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The book covers the history of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, which took place over three bloody days in the Lebanese capital Beirut. It was committed against Palestinian refugees by Lebanese militias, aided and supervised by the Israeli Army, which had encircled the district.

Now available for the first time in English, this classic book is the most comprehensive, authoritative account of what happened and who was responsible. The author, Bayan Nuwayhed al-Hout, was a Professor at the Lebanese University at the time. Driven by the horror of what occurred, she interviewed survivors and set up an oral history project immediately after the massacre to preserve testimonies. This book is the result.

Following a general introduction, the first part contains interviews mainly with victims' families. The second part analyses statistical data and attempts to determine the number of victims. The conclusion, 'Who Was Responsible?', sheds light on the various parties responsible.

Over five-hundred pages long, illustrated with photographs and maps, unrivalled in detail and scope, this book is a courageous attempt to make sense of what happened and an important political document in its own right.

Joseph Butwin’s oral history presents conversations with ten Jewish veterans of the ALB. Recorded from 1992–94 in the wake of European communism’s collapse, the interviews explore the milieus that formed the volunteers. Immigrants established the secular Yiddish-speaking socialism that became a part of many Jewish American communities. Their children, reacting to economic depression and the rise of fascism, enlisted in the ALB. Butwin follows their stories from their youthful motives and choices through their lives as Jews and leftists, and records the reckonings that took place as they reflected on their past.

Insightful and revealing, Salud y Shalom explores the forces of identity and history that led young Jewish leftists to fight fascism.

This is a political biography of one of the 20th century’s most emblematic left-wing figures - Salvador Allende, who was president of Chile until he was ousted by General Pinochet in a US-supported coup in 1973.

Victor Figueroa Clark guides us through Allende's life and political project, answering some of the most frequently asked questions. Was he a revolutionary or a reformist? A bureaucrat or inspirational democrat? Clark argues that Allende and the Popular Unity Party created a unique fusion which was both revolutionary and democratic.

The process led by Allende was a symbol of hope for the left during his short time in power. Forty years on, and with left governments back in power across Latin America, this book looks back at the man and the process in order to draw vital lessons for the left in Latin America and around the world today.

Founded in 1919, the Communist Party (CP) in San Francisco survived an ineffectual early period to become a force in the trade union heyday of the 1930s. Robert Cherny uses the lives and careers of more than fifty members to tell the story of the city’s CP from its founding through 1958.

Cherny draws on FBI files, the records of the CP at the Russian State Archive for Social and Political History, interviews, and memoirs to follow male and female party and union leaders, rank-and-file members, and others. His history reveals why people joined the CP while charting the frequent changes in policy, constant member turnover, and disruptive factionalism that limited party aims and successes. Cherny also follows his subjects through their resignations, expulsions, or other reasons for departure and looks at the CP’s influence on their lives in subsequent years.

Vivid and exhaustively researched, San Francisco Reds is a long view account of the personal motivations and activism of an Old Left generation in a West Coast city.

Drawing on previously unknown or unassimilated sources, Donald C. Hodges here presents an entirely new interpretation of the politics and philosophy of Augusto C. Sandino, the intellectual progenitor of Nicaragua's Sandinista revolution.

The first part of the book investigates the political sources of Sandino's thought in the works of Babeuf, Buonarroti, Blanqui, Proudhon, Bakunin, Most, Malatesta, Kropotkin, Ricardo Flores Magón, and Lenin—a mixed legacy of pre-Marxist and non-Marxist authoritarian and libertarian communists.

The second half of the study scrutinizes the philosophy of nature and history that Sandino made his own. Hodges delves deeply into this philosophy as the supreme and final expression of Sandino's communism and traces its sources in the Gnostic and millenarian occult undergrounds. This results in a rich study of the ways in which Sandino's revolutionary communism and communist spirituality intersect—a spiritual politics that Hodges presents as more realistic than the communism of Karl Marx.

