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Can shame become a source of political strength? Faced with injustice, growing inequality and systemic violence, we cry out in shame. We feel ashamed of obscene wealth amid wider deprivation. We feel ashamed of humanity for its ruthless and relentless exploitation of the earth. We feel ashamed of the racism and sexism that permeate society and our everyday lives.<br><br>This difficult emotion is not just sadness or a withdrawal into oneself, nor is it a paralysing sense of inadequacy. As Frédéric Gros argues in <i>A Philosophy of Shame</i>, it arises when our perception of reality rejects passivity and resignation and instead embraces imagination. Shame thus becomes the expression of an anger that is a powerful, transformative force —one that assumes a radical character.<br><br>In dialogue with authors such as Primo Levi, Annie Ernaux, Virginie Despentes and James Baldwin, Gros explores a concept that is still little understood in its anthropological, moral, psychological and political depths. Shame is a revolu­tionary sentiment because it lies at the foundation of any path of subjective recognition, transformation and struggle.

Wilfred Burchett went to Lisbon in 1974 to cover the military overthrow of the fascist dictatorship that had ruled the country for nearly five decades. Burchett’s on-the-ground reporting details the immediate aftermath of the coup and the civilian uprising that followed, which took its name, the Carnation Revolution, from the flowers demonstrators handed out to soldiers and placed in their rifle muzzles. The people’s victory began a transition to democracy. It prompted the withdrawal of troops from Portugal’s colonies, bringing independence to Guinea Bissau and soon to Angola, Mozambique and other colonial territories.<br><br>On the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution’s end, <i>The Captains’ Coup</i> offers an insightful, poignant narrative never before available in English from a journalist of international repute. The text is based on the author’s original typescripts, discovered recently in the National Library of Australia.<br><br>Included are a foreword and introductory essay that explore the political and journalistic significance of Burchett’s work. Illustrated by contemporary photographs and political posters, the volume is complemented by the editors’ annotations, providing essential historical context.<br><br>Also included is an afterword by historian and filmmaker Tariq Ali.

<i>The Fiery Spirits</i> tells the story of the MPs in parliament and the protestors in the streets who played a pivotal role in the English Civil Wars. Through their stories, John Rees reveals the hidden history of the republicans who brought a desperate nation to the brink of revolution.<br><br>At the start of the English Civil Wars, very few could have imagined that the country would soon become a republic. Practically alone in his republicanism was Henry Marten, MP and future regicide. But he soon gathered around him a group of radical Parliamentarians that included William Strode, the parliamentary firebrand, Alexander Rigby, the formidable soldier, and Sir Peter Wentworth, descendant of a long line of opponents of monarchy. They formed the nucleus of a group that allied itself to a popular movement outside parliament to defeat the king politically and militarily.<br><br>In <i>The Fiery Spirits</i>, Rees tells how Marten and his radical allies overcame both moderate Parliamentarians and Royalists to change the face of England forever, establishing a kingdom without a crown.

TONY BENN: FIREBRAND? NATIONAL TREASURE? A SOCIALIST FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURYThis centenary anthology of Tony Benn?s speeches, writings and interviews is a timely reminder of his political potency and the urgency of his agenda across a wide set of issues: the consequences of empire, the need to embrace industrial change, reform of the state machine and the management of politics.Called the ?most dangerous man in Britain? by the Daily Mail, Tony Benn, Labour MP for over fifty years, was the most distinguished socialist politician of his era. Holding several significant cabinet posts in the 1960s and ?70s, he competed for the Labour Party deputy leadership in 1981 and party leadership in 1988. Throughout his career he put forward a series of arguments on constitutional reform, the economy and foreign affairs ? popular and influential policy positions which became known as ?Bennism? and set the template for the democratic socialism of the 2010s. A charismatic orator, a life-long campaigner for peace, and a charming disruptor of the mainstream consensus, Benn reached national treasure status in his retirement, his firebrand politics too often overlooked.The introduction to this collection, written by his daughter, the writer Melissa Benn, offers a more personal portrait of the man, showing how his politics informed all parts of his life. The book also includes a previously unpublished interview with Tony Benn conducted towards the end of his life.

"Everyone is female, and everyone hates it."<br><br>So begins Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire. <br><br>Drawing inspiration from a forgotten play by Valerie Solanas—who wrote the <i>SCUM Manifesto</i> and shot Andy Warhol—Chu aims her searing wit and surgical intuition at targets ranging from performance art to psychoanalysis, incels to porn, and even feminists like herself. Each step of the way she defends the indefensible claim that femaleness is less a biological state of women and more a fatal existential condition that afflicts the entire human race—men, women, and everyone else. In a new afterword, Chu reflects on the book’s reception, the growing anti-trans movement in America, and the continuing need for a radical theory of desire.

