Our corporations vie for slots in the Diversity Top 50, our universities brag about minority recruiting, and every month is Somebody's History Month. But in this provocative new book, Walter Benn Michaels argues that our enthusiastic celebration of "difference" masks our neglect of America's vast and growing economic divide. Affirmative action in schools has not made them more open, it's just guaranteed that the rich kids come in the appropriate colors. Diversity training in the workplace has not raised anybody's salary (except maybe the diversity trainers') but it has guaranteed that when your job is outsourced, your culture will be treated with respect. With lacerating prose and exhilarating wit, Michaels takes on the many manifestations of our devotion to diversity, from companies apologizing for slavery, to a college president explaining why there aren't more women math professors, to the codes of conduct in the new "humane corporations." Looking at the books we read, the TV shows we watch, and the lawsuits we bring, Michaels shows that diversity has become everyone's sacred cow precisely because it offers a false vision of social justice, one that conveniently costs us nothing. The Trouble with Diversity urges us to start thinking about real justice, about equality instead of diversity. Attacking both the right and the left, it will be the most controversial political book of the year.

    Today, with the welfare state creaking, it is one of the world’s most widely debated proposals. Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght present a comprehensive defense of this radical idea.

    But aren’t they the biggest issues for the vast majority of women around the globe?Taking as its inspiration the new wave of feminist militancy that has erupted globally, this manifesto makes a simple but powerful case: feminism shouldn’t start—or stop—with the drive to have women represented at the top of their professions. It must focus on those at the bottom, and fight for the world they deserve. And that means targeting capitalism. Feminism must be anticapitalist, eco-socialist and antiracist.

    As governments fail to respond to—or actively engineer—each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support the vulnerable. Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid.This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout. Writing for those new to activism as well as those who have been in social movements for a long time, Dean Spade draws on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community mobilization, social transformation, compassionate activism, and solidarity.

    But the truth is far more sinister, says Austin Ruse. We're actually living in the age of the low information voter, easily mislead by all-too-convincing false statistics and studies. In Fact-Shaming, Ruse debunks so-called "facts" used to advance political causes one after the other, revealing how poorly they stand up to actual science.

    Riley examines how well-intentioned welfare programs are in fact holding black Americans back. Minimum-wage laws may lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they price a disproportionate number of blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education is intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer black college graduates than would otherwise exist. And so it goes with everything from soft-on-crime laws, which make black neighborhoods more dangerous, to policies that limit school choice out of a mistaken belief that charter schools and voucher programs harm the traditional public schools that most low-income students attend.In theory these efforts are intended to help the poor—and poor minorities in particular. In practice they become massive barriers to moving forward.Please Stop Helping Us lays bare these counterproductive results. People of goodwill want to see more black socioeconomic advancement, but in too many instances the current methods and approaches aren’t working. Acknowledging this is an important first step.

    What do these people not know? Socialism has killed millions, but it’s now the ideology du jour on American college campuses and among many leftists. Reintroduced by leaders such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the ideology manifests itself in starry-eyed calls for free-spending policies like Medicare-for-all and student loan forgiveness.In The Case Against Socialism, Rand Paul outlines the history of socialism, from Stalin’s gulags to the current famine in Venezuela. He tackles common misconceptions about the “utopia” of socialist Europe. As it turns out, Scandinavian countries love capitalism as much as Americans, and have, for decades, been cutting back on the things Bernie loves the most.Socialism’s return is only possible because many Americans have forgotten the true dangers of the twentieth-century’s deadliest ideology. Paul reveals the devastating truth: for every college student sporting a Che Guevara T-shirt, there’s a Venezuelan child dying of starvation. Desperate refugees flee communist Cuba to escape oppressive censorship, rationed food and squalid hospitals, not “free” healthcare. Socialist dictatorships like the People’s Republic of China crush freedom of speech and run massive surveillance states while masquerading as enlightened modern nations. Far from providing economic freedom, socialist governments enslave their citizens. They offer illusory promises of safety and equality while restricting personal liberty, tightening state power, sapping human enterprise and making citizens dependent on the dole.If socialism takes hold in America, it will imperil the fate of the world’s freest nation, unleashing a plague of oppressive government control. The Case Against Socialism is a timely response to that threat and a call to action against the forces menacing American liberty.

    In his bracing new book, Under the Affluence, he brilliantly engages the roots and ramifications of radical inequality in our nation, carefully detailing the heartless war against the poor and the swooning addiction to the rich that exposes the moral sickness at the heart of our culture. Wise's stirring analysis of our predicament is more than a disinterested social scientific treatise; this book is a valiant call to arms against the vicious practices that undermine the best of the American ideals we claim to cherish. Under the Affluence is vintage Tim Wise: smart, sophisticated, conscientious, and righteously indignant at the betrayal of millions of citizens upon whose backs the American Dream rests. This searing testimony for the most vulnerable in our nation is also a courageous cry for justice that we must all heed."—Michael Eric Dyson, author of The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in AmericaTim Wise is one of America's most prolific public intellectuals. His critically acclaimed books, high-profile media interviews, and year-round speaking schedule have established him as an invaluable voice in any discussion on issues of race and multicultural democracy.In Under the Affluence, Wise discusses a related issue: economic inequality and the demonization of those in need. He reminds us that there was a time when the hardship of fellow Americans stirred feelings of sympathy, solidarity for struggling families, and support for policies and programs meant to alleviate poverty. Today, however, mainstream discourse blames people with low income for their own situation, and the notion of an intractable "culture of poverty" has pushed our country in an especially ugly direction.Tim Wise argues that far from any culture of poverty, it is the culture of predatory affluence that deserves the blame for America's simmering economic and social crises. He documents the increasing contempt for the nation's poor, and reveals the forces at work to create and perpetuate it. With clarity, passion and eloquence, he demonstrates how America's myth of personal entitlement based on merit is inextricably linked to pernicious racial bigotry, and he points the way to greater compassion, fairness, and economic justice.Tim Wise is the author of many books, including Dear White America and Colorblind.