While accepting the current wisdom that Sandino was a Nicaraguan liberal and social reformer, Hodges also makes a persuasive case that Sandino was first and foremost a communist, although neither of the Marxist nor anarchist variety. He argues that Sandino's eclectic communist spirituality was more of an asset than a liability for understanding the human condition, and that his spiritual politics promises to be more relevant than Marxism-Leninism for the twenty-first century. Indeed, Hodges believes that Sandino's holistic communism embraces both deep ecology and feminist spirituality—a finding that is sure to generate lively and productive debate.

"Once again I repeat that I am not an impartial; objective critic. My judgments are nourished by my ideals, my sentiments, my passions. I have an avowed and resolute ambition: to assist in the creation of Peruvian socialism. I am far removed from the academic techniques of the university."—From the Author's Note

Jose Carlos Mariátegui was one of the leading South American social philosophers of the early twentieth century. He identified the future of Peru with the welfare of the Indian at a time when similar ideas were beginning to develop in Middle America and the Andean region. Generations of Peruvian and other Latin American social thinkers have been profoundly influenced by his writings.

Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana), first published in 1928, is Mariátegui's major statement of his position and has gone into many editions, not only in Peru but also in other Latin American countries. The topics discussed in the essays—economic evolution, the problem of the Indian, the land problem, public education, the religious factor, regionalism and centralism, and the literary process—are in many respects as relevant today as when the book was written.

Mariátegui's thinking was strongly tinged with Marxism. Because contemporary sociology, anthropology, and economics have been influenced by Marxism much more in Latin America than in North America, it is important that North Americans become more aware of Mariátegui's position and accord it its proper historical significance.

Jorge Basadre, the distinguished Peruvian historian, in an introduction written especially for this translation, provides an account of Mariátegui's life and describes the political and intellectual climate in which these essays were written.

Should we draw an analogy between Shakespeare’s tyrants—Richard III, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and King Lear—and Donald Trump? In Shakespeare and Trump, Jeffrey Wilson applies literary criticism to real life, examining plot, character, villainy, soliloquy, tragedy, myth, and metaphor to identify the formal features of the Trump phenomenon, and its hidden causes, structure, and meanings.

Wilsonapproaches his comparison prismatically. He first considers two high-concept (read: far-fetched) Shakespeare adaptations penned by Trump’s former chief political strategist Steve Bannon. He looks at University of Pennsylvania students protesting Trump by taking down a monument to Shakespeare. He reads Trump’s first 100 days in office against Netflix’s House of Cards. Wilson also addresses the summer 2017 Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar wherein an assassination of a Trump-ian leader caused corporations to withdraw sponsorship. 

These stories reveal a surprising—and bizarre—relationship between the provincial English playwright and the billionaire President of the United States, ostensibly a medieval king living in a modern world. The comparison reveals a politics that blends villainy and comedy en route to tragedy.

A myth-busting investigation of small donors: who they are, how they spend their money, and whose campaigns actually benefit from their donations.

Many political reformers argue that more robust small donor participation in US campaigns would reduce the influence of the wealthiest Americans and improve political responsiveness to ordinary citizens. Drawing on extensive data, including surveys and campaign records, Zachary Albert and Raymond J. La Raja largely dispel this myth, offering the first comprehensive portrait to date of small donors in US elections.

Although small donor contributions to high-profile, national races have increased markedly since 2018, the US campaign finance system allows for even larger sums of money from Super PACs and other independent spending groups. Moreover, small donors are mostly similar to their larger contributor counterparts: both are socioeconomically advantaged, strongly partisan, ideologically extreme, and distinct from non-donors. Small donors can also be impulsive: they tend to give mostly to high-profile candidates on the ideological extremes, empowering media celebrities and norm-breakers rather than consensus-builders, and they underinvest in competitive and down-ballot races. Importantly, the candidates who rely most heavily on small donor support are not necessarily better legislators or representatives.

