Remembering Vannak Prum

To celebrate the launch of Movements that Win, a new book by noted activist and radical writer-agitator Aric McBay, we’re proud to share McBay's afterword to the book, in which McBay explores the different tactical patterns that he observed when compiling the stories he presents throughout the text. In Movements that Win, Aric McBay offers a variety of paths forward, all based on the achievements of actions and movements past. If we need anything at this moment of increasing fascism and authoritarianism — both globally and domestically — we need concrete examples of victories and clear analysis of what made those victories possible, so we, too, can be victorious. While reading this text, consider the ways in which your organizing work embodies these patterns, if it does, and, if it doesn't, the ways in which you may further implement the forward-thinking ideas presented in text. 

---

Patterns of Resistance

Writing Movements that Win has been a source of joy and optimism for me. Although I’ve been involved in movements since I was a teenager, while researching this book, I found new stories that will nourish and inspire me for years to come.

As a reader, I hope you have also found new reasons for optimism in these pages. I hope your spirits have been lifted and you can see new avenues for action.

Some stories in this book were surprising to me. However, despite the variety and diversity of these examples, I have repeatedly found the same patterns behind movements that win.

Writing this book has strengthened some of my core beliefs about how social movements make change — in particular, the need for direct action, coalitions across differences, and the importance of building movement capacity at the grassroots level. I found twelve key patterns in these stories. For simplicity and coherence, I’ll place these twelve patterns into three groups: purpose, action, and organization:

PURPOSE:

1. A Tangible Common Goal

2. Positive Vision

3. Urgency (Imminence/Emergency)

4. A Common Enemy

ACTION:

1. Initiative and Escalation

2. Disruption and Direct Action

3. A Common Tactic and Collective Action

4. Diversity of Tactics and Radical Flanking

ORGANIZATION:

1. Coalitions Across Difference

2. Movement Capacity

3. Participatory Decision-Making and Democracy

4. Persistence and Endurance

Let’s begin with purpose. Our first four patterns all have to do with the goals and context of a movement. What do they want to achieve, and what environment are they operating in?

1. A TANGIBLE COMMON GOAL

In all these stories, community members and activists from different backgrounds had to rally together around a tangible common goal. They wanted to accomplish something specific and were able to do it together.

When Revolution of the Heart convened, its goal was clear: removing a specific colonial statue. That clarity and the ability to organize at a specific location were essential to its success.

Likewise, the struggle against the Richmond Dump was about a specific piece of land and community. There were particular people, wells, and wildlife being adversely affected by the dump. That made it easy to focus efforts on the problem’s source and organize and unify community efforts.

The same was true for the campaigns around Parcel C, the Green Bans, the Wyhl Reactor Site, and many others.

All these groups could have chosen more abstract or diffuse goals. The Revolution of the Heart could have chosen to focus on “colonialism” in general, but that kind of vague, amorphous system is much harder to rally around.

Likewise, the Richmond Dump organizers could have focused on opposing the concept of waste in general—but would 90 percent of their neighbors have signed a petition against “waste”? It’s very difficult to mobilize people to fight an abstraction.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t oppose harmful systems or name them as things we want to change—to the contrary. However, if we’re aiming to change big and abstract systems, we need to find intermediate goals and stepping stones that will let us achieve wins and build momentum.

2. POSITIVE VISION

While many of the stories in this book were oppositional, at least in part, successful movements were also guided by a positive vision of what they wanted to create or protect.

Parcel C organizers didn’t just want to stop a parking garage; they wanted a community center for Boston Chinatown.

The radical unionists of the Green Bans wanted to protect specific neighborhoods and places. But they also wanted to forge an intersectional working-class movement in which unions also fought racism, homophobia, and imperialism. They wanted to build a “socialist world with a human face, an ecological heart, and an egalitarian body.”

Many Indigenous-led movements discussed—like the Wet’suwet’en struggle or the Revolution of the Heart—were about more than Indigenous survival; they were about reshaping the larger society to become more just and self-aware.

Indeed, sometimes the method of opposition created the positive model needed—like how the camp opposed to the Wyhl nuclear reactor created its own “college” and eventually became a nature reserve.

A clear, positive vision allows us to be more strategic and use our limited resources as community activists. It guides us, gives us a direction to move toward, and motivates and sustains organizers and supporters. Few people want to participate in a social movement if the only options are different kinds of defeat or if struggle only prolongs the inevitable.

People need a positive, transformative vision of a future worth living in. Now, especially.

