Böcker i Jacobin-serien

Ending the horrors of police violence requires addressing economic inequality.

A narrative account of Jim Crow as people experienced it.

Recent years have seen a panic over ';online red-lightdistricts,' which supposedly seduce vulnerable youngwomen into a life of degradation, and New YorkTimes columnist Nicholas Kristof's live tweeting of aCambodian brothel raid. But rarely do these fearful,salacious dispatches come from sex workers themselves,and rarely do they deviate from the positionthat sex workers must be rescued from their condition,and the industry simply abolished a positioncommon among feminists and conservatives alike. In Playing the Whore, journalist Melissa Gira Grantturns these pieties on their head, arguing for anoverhaul in the way we think about sex work. Basedon ten years of writing and reporting on the sextrade, and grounded in her experience as an organizer,advocate, and former sex worker, Playing theWhore dismantles pervasive myths about sex work,criticizes both conditions within the sex industryand its criminalization, and argues that separatingsex work from the ';legitimate' economy only harmsthose who perform sexual labor.In Playing the Whore, sex workers' demands, too longrelegated to the margins, take center stage: sex work iswork, and sex workers' rights are human rights.

A deft and caustic takedown of the new prophets of profit, from Bill Gates to Oprah As severe environmental degradation, breathtaking inequality, and increasing alienation push capitalism against its own contradictions, mythmaking has become as central to sustaining our economy as profitmaking. 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.