Böcker utgivna av Verso Books

A forensic look at the changing landscape of American cities

A narrative history of council housing - from slums to Grenfell Tower

Originally published in Germany by Editions Nautilus as Vergewaltigung: Aspekte eines Verbrechens, 2016.

A major rereading of Marx's critique of political economy, fully updated.

One hundred years after the Russian Revolution, Zizek shows why Lenin's thought is still important today

A major new work from the world's leading writer on artLandscapes, the companion volume to John Berger's highly acclaimed Portraits, explores what art tells us about ourselves. ';Berger's work is an invitation to reimagine; to see in different ways,' writes Tom Overton in the introduction to this volume. As a master storyteller and thinker John Berger challenges readers to rethink their every assumption about the role of creativity in our lives. In this brilliant collection of diverse piecesessays, short stories, poems, translationswhich spans a lifetime's engagement with art, John Berger reveals how he came to his own unique way of seeing. He pays homage to the writers and thinkers who infuenced him, such as Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Bertolt Brecht. His expansive perspective takes in artistic movements and individual artistsfrom the Renaissance to the presentwhile never neglecting the social and political context of their creation. Berger pushes at the limits of art writing, demonstrating beautifully how his artist's eye makes him a storyteller in these essays, rather than a critic. With ';landscape' as an animating, liberating metaphor rather than a rigid defnition, this collection surveys the aesthetic landscapes that have informed, challenged and nourished John Berger's understanding of the world. Landscapesalongside Portraitscompletes a tour through the history of art that will be an intellectual benchmark for many years to come.

For 78 days in 1999, US and NATO forces launched round-the-clock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia, killing upwards of 3000 people in the name of humanitarianism. This book challenges mainstream media coverage of the war and uncovers hidden agendas behind Western talk and a decade-long disinformation campaign waged by western leaders.

Mobility as politics: the inequality of movement from transport to climate change.

Reconstructs Los Angeles's shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. This work tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. It gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West.

A field manual to the technologies that are changing our lives at bewildering speed

In winter 2014, a Tibetan monk lectured the world leaders gathered at Davos on the importance of Happiness. The recent DSM-5, the manual of all diagnosable mental illnesses, for the first time included shyness and grief as treatable diseases. Happiness has become the biggest idea of our age, a new religion dedicated to well-being. In this brilliant dissection of our times, political economist William Davies shows how this philosophy, first pronounced by Jeremy Bentham in the 1780s, has dominated the political debates that have delivered neoliberalism. From a history of business strategies of how to get the best out of employees, to the increased level of surveillance measuring every aspect of our lives; from why experts prefer to measure the chemical in the brain than ask you how you are feeling, to why Freakonomics tells us less about the way people behave than expected, The Happiness Industry is an essential guide to the marketization of modern life. Davies shows that the science of happiness is less a science than an extension of hyper-capitalism.

A classic of twentieth-century thought, charting how reason regressed back into myth and superstition

Bestselling, magisterial melding of global environmental history and global political history

A classic work of Marxist analysis, available unabridged for the first timeOriginally published in 1965, Reading Capital is a landmark of French thought and radical theory, reconstructing Western Marxism from its foundations. Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosopher, maintained that Marx's project could only be revived if its scientific and revolutionary novelty was thoroughly divested of all traces of humanism, idealism, Hegelianism and historicism. In order to complete this critical rereading, Althusser and his students at the cole normale superieure ran a seminar on Capital, re-examining its arguments, strengths and weaknesses in detail, and it was out of those discussions that this book was born. Previously only available in English in highly abridged form, this edition, appearing fifty years after its original publication in France, restores chapters by Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Ranciere. It includes a major new introduction by tienne Balibar.

An impassioned manifesto from the author of Booker-winner God of Small Things, one of the most vocal campaigners in the world

Coates is the essential chronicler of black America, and his first memoir is a small and beautiful epic of growing up in 1980s Baltimore

For Marc Auge, best-selling author of Non-Places, the prevailing idea of ';the Future' rests on our present fears of the contemporary world. It is to the future that we look for redemption and progress; but it is also where we project our personal and apocalyptic anxieties. By questioning notions of certainty, truth, and totality, Auge finds ways to separate the future from our eternal, terrified present and liberates the mind to allow it to conceptualize our possible futures afresh.

"The Communist Manifesto", drafted on the eve of the 1848 revolutions, is a political text of literary interest and historical insight. It is presented here by Eric Hobsbawm who describes the century-and-a-half of history which has been both shaped and illuminated by the "Manifesto".

Three renowned contemporary theorists discuss their different perspectives for politics and thought.

Offering a kaleidoscopic journey into the experiences of modernization, the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world, this title dexterously interweaves an exploration of modernism in art, literature, and architecture.

Contemporary philosophy of science has paid close attention to the understanding of scientific practice, in contrast to the previous focus on scientific method. This work shows the deficiencies of many widespread ideas about the nature of knowledge. It argues that the only feasible explanation of any scientific success is a historical account.

In this debate political philosophers Fraser and Honneth set out to advance the discussion in political philosophy regarding the increasingly polarized political positions of redistribution or recognition, or more simply, class politics versus identity politics.

Jameson's study of the cultural, political and social implications of postmodernism.

This work examines what it means to be a philosopher and attacks the sterility of modern philosophy. Part One explores the nature and scope of philosophy and its relation to social and economic development. Part Two considers other forms of thought: science, art, literature and music.

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.

The all-encompassing embrace of world capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century was generally attributed to the superiority of competitive markets. Globalization had appeared to be the natural outcome of this unstoppable process. But today, with global markets roiling and increasingly reliant on state intervention to stay afloat, it has become clear that markets and states aren't straightforwardly opposing forces.In this groundbreaking work, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin demonstrate the intimate relationship between modern capitalism and the American state, including its role as an ';informal empire' promoting free trade and capital movements. Through a powerful historical survey, they show how the US has superintended the restructuring of other states in favor of competitive markets and coordinated the management of increasingly frequent financial crises.The Making of Global Capitalism, through its highly original analysis of the first great economic crisis of the twenty-first century, identifies the centrality of the social conflicts that occur within states rather than between them. These emerging fault lines hold out the possibility of new political movements transforming nation states and transcending global markets.