    Meanwhile, it is increasingly difficult for bright but poor children to transcend their circumstances. This state of affairs should not only worry the poor. It hurts the middle classes too, who are increasingly locked out of the top professions by those from wealthy backgrounds.Hitherto, both Labour and Conservative politicians have sought to deal with this problem by promoting the idea of 'equality of opportunity'. In politics, social mobility is the only game in town and old socialist arguments, which emphasised economic equality, are about as unfashionable today as mullets and shell suits. Yet genuine equality of opportunity is impossible against a backdrop of levels of inequality last seen during the 1930s. In a grossly unequal society, the privileges of the parents unfailingly become the privileges of the children.A vague commitment from our politicians to build a ‘meritocracy’ is not enough. And besides, a perfectly stratified meritocracy, in which everyone knew their station based on ‘merit’, would be a deeply unpleasant place to live. Attempts to improve social mobility must start by reducing the gap between rich and poor.

    For nearly forty years, David Harvey has written and lectured on Capital, becoming one of the world’s most foremost Marx scholars.Based on his recent lectures, this current volume aims to bring this depth of learning to a broader audience, guiding first-time readers through a fascinating and deeply rewarding text. A Companion to Marx’s Capital offers fresh, original and sometimes critical interpretations of a book that changed the course of history and, as Harvey intimates, may do so again.David Harvey’s video lecture course can be found here: davidharvey.org/reading-capital/

    Unfortunately, Marable's blistering insights into racial injustice and economic inequality remain depressingly relevant. But the good news is that Marable's prescient analysis-and his eloquent and self-critical preface to this new edition-will prove critical in helping us to think through and conquer the oppressive forces that remain."-Michael Eric Dyson, author of I May Not Get Therewith You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr."For those of us who came of political age in the 1980s, Manning Marable's How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America was one of our bibles. Published during the cold winter of Reaganism, he introduced a new generation of Black activists/thinkers to class and gender struggles within Black communities, the political economy of incarceration, the limitations of Black capitalism, and the nearly forgotten vision of what a socialist future might look like. Two decades later, Marable's urgent and hopeful voice is as relevant as ever."-Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Yo' Mama's DisFunktional!:

    A stimulating analysis of the society and economy in the slave south.

    When people are trapped in a cycle of debt it also can affect their subjectivity and how they temporally inhabit the world by making it difficult for them to imagine and plan for the future. What psychic toll does this have on residents? How does it feel to be routinely dehumanized and exploited by the police?—from Carceral CapitalismIn this collection of essays in Semiotext(e)'s Intervention series, Jackie Wang examines the contemporary incarceration techniques that have emerged since the 1990s. The essays illustrate various aspects of the carceral continuum, including the biopolitics of juvenile delinquency, predatory policing, the political economy of fees and fines, cybernetic governance, and algorithmic policing. Included in this volume is Wang's influential critique of liberal anti-racist politics, “Against Innocence,” as well as essays on RoboCop, techno-policing, and the aesthetic problem of making invisible forms of power legible.Wang shows that the new racial capitalism begins with parasitic governance and predatory lending that extends credit only to dispossess later. Predatory lending has a decidedly spatial character and exists in many forms, including subprime mortgage loans, student loans for sham for-profit colleges, car loans, rent-to-own scams, payday loans, and bail bond loans. Parasitic governance, Wang argues, operates through five primary techniques: financial states of exception, automation, extraction and looting, confinement, and gratuitous violence. While these techniques of governance often involve physical confinement and the state-sanctioned execution of black Americans, new carceral modes have blurred the distinction between the inside and outside of prison. As technologies of control are perfected, carcerality tends to bleed into society.

    Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the nineteenth century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history and to sow the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World.

    In 2000, Chertavian dedicated his life to closing that divide and Year Up was born.Year Up is an intensive program that offers low income young adults training, mentorship, internships, and ultimately real jobs—often with Fortune 500 companies. 85 percent of program graduates are employed or in full-time college within four months of graduation. Today, Year Up serves more than 1,300 students in nine cities across the nation.Following a Year Up class from admissions through graduation, A Year Up lets students share—in their own words—the challenges, failures, and personal successes they’ve experienced during their program year. This deeply moving and inspirational story also explains Chertavian’s philosophy and the program’s genesis, offering a road map for real change in our country and a beacon for young adults who want the opportunity to enter the economic mainstream.