Religion, oil, and war bent to the House of Saud?s will to dominate Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle EastIn recent years the ruling family in Saudi Arabia, the House of Saud, has promoted the oil-rich kingdom as an open, liberalizing nation that has invested in culture, tourism, and social innovation to become a beacon for the region. International political manoeuvring, sports sponsorship, and the Vision 2030 programme with its vast architectural planning declare a bold future. But the murder in October 2018 of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul reveals a darker reality: one of intensifying political and religious repression. This is within the tumultuous context of the war in Yemen, sectarian rivalry with Iran, the crisis in Gaza, and volatile relations with the United States.Malise Ruthven, a leading commentator on Islamic affairs, reconstructs the nation?s history. He shows how the royal house co-opted Wahhabism to consolidate its power and enforce authoritarianism in collusion with Western businesses and governments. Unholy Kingdom looks to the nation?s future in the hands of Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, who touts the country?s liberalisation while aggressively imposing his will upon the region.This essential book traces the shifting fault lines in the Middle East to determine Saudi Arabia?s place in our volatile times.

<i>Stealing Horses</i> presents arguably the finest considerations yet of the origins of the First World War. Breaking with accounts which focus on the actions of a single state or the final countdown to hostilities, Paul W. Schroeder describes the systemic crisis engulfing the Great Powers. They were more interested in colonial plunder overseas ('stealing horses to great applause', in the old Spanish adage) than the traditional statecraft of European peace-making. Preserving the balance of power required preserving all the essential actors in it, including a tottering Austria-Hungary. This the British in particular failed to recognise. The Central Powers may have started the War but that does not mean they in any real sense caused it. In the end Schroeder recalls the verdict of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: 'All are punished'.<br><br><i>Stealing Horses </i>includes appraisals of Niall Ferguson and A. J. P. Taylor, and an extensive unpublished final paper re-thinking the First World War as 'the last 18th-century war'.<br><br>With an Introduction by Perry Anderson.

<i>America's Fatal Leap</i> deconstructs US geopolitics after the end of the Cold War, informed by its author's unsurpassed command of modern history. Paul W. Schroeder, an acclaimed historian of international diplomacy, was a conservative and a natural supporter of American leadership in the world. But he wrote scathing op-eds for the National Interest and the American Conservative about the hubris and moral failings of the War on Terror, warning of damaging long-range effects on the international system. Schroeder compared 9/11 to the assassination in Sarajevo that sparked the First World War, insisting that a great power should never give terrorists a war they wanted. He wrote with extraordinary prescience - months before the US launched its attack on the Taliban - of the 'risks of victory' in Afghanistan, characterised the war in Iraq as a failed bid for informal empire, and called for 'disimperialism' in the Middle East.<br><br><i>America's Fatal Leap</i> collects Schroeder's remarkable interventions on America's adventurism in the Middle East, from the 1991 Gulf War to the Surge of 2007. It includes an Introduction by Perry Anderson, author of <i>US Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers</i> and <i>Ever Closer Union?</i>

In his new book, critical theorist Mark Neocleous engages in a sustained critique of the theory and practice of pacification. Combining philosophical analysis with historical detail, Neocleous analyses the development of pacification as a key concept through which capitalist modernity has been organised, offering readers the first book that treats pacification as an important concept in the history of state power and capitalism. Neocleous’s approach is fourfold, examining pacification as social warfare carried out through the ideology of peace; as a form of social police carried out through mechanisms of security; as law and order exercised through the permanent wars of class society; and as the myriad practices of power designed to counter insurgency.<br><br>Making use of official documents of state, the writings of counterinsurgency thinkers and the ideas perpetuated by practitioners of counterrevolution, the book unravels the complex ways through which pacification generates new forms of social war and new modes of policing that reproduce capitalist order and fabricate obedient subjects.<br><br>Through expansive accounts of war and police, and engaging with a range of topics from debt to death, from <i>stasis</i> to civil war, and from the police kettle to the politics of fear, the book offers a provocative analysis of the ways in which state and capital combine to build a pacified social order.

The last generation of Americans with a living memory of Jim Crow will soon disappear. They leave behind a collective memory of segregation shaped increasingly by its horrors and heroic defeat but not a nuanced understanding of everyday life in Jim Crow America. In <i>The South</i>, Adolph L. Reed Jr. — New Orleanian, political scientist, and, according to Cornel West, "the greatest democratic theorist of his generation" — takes up the urgent task of recounting the granular realities of life in the last decades of the Jim Crow South.<br><br>Reed illuminates the multifaceted structures of the segregationist order. Thanks to his personal history and political acumen, we see America’s apartheid system from the ground up, not just its legal framework or systems of power, but the way these systems structured the day-to-day interactions, lives, and ambitions of ordinary working people.<br><br><i>The South</i> unravels the personal and political dimensions of the Jim Crow order, revealing the sources and objectives of this unstable regime, its contradictions and weakness, and the social order that would replace it.<br><br><i>The South</i> is more than a memoir or a history. Filled with analysis and fascinating firsthand accounts, this book is required reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of America's second peculiar institution and the future created in its wake.

