Böcker utgivna av Verso Books

Frigga Haug, one of Germany’s best-known feminist and Marxist critics, develops here a profound challenge both to women’s oppression and to what she sees as women’s ‘collusion’ in that oppression. Rejecting the essentialism of much feminist writing today, along with the denial of subjectivity that still permeates Marxism, Haug explores the connections between Marxist theory and the emancipation of women, a project which necessarily involves, as she explains, ¿diverting a powerful and long-standing anger into detective work.¿Under the headings of Socialization, Work and Politics, she combines the fruits of these investigations with the influential ¿memory-work¿ she has pioneered with women’s collectives, to throw startling new light on a wide range of themes and issues: personal ethics and public morality; daydreams, domesticity and consumerism; privatization, new technologies and the restructuring of the workplace; the evolution of women’s politics in Germany; the future of socialist feminism in the wake of Communism’s collapse.Above all, this is a book which strives to find new links between the micro-politics of daily life and the evolving structures of capitalism. ¿If we could find out why and when our hopes for life were buried,¿ Haug argues, ¿then we could try to take our history in our own hands.¿ Beyond Female Masochism provides the materials, and inspiration, to do just that.

Taking as their theme 'the sexualization of the body' - in particular women's sexualization - and the construction of gender, Frigga Haug and the other authors of this book make a contribution to these debates by taking their own bodies as objects of study.

Presents a serious challenge to the rise of Hindu fundamentalism, and exposes the right-wing and racist agenda of the BJP which wants to overturn India's secular constitution and escalate hostilities with neighbouring Muslim Pakistan.

The rise of the modern absolutist monarchies in Europe constitutes in many ways the birth of the modern historical epoch. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, the companion volume to Perry Anderson's Lineages of the Absolutist State, is a sustained exercise in historical sociology to root the development of absolutism in the diverse routes taken from the slave-based societies of Ancient Greece and Rome to fully-fledged feudalism. In the course of this study Anderson vindicates and the refines the explanatory power of a Marxist conception of history, whilst casting a fascinating light on Greece, Rome, the Germanic invasions, nomadic society, and the different patterns of the evolution of feudalism in Northern, Mediterranean, Eastern and Western Europe.

This work is commonly held to be the foundational text for Western Marxism. As Stalinism took over in Russia, Lukacs was subjected to attacks for "deviation". In the 1920s he wrote a response to this, which remained unpublished at the time. The manuscript was later found in Moscow and published.

The author focuses on the figure of the bystander, from the destruction of Jews in Europe, as well as to more recent atrocities, to consider the moral consequences of looking on without active response at persecution and great suffering.

Philosophy of Praxisexamines the work of four Marxist thinkers, the early Marx and Lukcs, and the Frankfurt School philosophers Adorno and Marcuse. The book holds that fundamental philosophical problems are in reality social problems, abstractly conceived. This argument has two implications: on the one hand, philosophical problems are significant insofar as they reflect real social contradictions; on the other hand, philosophy cannot resolve the problems it identifies because only social revolution can eliminate their social causes.Feenberg's Lukacs, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory was an intellectual history of these discussions.Philosophy of Praxisis an update of that classic theoretical work, which details how the discussion has been taken up by contemporary schools of thought, including Marxist political theory and continental philosophy.

Traces the genesis, consolidation and consequences of the postmodern idea. Beginning in the Hispanic world of the 1930s, the text takes the reader through to the 70s, when Lyotard and Habermas gave the idea of postmodernism wider currency and finally the 90s, with the work of Fredric Jameson.

Pierre Bourdieu, one of the most influential critical social theorists of the second half of the twentieth century, once described sociology as "a combat sport." This collection of his writings on politics and social science from the Algerian War of Independence bears out that this vision was enduring throughout his life.

In the most comprehensive study of Jacques Lacan yet to be published in English, David Macey challenges many of the assumptions that have come to surround Lacan’s work. He shows that key elements of Lacanian thought relate not to structuralism, as is often claimed, but to surrealism, Bataille and the early French phenomenologists. The famous ¿return to Freud¿ is shown to mask Lacan’s adherence to a psychiatric tradition and to trends within French psychoanalysis which were opposed by Freud himself.A detailed and challenging reading of work by Lacan and his associates on femininity reveals its reliance upon a virulently sexist discourse and upon an iconography derived from surrealism. The view that Lacanian psychoanalysis has a positive contribution to make to feminism and to theories of gender and sexual difference is contested. As well as providing a new and provocative reading of Lacan’s work, Lacan in Contexts is an important contribution to psychoanalytic history and to the history of French intellectual life.

The news of October 1998 that General Pinochet had been arrested in Britain presaged two years of international interest in the case. This book tells the story of how the dictator's detention has lifted a stranglehold that suffocated Chile's moral sensibility for a generation.

In this book, the author turns her attention to the deconstruction of pictures closer to home - photographs from her own childhood and images from her shared ethnographic past - to trace a trajectory from personal to collective acts of memory.

The student protests of 1968, followed by the Hot Autumn factory strikes of 1969, shook the foundations of the Italian Republic. They also prepared the way for a whole decade of intense and widespread social conflict—a decade in which militant social movements arose with new aspirations, centered on protagonists such as women, young people and the unemployed. States of Emergency provides a vivid reconstruction of the events and movements of that period—from the students of 1968 to the Autonomists of 1977.The book’s title evokes both the emergence of new social subjects and the crises they provoked in the social order. But Lumley also looks at the paradoxes and contradictions of the movements, their creative potential and ultimate failure. The political debates which they initiated soon became part of the agenda of the Left internationally.Drawing on the work of theorists such as Umberto Eco, Alberto Melucci, Norberto Bobbio and Antonio Negri, States of Emergency is a vital contribution not only to Italy’s social history but to contemporary political discussion.