Yet, the story is not entirely bleak. Small donors bring energy and resources, especially for challengers and outsider candidates. The book shows how reforms could channel this energy more productively—by strengthening political parties, emphasizing local representation, and creating systems that broaden participation beyond the most ideological citizens.

Timely, accessible, and grounded in data, Small Donors in US Politics reveals both the promise and the peril of small donor politics—and what it will take to make money in politics serve democracy, not undermine it.

A powerful cultural critique of soccer’s public rhetoric

American sports agnostics might raise an eyebrow at the idea that soccer represents a staging ground for cultural, social, and political possibility. It is just another game, after all, in a society where mass-audience spectator sports largely avoid any political stance other than a generic, corporate-friendly patriotism. But John M. Sloop picks up on the work of Laurent Dubois and others to see in American soccer—a sport that has achieved immense participation and popularity despite its struggle to establish major league status—a game that permits surprisingly diverse modes of thinking about national identity because of its marginality.

As a rhetorician who draws on both critical theory and culture, Sloop seeks to read soccer as the game intersects with gender, race, sexuality, and class. The result of this engagement is a sense of both enormous possibility and real constraint. If American soccer offers more possibility because of its marginality, looking at how those possibilities are constrained can provide valuable insights into neoliberal logics of power, profit, politics, and selfhood.

In Soccer’s Neoliberal Pitch, Sloop analyzes a host of soccer-adjacent phenomena: the equal pay dispute between the US women’s national team and the US Soccer Federation, the significance of hooligan literature, the introduction of English soccer to American TV audiences, the strange invisibility of the Mexican soccer league despite its consistent high TV ratings, and the reading of US national teams as “underdogs” despite the nation’s quasi-imperial dominance of the Western hemisphere. An invaluable addition to a growing bookshelf on soccer titles, Soccer’s Neoliberal Pitch serves as a model for critical cultural work with sports, with appeal to not only sports studies, but cultural studies, communication, and even gender studies classrooms.
 

What is ‘social capital’? The enormous positivity surrounding it conceals the instrumental economic rationality underpinning the notion as corporations silently sell consumer data for profit. Status chasing is just one aspect of a process of transforming qualitative aspects of social interactions into quantifiable metrics for easier processing, prediction, and behavioural shaping.

A work of critical media studies, Social Capital Online examines the idea within the new ‘network spectacle’ of digital capitalism via the ideas of Marx, Veblen, Debord, Baudrillard and Deleuze. Explaining how such phenomena as online narcissism and aggression arise, Faucher offers a new theoretical understanding of how the spectacularisation of online activity perfectly aligns with the value system of neoliberalism and its data worship. Even so, at the centre of all, lie familiar ideas – alienation and accumulation – new conceptions of which he argues are vital for understanding today’s digital society.

Humorous, frank, and insightful, this book challenges the reader to step in and take hold of what is right and to cast away what is wrong. Topics covered included such varied subjects as private property, the individual, the Three Philosophies of Man, women, individualism, and more. A wonderful introduction to philosophy for the neophyte, and a joy for the experienced student of thought.

     “Imagine two of the most influential thinkers of all time, and two of the most diametrically opposed, thrust together in a no holds barred debate about some of the most important questions: Does man move the world or is he only a puppet of forces beyond his control? Is there a human nature or only market forces? Is Communism the liberator of mankind or a deadly scourge? In Peter Kreeft’s Socrates Meets Marx, the father of philosophy cross examines the founder of communism using the Communist Manifesto, details from the life of Marx himself, and the witnesses of history as evidence to be considered for judgment. If only every edition of the Communist Manifesto would have been bound together with a copy of this book, the world would be a much saner place.” – Christopher Kaczor, author of Proportionalism and the Natural Law Tradition

Following Stalin’s death, Soviet film—like Soviet culture—changed in meaningful ways. Emerging from a system that had stymied individual, creative voices, prominent directors now found their own respective styles, as they embraced their personal visions to produce works that diverged significantly from the mainstream. Grounded in auteur theory, this volume explores how these filmmakers expressed themselves through creative cinematic means rather than through a narrow emphasis on narrative or in accordance with popular—and governmental—whims.