A crossroads of the Mediterranean, Sicily links Europe, Africa and the East. In this riveting, rich history Jamie Mackay peels away the layers of this most mysterious of islands. It is a story with origins in ancient myth that embraces two thousand years of reinvention through both conquest and resistance. Mackay leads the reader from ancient amphitheatres through Arab gardens to baroque cathedrals. He delves into the island’s great literature, such as Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s masterpiece, <i>The Leopard</i>. In its modern era, Sicily has been the site of revolution, the Cosa Nostra and, in the twenty- first century, a focal point in the refugee crisis. <i>The Invention of Sicily</i> is a dazzling introduction to the island, its history and its people.

Sebastiano Timpanaro (1923-2000) was one of the most original leftist thinkers of the 20th century. His thought spans a unique range of subjects, from materialism to classical philology, from the Enlightenment to Freud, from science to socialism, from the history of linguistics to 19th century Italian literature. Timpanaro confronted this manifold material with addictive clarity and incisive honesty. This book is the first serious attempt in any language to introduce Timpanaro’s thought in its entirety. Drawing on original archival research, Geue shows the astonishing breadth of Timpanaro’s intellect and his eccentric dual profile as a Marxist and technical philologist. From this emerges not only a compelling portrait of a neglected radical thinker, but also a rallying call for the Left to revive its commitment to scientific truth and rigorous detail.

This book presents a full decade of Sartre’s work, from the publication of the <i>Critique of Dialectical Reason</i> in 1960, the basic philosophical turning-point in his postwar development, to the inception of his major study on Flaubert, the first volumes of which appeared in 1971. The essays and interviews collected here form a vivid panorama of the range and unity of Sartre’s interests, since his deliberate attempt to wed his original existentialism to a rethought Marxism.<br><br>A long and brilliant autobiographical interview, given to <i>New Left Review</i> in 1969, constitutes the best single overview of Sartre’s whole intellectual evolution. Three analytic texts on the US war in Vietnam, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the lessons of the May Revolt in France, define his political positions as a revolutionary socialist. Questions of philosophy and aesthetics are explored in essays on Kierkegaard, Mallarme and Tintoretto. Another section of the collection explores Sartre’s critical attitude to orthodox psychoanalysis as a therapy, and is accompanied by rejoinders from colleagues on his journal <i>Les Temps Modernes</i>. The volume concludes with a prolonged reflection on the nature and role of intellectuals and writers in advanced capitalism, and their relationship to the struggles of the exploited and oppressed classes. <i>Between Existentialism and Marxism</i> is an impressive demonstration of the breadth and vitality of Sartre’s thought, and its capacity to respond to political and cultural changes in the contemporary world.

Why is democracy so broken and how might it be fixed? In <i>The Master's Tools</i>, award-winning author Michael A. McCarthy argues the answer can be found in the flows of credit and investment bound up with finance capital.<br>Today, finance guides and constrains our politics, but there is no reason why this must be so. In this groundbreaking work, McCarthy develops a political and social theory of institutional transformation rooted in the interconnectedness of finance and democracy.<br><br>Inspired by ancient Athens, where small groups chosen by lottery were used to ensure democratic participation, he shows how democracy and working-class power can be strengthened by introducing new forms of financial governance, focusing on the inclusion of historically excluded groups.<br><br>His proposals for democratic financial institutions point the way to imbuing finance with a socio-environmental purpose and the funding of a just green transition, social housing, and other necessary public goods. And these financial institutions might be the first step toward a whole new kind of economy.

Western governments and elites have supported the destruction of Gaza, silencing the Palestinians and those who speak on their behalf.Providing a record of the first six months of the war waged by the Israeli army after the 7 October attacks and drawing on a rich range of international sources, Didier Fassin examines how most Western governments have acquiesced in and often contributed to the destruction, by the Israeli army, of Gaza, its homes, infrastructures, hospitals, institutions of education, and civilian population. To justify their support and prevent criticism, they have provided an official version of the events, adopting the Israeli narrative. It was largely taken up by mainstream media, which ignored the experiences and perspectives of Palestinians. Dissenting voices were silenced. A policing of language and thought was imposed. Censorship and self-censorship became normalized. To call for a ceasefire or to demand the respect of humanitarian law was enough to prompt the ever-ready accusation of antisemitism. Exploring the multiple dimensions of the extreme inequality of lives between the two sides of the conflict and analyzing the complex geopolitical, economic and ideological stakes that underlie it, Fassin intends to constitute an archive of this moral abdication. In his view, the abandonment of the values and principles proclaimed by Western elites to be foundational will leave a deep scar in the history of the world.

In this absorbing chronicle of the role of race in US history, David R. Roediger explores how the idea of race was created and recreated from the 1600s to the present day. From the late seventeenth century-the era in which Du Bois located the emergence of "whiteness"-through the American revolution and the emancipatory Civil War, to the civil rights movement and the emergence of the American empire, How Race Survived US History reveals how race did far more than persist as an exception in a progressive national history. Roediger examines how race intersected all that was dynamic and progressive in US history, from democracy and economic development to migration and globalisation.