition includes a chronology of Guattari's life and work, introductions to both his general philosophy and to the work itself, and extended notes to the original text.

Critique of Pure Reason


Immanuel Kant - 1781
    It presents a profound and challenging investigation into the nature of human reason, its knowledge and its illusions. Reason, Kant argues, is the seat of certain concepts that precede experience and make it possible, but we are not therefore entitled to draw conclusions about the natural world from these concepts. The Critique brings together the two opposing schools of philosophy: rationalism, which grounds all our knowledge in reason, and empiricism, which traces all our knowledge to experience. Kant's transcendental idealism indicates a third way that goes far beyond these alternatives.

The Old Regime and the French Revolution


Alexis de Tocqueville - 1856
    It is one of the major early historical works on the French Revolution.

Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s


Michael Omi - 1994
    This second edition builds upon and updates Omi and Winant's groundbreaking research. In addition to a preface to the new edition, the book provides a more detailed account of the theory of racial formation processes. It includes material on the historical development of race, the question of racism, race-class-gender interrelationships, and everyday life. A final chapter updates the developments in American racial politics up to the present, focusing on such key events as the 1992 Presidential election, the Los Angeles riots, and the Clinton administration's racial politics and policies."…required reading for scholars engaged in historical, sociological, and cultural studies of race. In the new edition, the authors further develop their provocative theory of 'racial formation' and extend their political analyses into the 1990s. They introduce the concept of 'racial project', linking race as representation with race as it is embedded in the social structure." -- Angela Y. Davis

The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy


David Graeber - 2013
    He then jets forward to the nineteenth century, where systems we can easily recognize as modern bureaucracies come into being. In some areas of life—like with the modern postal systems of Germany and France—these bureaucracies have brought tremendous efficiencies to modern life. But Graeber argues that there is a much darker side to modern bureaucracy that is rarely ever discussed. Indeed, in our own “utopia of rules,” freedom and technological innovation are often the casualties of systems that we only faintly understand.Provocative and timely, the book is a powerful look and history of bureaucracy over the ages and its power in shaping the world of ideas.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays


Richard Hofstadter - 1964
    In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, acclaimed historian Richard Hofstadter examines the competing forces in American political discourse and how fringe groups can influence — and derail — the larger agendas of a political party. He investigates the politics of the irrational, shedding light on how the behavior of individuals can seem out of proportion with actual political issues, and how such behavior impacts larger groups. With such other classic essays as “Free Silver and the Mind of 'Coin' Harvey” and “What Happened to the Antitrust Movement?”, The Paranoid Style in American Politics remains both a seminal text of political history and a vital analysis of the ways in which political groups function in the United States."Recent months have witnessed an attack of unprecedented passion and ferocity against the national government. The Republican Party has apparently embarked on a crusade to destroy national standards, national projects, and national regulations and to transfer domestic governing authority from the national government to the states. A near majority of the Supreme Court even seems to want to replace the Constitution by the Articles of Confederation…"Unbridled rhetoric is having consequences far beyond anything that antigovernment politicians intend. The flow of angry words seems to have activated and in a sense legitimized what the historian Richard Hofstadter called the 'paranoid strain' in American politics." - Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Wall Street Journal, June 7, 1995

The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study


Fred Moten - 2013
    Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control, from the proliferation of capitalist logistics through governance by credit and management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in the undercommons Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of the undercommons.