Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition


Glen Sean Coulthard - 2014
    The term “recognition” shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples’ right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources.In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politics—one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism.Coulthard demonstrates how a “place-based” modification of Karl Marx’s theory of “primitive accumulation” throws light on Indigenous–state relations in settler-colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time. This framework strengthens his exploration of the ways that the politics of recognition has come to serve the interests of settler-colonial power.In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization.

The New Prophets of Capital


Nicole Aschoff - 2015
    Enter the new prophets of capital: Sheryl Sandberg touting the capitalist work ethic as the antidote to gender inequality; John Mackey promising that free markets will heal the planet; Oprah Winfrey urging us to find solutions to poverty and alienation within ourselves; and Bill and Melinda Gates offering the generosity of the 1 percent as the answer to a persistent, systemic inequality. The new prophets of capital buttress an exploitative system, even as the cracks grow more visible.

The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World


Vincent Bevins - 2020
    In 1965, the U.S. government helped the Indonesian military kill approximately one million innocent civilians. This was one of the most important turning points of the twentieth century, eliminating the largest communist party outside China and the Soviet Union and inspiring copycat terror programs in faraway countries like Brazil and Chile. But these events remain widely overlooked, precisely because the CIA's secret interventions were so successful. In this bold and comprehensive new history, Vincent Bevins builds on his incisive reporting for the Washington Post, using recently declassified documents, archival research and eye-witness testimony collected across twelve countries to reveal a shocking legacy that spans the globe. For decades, it's been believed that parts of the developing world passed peacefully into the U.S.-led capitalist system. The Jakarta Method demonstrates that the brutal extermination of unarmed leftists was a fundamental part of Washington's final triumph in the Cold War.

The Cornel West Reader


Cornel West - 1999
    Whether he is writing a scholarly book or an article for Newsweek, whether he is speaking of Emerson, Gramsci, or Marvin Gaye, his work radiates a passion that reflects the rich traditions he draws on and weaves together: Baptist preaching, American transcendentalism, jazz, radical politics. This anthology reveals the dazzling range of West's work, from his explorations of ”Prophetic Pragmatism” to his philosophizing on hip-hop.The Cornel West Reader traces the development of West's extraordinary career as academic, public intellectual, and activist. In his essays, articles, books, and interviews, West emerges as America's social conscience, urging attention to complicated issues of racial and economic justice, sexuality and gender, history and politics. This collection represents the best work of an always compelling, often controversial, and absolutely essential philosopher of the modern American experience.

Night-Vision: Illuminating War & Class on the Neo-Colonial Terrain


Butch Lee - 2000
    hegemony, and the need for a revolutionary movement of the oppressed to overthrow it all.From Night-Vision: "The transformation to a neo-colonial world has only begun, but it promises to be as drastic, as disorienting a change as was the original european colonial conquest of the human race. Capitalism is again ripping apart & restructuring the world, and nothing will be the same. Not race, not nation, not gender, and certainly not whatever culture you used to have. Now you have outcast groups as diverse as the Aryan Nation and the Queer Nation and the Hip Hop Nation publicly rejecting the right of the u.s. government to rule them. All the building blocks of human culture—race, gender, nation, and especially class—are being transformed under great pressure to embody the spirit of this neo-colonial age."

The ABCs of Capitalism


Vivek Chibber - 2018
    A series of three ~40-page pamphlets written by Jacobin and Catalyst Magazine explaining capitalism and it's relationship to the state and class struggle.

Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics in the Age of Crisis


George Monbiot - 2017
    It misrepresents human nature, destroying hope and common purpose. Only a positive vision can replace it, a new story that re-engages people in politics and lights a path to a better world.George Monbiot shows how new findings in psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology cast human nature in a radically different light: as the supreme altruists and cooperators. He shows how we can build on these findings to create a new politics: a “politics of belonging.” Both democracy and economic life can be radically reorganized from the bottom up, enabling us to take back control and overthrow the forces that have thwarted our ambitions for a better society.Urgent, and passionate, Out of the Wreckage provides the hope and clarity required to change the world.

Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America


Kristian Williams - 2003
    But just what is the role of police in a democracy: to serve the public or to protect the powerful? Tracing the evolution of the modern police force back to the slave patrols, this controversial study observes the police as the armed defender of a violent status quo.Kristian Williams is the author of American Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination.

Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method


Bertell Ollman - 2003
    In this book Ollman offers a thorough analysis of Marx's use of dialectical method.   Marx made extremely creative use of dialectical method to analyze the origins, operation, and direction of capitalism. Unfortunately, his promised book on method was never written, so that readers wishing to understand and evaluate Marx's theories, or to revise or use them, have had to proceed without a clear grasp of the dialectic in which the theories are framed. The result has been more disagreement over "what Marx really meant" than over the writings of any other major thinker.   In putting Marx's philosophy of internal relations and his use of the process of abstraction--two little-studied aspects of dialectics--at the center of this account, Ollman provides a version of Marx's method that is at once systematic, scholarly, clear and eminently useful.   Ollman not only sheds important new light on what Marx really meant in his varied theoretical pronouncements, but in carefully laying out the steps in Marx's method makes it possible for a reader to put the dialectic to work in his or her own research. He also convincingly argues the case for why social scientists and humanists as well as philosophers should want to do so.

Introducing Marxism: A Graphic Guide


Rupert Woodfin - 2004
    Was Marx himself a 'Marxist'? Was his visionary promise of socialism betrayed by Marxist dictatorship? Is Marxism inevitably totalitarian? What did Marx really say? "Introducing Marxism" provides a fundamental account of Karl Marx's original philosophy, its roots in 19th century European ideology, his radical economic and social criticism of capitalism that inspired vast 20th century revolutions.

Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization


Immanuel Wallerstein - 1983
    In developing an anatomy of capitalism over the past five centuries, Wallerstein traces those elements that have constantly changed and evolved, while giving equal attention to features of historical capitalism that have necessarily remained constant.Particular attention is focused on the emergence and development of a unified world market, and the concomitant international division of labour. Wallerstein argues forcefully, against the current of much contemporary opinion, that capitalism has brought about an actual, not merely relative, immiseration in the countries of the Third World. The economic and social problems of underdeveloped countries will remain unresolved as long as they remain located within a framework of world capitalism.Historical Capitalism, with its continuation Capitalist Civilization, is a welcome and stimulating synthesis of one of the most challenging and influential assessments of capitalism as a world-historic mode of production.

In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action


Vicky Osterweil - 2020
    Even self-identified radicals distance themselves from looters, fearing that violent tactics reflect badly on the broader movement.However, in this deftly argued corrective, Vicky Osterweil argues that while looting is often maligned in today's society, it is, and has always been, one of our most powerful tools of dismantling capitalism and white supremacy. Stealing goods and destroying property are a direct means of wealth redistribution and a practical, immediate way of improving life for the working class-- not to mention a brazen message to the police, the state, and an unjust society. All our beliefs about the innate righteousness of property and ownership, Osterweil explains, are built on the history of anti-Black and settler oppression--meaning that belief in the right to own property is innately, structurally white supremacist.From the slave revolts that started a social revolution in the South to the more recent #BlackLivesMatter and climate change movements, Osterweil makes a convincing case for rioting and looting as weapons that bludgeon the status quo while uplifting the poor and marginalized. In Defense of Looting is a history of violent protest sparking social change; a compelling reframing of radical activism; and a practical vision for the redistribution of wealth, a new relationship to property, and a radically restructured society.

Marxism and Philosophy


Karl Korsch - 1923
    In it he argues for a reexamination of the relationship between Marxist theory and bourgeois philosophy, and insists on the centrality of the Hegelian dialectic and a commitment to revolutionary praxis. Although widely attacked in its time, Marxism and Philosophy has attained a place among the most important works of twentieth-century Marxist theory, and continues to merit critical reappraisal from scholars and activists today.

Who Rules America? Power, Politics and Social Change


G. William Domhoff - 1967
    society. It argues that the owners and top-level managers in large income-producing properties are far and away the dominant figures in the U.S.

The Philosophy of Marx


Étienne Balibar - 1993
    Providing a lucid, succinct, and accessible introduction to Marx and his key followers, complete with pedagogical information for the student, Balibar makes the most difficult areas of theory easy to understand. Balibar examines all the key areas of Marx's writings in their wider historical and theoretical context including the concepts of class struggle, ideology, humanism, progress, determinism, commodity fetishism, and the state. Suitable for the student and scholar in the humanities and social sciences, this will become the standard guide to Marx.