front cover of Voices of 1968
Voices of 1968
Documents from the Global North
Edited by Laurence Cox, Salar Mohandesi and Bjarke Skaerlund Risager
Pluto Press, 2018
The year 1968 marked one of the great upheavals of twentieth-century politics and culture. Across the world, people rebelled against postwar conformity and patriarchy, against the authoritarian university and factory work, and against the Cold War and state power. The legacy of 1968 endures in many of today’s social movements and struggles, and yet it is often misunderstood, the realities of the time turned to caricature.

Voices of 1968 is a vivid collection of key texts from the movements and uprisings of “the long 1968.” Emphasizing the transnational linkages between these struggles, the primary documents of this collection delve into events that took place as far afield as Italy, France, West Germany, the United States, Mexico, Canada, Britain, Northern Ireland, Denmark, Czechoslavakia, Yugoslavia, and Japan. This wealth of material is supported by framing essays helping readers to find their way around the era’s revolutionary ideas and to understand their legacy in politics, culture, and society today. Featuring many texts that have never been seen in English before, this remarkable collection is published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the events of 1968.
 
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We Make Our Own History
Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism
Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen
Pluto Press, 2014

We live in the twilight of neoliberalism: the ruling classes can no longer rule as before, and ordinary people are no longer willing to be ruled in the old way. Pursued by global elites since the 1970s, neoliberalism is defined by dispossession and ever-increasing inequality. The refusal to continue to be ruled like this - "ya basta!" - appears in an arc of resistance stretching from rural India to the cities of the global North.

From this network of movements, new visions are emerging of a future beyond neoliberalism. We make our own History responds to these visions by reclaiming Marxism as a theory born from activist experience and practice.

This book marks a break both with established social movement theory, and with those forms of Marxism which treat the practice of social movement organising as an unproblematic process. It shows how movements can develop from local conflicts to global struggles; how neoliberalism operates as a social movement from above, and how popular struggles can create new worlds from below.

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