From acclaimed public scholar Andrew Ross, groundbreaking reporting on climate change and the horizons of a just future from Palestine, UAE, Arizona, and China.

Between the summers of 2023 and 2024, temperatures rose, coastal areas flooded, and droughts and fires raged inland. Unprecedented tornadoes, hurricanes, and typhoons of astonishing force revealed the disturbances roiling the air and the oceans. More species than ever before disappeared from the planet in what scientists are calling Earth’s Sixth Great Extinction. Reports from the front lines of the climate crisis have always been grim, but this past year was worse than any other, measurably more catastrophic in more ways for more animals and more people. 

In his travels during this tumultuous year, public intellectual and noted scholar Andrew Ross criss-crossed the world, visiting Ramallah (Palestine), Dubai (UAE), Phoenix (USA), and Shanghai (China)—some of the landscapes most disturbed by human activity, whether through active warfare or massive development projects. But rather than offering another eco-polemic or recalling for us the dread prognostications of Malthus in the 19th century or Ehrlich in the 20th, The Weather Report is a clear-eyed and essentially optimistic book that proposes a pragmatic, just, and urgent new common ground reestablishing scalable projects of mutual aid and care as a new, essential center for our economic, ecological, and social well-being. 

Songwriters in a Fiat factory. Miners in the local music studio. Workers on the radio and musicians on the picket line. Music can carry a strike from one factory to the next, or bring it into living rooms across the globe. Record by record, this book unearths some of the biggest swings musicians, workers, and supporters have taken to co-create a popular culture of resistance.

Workers have been engaged in a culture of resistance for as long as there have been bosses. Across every movement and in every language, we have joined our voices together in rebellion and solidarity, singing songs that still echo through the history of organized labor. But in the last hundred years, new technology has allowed these militant rhythms and rebellious melodies to be recorded as they were sung–the voices of miners in Northern England, fieldworkers in California, autoworkers in France, and many others–etched into wax, shellac, and vinyl as strike records.

Strike While the Needle is Hot takes readers through labor’s greatest hits, providing both a broad overview of how militant unionists used music as a tool of struggle, as well as an inspiring history from below about specific worker revolts that would be lost to the bosses’ tune of profit and production had they not been preserved on these fragile discs.

“Full of gorgeous images of album art and inserts as well as contemporaneous news items, Strike While the Needle Is Hot shows workers taking full control of their messaging—spreading info and raising funds for strikes and documenting their own actions.”

—Kerry Cardoza for Chicago Reader

Call it “bad manners,” but the militants of Rise Up or Die!—Brazil's radical Black liberation movement—refuse to abide by the rules of a society that is killing Black people.

Confronting centuries of hyper-exploitation and dehumanization of Black people in Brazil, Rise Up or Die! invented a new political vocabulary for Black self-determination, introduced sexual health and food justice initiatives, attracted militants and activists from the most marginalized spaces of one of the largest Black nations in the world, and founded an autonomous Pan-Africanist school as part of their broader struggle for collective liberation.

As the activists of Rise Up or Die! say, “Creative hatred is what makes you build new things,” and indeed they have relentlessly pursued invention as the necessary alternative to the nation’s genocidal model of racial democracy. Known in Brazil as Reaja ou Será Morto/Reaja ou Será Morta, this is the story of their organization, in their own words, as they resist a culture that simply hates Black people.

A one-of-a-kind lyrical and fast-paced memoir of the frontlines and trenches of Native liberation in the Four Corners and Southwest in the 1970s.

From the late summer of 1972 to the late summer of 1974, John Redhouse and many other Navajo and Indian rights activists threw all they had into mass movement organizing and direct action. And they were pretty good at it too in terms of effectiveness and impact. 

Written in the first-person and above all, with a collective spirit of generosity and witness, John Redhouse describes the hot temper of the times in the racist and exploitative border towns in the Four Corners area of the Southwest region.

As John Redhouse says, “Without the People, you have nothing. But back then, we had a lot of people WITH us.” Yes, the Power of the People, the collective human spirit of the emerging local and regional Indian civil movement, thousands of us marching in the streets of Gallup and Farmington in northwestern New Mexico with our demands. A bold citizens arrest at city hall, a downtown street riot, burning images of enemy leaders in effigy. And more marches, demonstrations, and direct actions.