Each chapter focuses on a specific filmmaker, from well-known auteurs Aleksei German Sr., Kira Muratova, Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov, and Larisa Shepit’ko, to others less familiar in the West: Sergei Solovyov, Roman Balayan, Otar Iosseliani, Tengiz Aduladze, and Ali Khamraev. Hailing from a range of Soviet republics, they all impacted the Soviet cinematic sphere despite harsh censorship and the repression of artists throughout the nation. By integrating cinematic and theoretical perspectives into a discussion of auteur Soviet films, this volume illuminates the significance of a cinematic trend that took place in both Soviet culture and international film history.

Contributors: Robert Efird, Tim Harte, Lilya Kaganovsky, David Gomiero Molina, Lida Oukaderova, Elizabeth A. Papazian, Marina Rojavin, Rita Safariants, Sydney Stotter, Sergey Toymentsev

A look at the violent “Red Summer of 1919” and its intersection with the highly politicized New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance

With the New Negro movement and the Harlem Renaissance, the 1920s was a landmark decade in African American political and cultural history, characterized by an upsurge in racial awareness and artistic creativity. In Spectres of 1919 Barbara Foley traces the origins of this revolutionary era to the turbulent year 1919, identifying the events and trends in American society that spurred the black community to action and examining the forms that action took as it evolved.

Unlike prior studies of the Harlem Renaissance, which see 1919 as significant mostly because of the geographic migrations of blacks to the North, Spectres of 1919 looks at that year as the political crucible from which the radicalism of the 1920s emerged. Foley draws from a wealth of primary sources, taking a bold new approach to the origins of African American radicalism and adding nuance and complexity to the understanding of a fascinating and vibrant era.

Speculation: Politics, Ideology, Event develops Hegel’s radical perspective of speculative thought as a way of reclaiming and revitalizing the sense of the future and its possibilities. Engaging with such figures as Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Žižek, and Fredric Jameson, Glyn Daly articulates the distinctness of speculative philosophy and draws its implications for new debates in areas of science, politics, capitalism, ideology, ethics, and the event. 

In a confrontation with today’s fatalistic milieu, principal emphasis is given to Hegel’s idea of infinity as the intrinsic dimension of negativity within all finitude. Against the modern era’s paradigmatic tendency to externalize social problems in the form of antagonism and Otherness, Daly argues for a renewal of utopian thought based on Hegelian reconciliation and the affirmation of excess as the essence of all being. On these grounds, he advances a new kind of political imagination that in speculative terms centers on uncompromising notions of truth and reason. 
 

Across the modern political spectrum, left-wing and right-wing political theorists have invested sport with ideological significance. That significance, however, varies distinctively and characteristically with the ideology—a phenomenon John Hoberman terms "ideological differentiation." Taking this phenomenon as its point of departure, this provocative work interprets the major sport ideologies of the twentieth century as distinct expressions of political doctrine.

Hoberman argues that a political ideology's interpretation of sport is shaped in part by the value it assigns to work and play as modes of experience; the political anthropologies of right and left can be distinguished by examining their resistance to—or affinity for—sportive imagery of their leaders and of the state itself; there exists a fascist temperament that shows an affinity to athleticism and the sphere of the body that is not shared by the left.

Tracing modern sport ideology back to its premodern antecedents, Hoberman examines the interpretations of sport that have been promulgated by European political intellectuals, such as cultural conservatives and contemporary neo-Marxists, and by the official ideologists of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, and China before and after Mao.

As a form of mass theater, sport can advertise any ideology. But the deeper relationship between sport and political ideology has never before been explored wth such vigor. Presenting the first general theory of sport and political ideology to appear in any language, Hoberman's groundbreaking work is a unique and invaluable contribution to the intellectual and political history of sport in the twentieth century.