Ranging from an exploration of the English, French and Russian revolutions and their treatment by revisionist historiography, to the debates and themes arising from attempts to downplay revolution's role in history, this work also engages with several prominent revisionist historians, including Orlando Figes, Conrad Russell and Simon Schama.

Reconstructing Marxism explores fundamental questions about the structure of Marxist theory and its prospects for the future. The authors maintain that the disintegration of the old theoretical unity of classical Marxism is in part responsible for what is commonly called the ¿crisis of Marxism.¿ Only a reconstructed Marxism can come to terms with this disintegration.Addressing a range of problems in historical materialism and class analysis, the authors compare historical materialism with Darwinian evolutionary theory, and identify what is distinctively ¿historical¿ in Marx’s theory of history. Through an evaluation of G.A. Cohen’s defense and Anthony Giddens’s critique of historical materialism they suggest what a plausible, yet still Marxist, theory of history might be. They analyze the relationship of micro-analysis to macro theory and the assignment of causal primacy in explanations, and present a general assessment of the current state of Marxist theory and the prospects for its analytical reconstruction.Distinguished by the clarity of its presentation, the analytical rigor of its argument and its concern with fundamental philosophical and sociological issues, Reconstructing Marxism advances, at this critical juncture in the history of Marxism, a challenging new research program.

This volume illuminates a neglected moment in cultural and political history. The essays look at the relationship between black anti-colonialist movements in the Caribbean and the surrealist European movements of the 1930s and 1940s. Michael Richardson is the author of "Georges Batailles".

This book demonstrates how the denial of truth about the Palestinians by governments and the media in the West has led to the current impasse in Middle East politics. The book attempts to redress a sustained crime against historical truth in order to make a more rational future possible.

"Rumba on the River" presents a snapshot of an era when the currents of a tradition and modernization collided to produce unique music along the banks of the Congo River. It is the story of Twin capitals engulfed in political struggle, and the vibrant music that flowered amidst the ferment.

Bearded bomb-throwers, self indulgent nihilists, dangerous subversives - these characteristic cliches of anarchists in the popular imagination are often reproduced in the cinema. In this survey of anarchism in film, Richard Porton deconstructs such stereotypes while offering an account of films featuring anarchist characters and motifs.

The characteristic form taken by English Marxism since the war has been the study of history. No writer exemplifies its achievements better than Edward Thompson, whose Making of the English Working Class is probably the most influential single work of historical scholarship by a socialist today. An editor of The New Reasoner in 195759, a founder of the New Left in 1960, now an eloquent champion of civil rights, Thompson has most recently aroused widespread interest with the appearance of his Poverty of Theory, which combines philosophical and political polemic with Louis Althusser, and powerful advocacy of the historian’s craft. Arguments Within English Marxism is an assessment of its central theses that relates them to Thompson’s major historical writings themselves. Thus the role of human agencythe part of the conscious choice and active willin history is discussed through consideration of its treatment in The Making of the English Working Class. The problems of base and superstructure in historical materialism, and of affiliation to values in the past, are reviewed in the light of Whigs and Hunters. The claims of utopian imagination are illustrated from the findings of William Morris. Questions of socialist strategy are broached in part through the articles now collected in Writing by Candlelight. Exploring at once differences and convergences between New Left Review and one of its founders, the essay concludes by suggesting the virtues of diversity within a common socialist culture.

In this text, the author proposes a new future for socialism based on a redefinition of market socialism. He argues for a modified version of socialism, not necessarily based on public ownership, but founded on equality of opportunity and political influence.

This text examines documentary in print, photography and film from the 1930s to the 1990s, using the lens of feminist film theory as well as scholarship on race, class and gender. Rabinowitz discusses the ways in which the media have shaped the truth over the decades.

In this volume, Sartre sets out the basic categories for the renovated theory of history that he believed was necessary for post-war Marxism. His formal aim is to establish the dialectical intelligibility of history itself, what he called "a totalization without a totalizer".

The debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, originally published in Science and Society in the early 1950s, is one of the most famous episodes in the development of Marxist historiography since the war. It ranged such distinguished contributors as Maurice Dobb, Paul Sweezy, Kohachiro Takahshi and Christopher Hill against each other in a common, critical discussion. Verso has now published the complete texts of the original debate, to which subsequent discussion has returned again and again, together with significant new materials produced by historians since then. These include articles on the same themes by such French and Italian historians as Georges Lefebvre and Giuliano Procacci. What was the role of trade in the Dark Ages? How did feudal rents evolve during the Middle Ages? Where should the economic origins of mediaeval towns be sought? Why did serfdom eventually disappear in Western Europe? What was the exact relationship between city and countryside in the transition from feudalism to capitalism? How should the importance of overseas expansion be assessed for the 'primitive accumulation of capital' in Europe? When should the first bourgeois revolutions be dated, and which social classes participated in them? All these, and many other vital questions for every student of mediaeval and modern history, are widely and freely explored.Finally, for this Verso edition, Rodney Hilton, author of Bond Men Made Free, has written a special introductory essay, reconsidering and summarising relevant scholarship in the two decades since the publication of the original discussion. The result is a book that will be essential for history courses, and fascinating for the general reader.

Raymond Williams’s work was always concerned with the relation between culture and society. This book focuses on specific texts and authors, exploring the historical and cultural sources of their particular forms of writing. In it, Williams examines dramatic form and language in Racine and Shakespeare; the politics of fiction in the English Jacobin novel; David Hume and Charles Dickens and the changing characteristics of English prose; Robert Tressell, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, and the role of region and class in the English novel. Also included are Williams’s reflections on the rise of English studies, on their crisis as the literary traditions of Cambridge University were beset by the ‘structuralist controversy’, and on the wider implications of this redefinition of the critical field.