3. URGENCY

Just because a problem exists doesn’t mean people will act against it. Something needs to motivate people to get involved rather than wait for someone else to solve the problem. There must be some reason to set aside business as usual so that people go to the streets instead of staying home and watching Netflix.

Often, that reason is urgency. People respond much more actively to the threat of imminent harm than to something that may be a problem one day.

There’s a reason activists have reframed climate change as a climate “emergency.” Climate change is notoriously difficult to organize against because it can feel so nebulous and distant.

The environmental justice wins described in this book are tied to specific, tangible plans and specific, urgent threats. The Brent Spar was on the verge of being sunk. Doug Ford’s gas plants were within weeks or days of being approved. The Richmond Dump was an active and growing threat to groundwater.

4. A COMMON ENEMY

Rallying people from different backgrounds around a joint campaign isn’t easy. A tangible goal helps, and so does an emergency.

But one particular thing helps people put aside their differences: a common enemy.

In the struggles against the Northern Gateway and Line 9 pipelines, that common enemy was fossil fuel giant Enbridge. It’s often a corporation, whether Unocal at Umbergaon, Waste Management at the Richmond Dump, or Walmart . . . everywhere.

Other times, the common enemy is the government: the German government in the struggle at Wyhl or the UK government in the case of the movement for nuclear disarmament.

Governments, though, can be sprawling. It’s best to put pressure on specific figures and decision-makers whenever possible. Opponents of the Brent Spar painted Prime Minister John Major as a “redundant rig” to be dumped. Organizers of the 504 Disability Sit-ins focused much of their effort on Joseph Califano, the federal secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare.

That’s the last pattern in the purpose and context group. Next, let’s look at four more patterns: those of action.

5. INITIATIVE AND ESCALATION

In these stories (and in the wider world!), we see again and again that officials in corporations and government funnel dissent into bureaucratic or technical channels where community power can be controlled and dominated.

The United States government stalled the implementation of the disability rights measures in Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 by starting another review of regulations. Opponents of Line 9, the Richmond Dump, and the proposed nuclear waste dump spent years engaging in technical and bureaucratic reviews.

The City of Kingston tried to direct opposition to a colonial statue into a committee discussion about how the wording of a plaque might be adjusted.

Eventually, though, activists broke from those systems, seized the initiative, and went outside official challenges to do something bold and challenging. Activists kept their eyes on the prize, focusing on the specific tangible outcomes they wanted to achieve so they could avoid being derailed by a bureaucratic process that was meant to stifle them.

Sometimes this meant escalating the struggle, raising the stakes. Site occupations or sit-ins (like Revolution of the Heart, the Brent Spar, Wyhl reactor site, and the 504 disability sit-ins) were all meant to escalate the struggle and keep it from being ignored. They also created a sense of urgency that people could rally around to crystallize abstract issues into clear and tangible problems to be confronted.

Smart groups can also take the initiative by being proactive or preemptive. Al Norman’s ultimate advice to stop corporations like Walmart was to put in place zoning bylaws that would explicitly pan big-box stores, avoiding the need for a site fight altogether. The struggle against the Energy East pipeline was likewise successful because of its willingness to preempt the bureaucratic hearing of the National Energy Boards with disruption and direct action.

6. DISRUPTION AND DIRECT ACTION

Disruption and direct action are among the most powerful tools we have as movement workers. In so many campaigns, our worst enemy is business as usual. Business as usual means the constant march of gentrification, corporatization, and growing inequality (as with the Green Bans, Parcel C, and the struggle against Walmart).

Business as usual also means the gradual accumulation of a threat that could eventually become catastrophic, as with climate change or nuclear war.

Direct actions such as sit-ins, strikes, and blockades provide powerful tools to disrupt or stop business as usual.

Disrupting business as usual has many benefits. One is that it creates a strategic dilemma that those in power feel pressure to resolve. Recall how the Revolution of the Heart was able to get a quick response in part because city hall didn’t know how to manage them or control such a bold action.

Direct action like the rail blockades of Shut Down Canada can create a strong economic cost that corporations and governments can’t tolerate. The same was the case for the Brent Spar struggle, which combined both an occupation and boycotts to produce a high economic and political cost for those in power.

The bureaucratic management of dissent—through hearings or courts—is meant to put activists on a field of struggle that is rigged in favor of big corporations and colonial governments. It is meant to put us on a plane of conflict where we are at a disadvantage.

The benefits of direct action—and taking the initiative—are that we get to decide where conflict happens. We leverage the power of asymmetry. We choose a place where those in power are weak and we are strong. We get more control of the narrative.

