Len McCluskey is the standout trade unionist of his era. Head of the giant Unite union for more than a decade, he is a unique and powerful figure on the political stage. Witty and sharp, McCluskey delivers a powerful intervention, issuing a manifesto for the future of trade unionism and urging the left not to lose sight of class politics.
“Len tells his story as only he can: forthright, confident and witty. He is an amazing and unusual trade union leader who manages to encompass industrial, social and international campaigning all at the same time. His support for struggles all around the world, as well as for democratising the Labour Party and injecting the politics of social transition into our movement, will leave a lasting mark and legacy. —Jeremy Corbyn
“Pulls no punches. An explosive account of life at the top of the Labour Party from Britain’s most important trade union leader.” —Kevin Maguire
“Len’s life story is an inspiration. He lives and breathes solidarity. He is a true workers’ leader.” —Maxine Peake
“Len reminds us what—and who—we’re fighting for. He knows his own mind and isn’t afraid to speak it.” —Zarah Sultana
“The riveting story of a lifetime spent fighting for workers, with lessons for all of us. Len learned the value of solidarity working on the Liverpool docks and it has never left him.” —Dave Ward
Dialogues on the future of nature, with Jared Diamond, Bill McKibben, Kim Stanley Robinson, and more.
THE BUSINESS SECRETS OF DRUG DEALING Matt Taibbi & 'Anonymous'
Co-author Matt Taibbi discusses new book with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti on "Rising"
HATE INC. Matt Taibbi
"Bombholed" — How the media uses one bombshell story to push another one down a memory-hole.
EVERYTHING MUST CHANGE! Renata Ávila and Srećko Horvat
"The World after COVID-19" — Prominent commentators from around the world announce EVERYTHING MUST CHANGE!
PEOPLE'S POWER Ashley Dawson
"We can no longer think of energy as a commodity" — Announcing PEOPLE'S POWER by Ashley Dawson, with scenes from Man with a Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov
SURF, SWEAT AND TEARS Andy Martin
Surf noir at its most compelling, a dystopian tale of one man's obsessions, wiped out in a grisly true crime — Announcing SURF, SWEAT AND TEARS by Andy Martin, to a surf rock soundtrack
PRIDE Fred W. McDarrah
Announcing PRIDE by Fred W. McDarrah, with a montage of classic and never-before-seen images captured by the iconic photographer
Welcome to OR Books
A radical, exciting response to Amazonian hegemony. —Dazed
OR Books is a new type of publishing company. It embraces progressive change in politics, culture and the way we do business. More
Len McCluskey’s news making, tell-all memoir, Always Red, publishes this month. Jeremy Corbyn describes it as “forthright, confident and witty”, the Daily Mail calls it “a bombshell.” Order your copy here.
Profiling along the way storied Black leaders such as Martin Luther King, Malcom X and James Brown (for whom Glen Ford once worked), The Black Agenda looks, too, beyond American shores at US intervention in Libya, the Congo and the Middle East, showing how these are imbricated with racism at home.
Heaven In Disorder looks with fervid dispassion at the fracturing of the Left, the empty promises of liberal democracy, and the tepid compromises offered by the powerful. From the ashes of these failures, Žižek asserts the need for international solidarity, economic transformation, and—above all—an urgent, “wartime” communism.
Your All-Purpose Guide to Make the Impossible Possible
STEVE DUNCOMBE and STEVE LAMBERT
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The Art of Activism brings together the authors’ extensive practical knowledge—gleaned from over a decade’s experience training activists around the world—with theoretical insights from fields as far-ranging as cultural studies and cognitive science.
TESLA: All My Dreams Are True jolts and flows between the extraordinary life of the inventor Nikolas Tesla, the making of a feature film about him by the celebrated director Michael Almereyda, and episodes from the filmmaker’s own restless, quixotic career.
Julian Assange In His Own Words provides a highly accessible survey of Assange’s philosophy and politics, conveying his views on how governments, corporations, the military, and the press function. As well as addressing the significance of the vast trove of leaked documents published by WikiLeaks, Assange draws on a polymathic intelligence to range freely over quantum physics, Greek mythology, macroeconomics, modern literature, and empires old and new.
Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York
ROSS BARKAN
Available Now
A vital riposte to Cuomo’s recently published book about the pandemic, now increasingly derided as self-serving and deceitful, The Prince is a searing indictment of Cuomo’s handling of coronavirus and his time overall in the highest office of the state.
It is all worse than we think. It is even worse than Mike Davis, for whom “every day is judgment day” (The Nation), could have imagined. The contributions to this volume are explorations of what Davis—in typical wry fashion—once referred to as the field of “disaster studies.” Collectively, they show how our “disaster imaginary” has been rendered inadequate by the existing order’s ability to feed off and coopt our resistance to it.
Racism and Social Reform Movements in the United States
ROBERT L. ALLEN and CHUDE PAMELA ALLEN
Available Now
Reluctant Reformers explores the centrality of racism to American politics through the origins, internal dynamics, and leadership of the major democratic and social justice movements between the early nineteenth century and the end of World War II. It focuses in particular on the abolitionists, the Populist Party, the Progressive reformers, and the women’s suffrage, labor, and socialist and communist movements.
Conceived in response to the shocking violence observed in humankind, the project identifies people who have wrongfully died at the hands of others—whether victims of war, hate crimes, or random brutality—and attempts to compensate for the cruelty and pain they faced in life and death.The Compensation Bureau explores the power of individual and collective action, from a writer hailed by The Washington Post as “a world-novelist of the first category.”
Since leaving her American homeland in 2003 Belén Fernández had been an inveterate traveler. Ceaselessly wandering the world, the only constant in her itinerary was a conviction never to return to the country of her childhood. Then the COVID-19 lockdown happened and Fernandez found herself stranded in a small village on the Pacific coast of Mexico.
Above the Law recounts 12 cases in which justice was denied because of QI. The stories are accompanied by infographics, timelines, and contextualizing background to create a concise and compelling indictment of an outrageously unjust legal principle that must be changed
In this characteristically turbocharged new book, celebrated Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi provides an insider’s guide to the variety of ways today’s mainstream media tells us lies. Part tirade, part confessional, it reveals that what most people think of as “the news” is, in fact, a twisted wing of the entertainment business.
In a career that spanned five decades up to his death in 2016, Michael Ratner was involved in a wide range of high-profile cases. From working with William Kunstler in pursuing justice after the notorious prison massacre at Attica, to representing the revolutionary governments in Cuba and Nicaragua and prisoners interned at Guantanamo Bay in the wake of 9/11, through to being Julian Assange’s principal US lawyer, Ratner never shied away from taking on difficult, controversial cases.
Few urban critters are more reviled than the hipster. They are notoriously difficult to define, and yet we know one when we see one. No wonder: they were among the global cultural phenomena that ushered in the 21st century. They have become a bulwark of mainstream culture, cultural commodity, status, butt of all jokes and ready-made meme.
Maud Gonne, the legendary woman known as the Irish Joan of Arc, left her mark on everyone she met. She famously won the devotion of one of the greatest poets of the age, William Butler Yeats. Born into tremendous privilege, she allied herself with rebels and the downtrodden and openly defied what was at the time the world’s most powerful empire. More
The Center Did Not Hold
A Biden/Obama Balance Sheet
ROBERT EISENBERG
Available Now
The Center Did Not Hold weighs the progressive—and not so progressive—contributions of the Obama-Biden White House across more than a hundred issues involving international relations, domestic cultural and economic matters, and social justice.
Foreshadowing a subsequent exodus, Luke O’Neil and his wife moved from the city to the suburbs just prior to the lockdown. Isolated not only by a virus but also by the alienation of a neighborhood where social distancing meant more than just geographical separation, O’Neil faced trials on numerous fronts.
In this exhilarating sequel to his acclaimed Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World, Žižek delves into some of the more surprising dimensions of lockdowns, quarantines, and social distancing—and the increasingly unruly opposition to them by “response fatigued” publics around the planet.