Critical conversations and reflections about lessons learned at the intersection of social movements and artist production.

Diversity of Aesthetics collects powerful and timely conversations among leading cultural critics, artists, and organizers to connect the threads between some of the most pressing social struggles and conflicts of our time: policing, war, borders and migration, economic crisis. 

Across three themes—infrastructure, migration, and riots—militant thinkers, artists, educators, and others discuss aesthetic production, forms of social organization, modes of struggle against gendered and racialized capitalism, and revolutionary theory. Common to all three conversations is a commitment to rethinking the relationship between forms of critique and forms of struggle undertaken by collective social practices, offering lessons for tactics, strategies, and practices.

“They together serve as a sort of manual on collectivity, the relationship between language and political struggle, and artmaking outside institutional frameworks—among other pressing concerns.”

—Marko Gluhaich, Senior Editor, Frieze

Lessons from the greatest people’s victory against corporate neoliberal capture in
Latin America.

Water is life! From the frontlines of the greatest popular rebellion against the privatization of water comes the triumphant grassroots story of ordinary people in Cochabamba, Bolivia who became water warriors. As Echoes of Cochabamba shows in vivid detail, the 2001 “water wars” was an explosion of democracy and human rights regained by the masses, which won popular control of water supply and defied all odds by driving out the transnational corporation that had stolen their water in the first place.

Oscar Olivera, a trade union machinist who helped shape and lead a movement that brought thousands of ordinary people to the streets, powerfully conveys the perspective of a committed participant in a victorious and inspirational rebellion.

Olivera relates the selling of the city’s water supply to Aguas del Tunari—a subsidiary of US-based Bechtel—the subsequent astronomical rise in water prices, and the refusal of poverty-strapped Bolivians to pay them. Olivera brings us to the front lines of a movement, chronicling how the people organized an opposition and the dramatic struggles that eventually defeated the privatizers.

With hard-won political savvy, Olivera reflects on major themes that emerged from the war over water: the fear and isolation that Cochabambinos faced with a spirit of solidarity and mutual aid; the challenges of democratically administering the city’s water supply; and the impact of the water wars on subsequent resistance.

Twenty-five years later, Cochabamba teaches us that the real issue is not the capture of state power, but the creation of new pathways from the grassroots up.

“This book is a gift to a new generation of English-reading activists, students, and concerned people around the world.”

—Sarah T. Hines for NACLA

A collection of poems spanning six decades of life, love, loss, and rebellion amidst the planetary transformations of the working class and capital, from the acclaimed Marxist philosopher and writer George Caffentzis.

"I have never considered myself a poet, yet, from my adolescence, poetry has been a constant company in my life. Only recently, however, I have begun to collect poems that I had scattered through notebooks, back-pages of articles and other occasional spaces. The desire to see them as one work is partly stimulated by the recognition of recurring themes, at times in syntony with those inspiring my political writings. Among them are the memories and the nostalgia for the Greek world of my childhood, my grandmother's house facing the Taygetus mountain, the pleasures and troubles of love and political organizing, and, with the passing of years, the mourning of dead friends and comrades, and above all the never-ending pleasure of playing with words. This book collects some of the poems that have accompanied this journey."

—George Caffentzis, from the Introduction

Conflict and resolution are the lifeblood of social movements. How, and with whom, do we find lasting friendship, support, and joy in a world in need of so much repair?

In On Activism, Friendships, and Fighting veteran organizer and social worker Benjamin Heim Shepard traces a pressing dynamic of social movements: friendship and conflict. The project builds on oral histories with more than  thirty movement organizers—from AIDS, queer, trade union, community, Occupy, and harm reduction-based movements—reflecting on the lessons, meanings, and future directions of movements and collective organizing efforts. “There is a hunger for radical history – to give credit to past struggles, to learn from our mistakes and to improve our strategies for the future,” writes Lesley Wood. Oral histories trace the stories of these movements. 

The book goes in depth into the reasons and ways the interviewees became involved in activism, the friendships they formed, and the conflicts they faced. This includes asking questions such as: where do friendships support or undermine these efforts? How can conflicts be resolved?  And where do people find lasting support?