Books published by Verso Books

The secret life of the man who reshaped Russia

With racial justice struggles on the rise, a probing collection considers the past and future of Black radicalism

The provocative political thinker asks if it will be with a bang or a whimperAfter years of ill health, capitalism is now in a critical condition. Growth has given way to stagnation; inequality is leading to instability; and confidence in the money economy has all but evaporated.In How Will Capitalism End?, the acclaimed analyst of contemporary politics and economics Wolfgang Streeck argues that the world is about to change. The marriage between democracy and capitalism, ill-suited partners brought together in the shadow of World War Two, is coming to an end. The regulatory institutions that once restrained the financial sector's excesses have collapsed and, after the final victory of capitalism at the end of the Cold War, there is no political agency capable of rolling back the liberalization of the markets.Ours has become a world defined by declining growth, oligarchic rule, a shrinking public sphere, institutional corruption and international anarchy, and no cure to these ills is at hand.

';Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night,' wrote the poet Rupert Brooke. Before the age of electricity, the nighttime city was a very different place to the one we know todayhome to the lost, the vagrant and the noctambulant. Matthew Beaumont recounts an alternative history of London by focusing on those of its denizens who surface on the streets when the sun's down. If nightwalking is a matter of ';going astray' in the streets of the metropolis after dark, then nightwalkers represent some of the most suggestive and revealing guides to the neglected and forgotten aspects of the city.In this brilliant work of literary investigation, Beaumont shines a light on the shadowy perambulations of poets, novelists and thinkers: Chaucer and Shakespeare; William Blake and his ecstatic peregrinations and the feverish ramblings of opium addict Thomas De Quincey; and, among the lamp-lit literary throng, the supreme nightwalker Charles Dickens. We discover how the nocturnal city has inspired some and served as a balm or narcotic to others. In each case, the city is revealed as a place divided between work and pleasure, the affluent and the indigent, where the entitled and the desperate jostle in the streets.With a foreword and afterword by Will Self, Nightwalking is a captivating literary portrait of the writers who explore the city at night and the people they meet.

The republication of Suzanne de Brunhoff's classic investigation into Karl Marx's conception of ';the money commodity' shines light on commodities and their fetishism. The investigation of money as the crystallization of value in its material sense is central to how we understand capitalism and how it can be abolished. Marx on Money is an elegant analysis of how money, credit, debt and value fit into the ';logic of capital' that characterizes commodity society.

A beautiful collection of the legendary thinker's short storiesThe Storyteller gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, One-Way Street and The Arcades Project. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, and delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling and fortune-telling, and explore the themes that defined Benjamin. The novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and riddles in this collection are brought to life by the playful imagery of the modernist artist and Bauhaus figure Paul Klee.

';It is only ideas gained from walking thathave any worth.'Nietzsche In A Philosophy of Walking, a bestsellerin France, leading thinker FredericGros charts the many different wayswe get from A to B the pilgrimage,the promenade, the protest march, thenature rambleand reveals what theysay about us. Gros draws attention to otherthinkers who also saw walking assomething central to their practice.On his travels he ponders Thoreau's eagerseclusion in Walden Woods; the reasonRimbaud walked in a fury, while Nervalrambled to cure his melancholy. Heshows us how Rousseau walked in orderto think, while Nietzsche wanderedthe mountainside to write. In contrast,Kant marched through his hometownevery day, exactly at the same hour, toescape the compulsion of thought.Brilliant and erudite, A Philosophyof Walking is an entertaining andinsightful manifesto for putting onefoot in front of the other.

The Belgrade Circle was established as an intellectual forum to promote the establishment of a free, open, democratic and rational civil society around the world. This volume sets out to describe the political and philosophical underpinnings to the idea of human rights by bringing together a collection of original essays.

Addresses the challenges posed by a globally integrated economy and the economic roles played by information and motivation. The text argues for an egalitarian redistribution of assets - land, capital and housing - and the beneficial disciplining effects of competition.

This book which combines the methods and results of both Freud and Marx is by one of the leaders of the West German student left during its most militant phase in the late 1960s. For reasons the author makes clear, the anti-authoritarian movement took more thorough¬going and trenchant forms in West Germany than anywhere else. A new sexual morality was not only preached but practised.Is it possible, however – the author asks – that this new emphasis on sexual enlight¬enment and liberty can become merely a characteristic of Western capitalism, which serves to activate the market economy, deflect rebellion, and hence contribute to the preservation of the system? In answering this question Reiche explains and develops Marcuse’s widely misunderstood concept of ‘repressive desublimation’. He exposes the artificial and illusory nature of many attempts – in Germany and elsewhere – at ‘sexual liberation’, and shows why it is impossible to overcome sexual oppression and mystification in our society in isolation from the political struggle.

This collection is designed to answer the demands of students and socialists, teachers and interested readers, for a comprehensive critique of the major schools of European Marxism since the October Revolution. It is composed of a series of carefully documented essays setting out the theories of the major thinkers of the tradition, and submitting them to searching criticism.Essays include critiques of Lukács by Gareth Stedman Jones and Michael Löwy; a survey of the Frankfurt School by Göran Therborn; an assessment of the legacy of Gramsci, by John Merrington; exposition and criticism of the work of Sartre by André Gorz and Ronald Aronson; major assessments of Althusser by Norman Geras and André Glucksmann and a wide-ranging interview with the Italian philosopher Lucio Colletti that provides an overview of Western Marxism.

Ernest Mandel's book is a study of Eurocommunism unlike any other. Written in the polemical tradition of Trotsky, its sweep extends well beyond the immediate prospects of the Communist Parties of Western Europe. Mandel traces the long historical process which has transformed the once embattled detachments of the Third International into the constitutionalist formations of ';historic compromise' and ';union of the people' today. He then goes on to argue that the national roads to socialism of contemporary Eurocommunism are the ';bitter fruits of socialism in one country' in the USSR.Mandel's book contains trenchant and documented criticisms of the ideas of Santiago Carrillo in Spain, the economic policies of the PCI in Italy, and the PCF's theories of the State in France. But it also sets these Western developments in the context of European politics as a wholediscussing the Russian response to Carrillo, the organizational attitudes of the CPSU to the Western parties, and the emergence of major dissident currents in Eastern Germany sympathetic to Eurocommunism.From Stalinism to Eurocommunism represents the first systematic and comprehensive critique from the Marxist Left of the new strategy of Western Communism. It can be read as a barometer of the storms ahead in the European labour movement.

Marx and Engels had sketched out the principles of scientific communism by 1846. Yet it was from his intense involvement in the abortive German Revolution of 1848 that Marx developed a depth of practical understanding he would draw on in Capital and throughout his later career. This work includes his great call to arms - "The Communist Manifesto".

A work of criticism on the cultures of imperialism. Fundamental to the editors' conceptualization is the premise that while colonialism may be a thing of the past for the majority of the world's people, its legacies in political, economic and ideological structures continue to shape the world.

The author charts the developments in feminist film theory, drawing on both recent and classic films, from the mainstream and alternative cinema. She also attempts to demystify current methods of analysis, including semiotic and psychoanalytical approaches.