7.  A COMMON TACTIC AND COLLECTIVE ACTION

Movements that win use collective action of some kind. Individual actions alone—even good actions like buying fair trade coffee or flying less—cannot overturn entrenched systems of power. The boycotts against Shell, marches of the nuclear-disarmament movement, and the construction bans in Sydney were all examples of common tactics that brought together people from many backgrounds to pursue a common cause.

But that’s not the only way to do things. Indeed, collective action can be even more powerful when it involves many kinds of action at once.

8. DIVERSITY OF TACTICS AND RADICAL FLANKING

The most powerful movements use many tactics simultaneously—from petitions to legal challenges to direct action. This maximizes the impact by encouraging many different people to participate in the way that best suits them, using their particular gifts and skills at a risk level they feel comfortable with.

Sometimes, groups diversify their tactics because of the failure or shortcomings of a broader movement, as with the Committee of 100 and the Spies for Peace (and, to some extent, Energy East). Ideally, a strategy of diverse tactics is intentional, as with the 504 disability sit-ins.

Smart use of diverse tactics can also strengthen a movement through radical flanking, as we saw in the struggles against the Richmond Dump and the nuclear waste dump in South Australia.

Radical flanking at work during Revolution of the Heart’s effort to remove the statue of John A Macdonald. Kingston officials had ignored requests to take down the offensive statue for years. However, the escalation of direct action meant that a negotiated removal of the statue was suddenly the most appealing option, especially after the toppling and destruction of colonial statues in other cities.

9. COALITIONS ACROSS DIFFERENCE

To generate the political strength needed to create substantive change, movements that win create powerful coalitions across differences.

The Green Bans were not only a struggle to preserve green space but also for working-class neighborhoods and the rights of women, Indigenous People, and queer people.

Opponents of Doug Ford’s gas plants were able to rally students and seniors, Indigenous people and farmers, climate justice advocates and public health experts. The struggle to salvage Parcel C for Chinatown likewise rallied not only the community but lawyers, healthcare advocates, and Quakers.

This ability to organize across differences is critical. Bridge-builders who convene supporters from diverse communities can, of course, increase the number of people and resources involved. However, they also bring together new perspectives that boost a movement’s strategic capacity.

The organizers of the 504 disability sit-ins would not have succeeded without the solidarity they cultivated to bring together disability rights activists along with Black Panthers, unionists, queer organizers, and the United Farm Workers.

Such alliances can open new possibilities for transformative action and dramatically increase a campaign’s overall capacity. Indeed, along with a diversity of tactics, cooperation between allied groups is essential to building healthy and strong ecologies of struggle.

10. MOVEMENT CAPACITY

Effective organizers must consider the specific capacities needed to reach their goals. Capacities like recruitment, communications, security, and logistics.

My book Full Spectrum Resistance was structured with a chapter for each of these important capacities, asking: “How do you recruit the people you need and keep them? How do you organize into groups that can cooperate and get things done? How do you moderate internal conflict? How do you reach out to new allies and supporters? How do you protect yourselves and your comrades from repression? How do you gather the intelligence you need to choose good targets? How do you work out the strategy and tactics you need to mobilize force in a rapidly changing political conflict? And how have movements of the past done these things?”

All movements need strategy and tactics. Movements must reach large numbers of people—like campaigns for Nuclear Disarmament—and more strongly develop their communications capacity. Groups that take on bigger risks—like the Spies for Peace or the Green Ban organizers—must build their skills in security and counterintelligence. And organizations that want to organize difficult or prolonged occupations—like those of the Brent Spar or the Wyhl Reactor Site—must master logistics if they want to win.

It’s also important to look at building not just single campaigns, but enduring and intersectional movements. When we build successful movements, we can make transformative changes on a much larger and more lasting scale than any one campaign.

11. PARTICIPATORY DECISION-MAKING AND DEMOCRACY

Each victory described in this book involved democratic decision-making in how activists organized themselves and wanted society to function.

When I spoke to Hereditary Chief Na’Moks of the Wet’suwet’en, I asked him what he ultimately wanted to attain. “Democracy,” he told me.

Remember the story of the Green Bans? When the suburban women in Hunter’s Hill wanted help from the builder’s union, the union agreed to help on the condition that the residents vote in favor of a green ban.

The campaign around Parcel C converged on a people’s referendum and was meant to capture the collective wishes of Boston Chinatown.

The petition gathered by opponents to the Richmond Dump—boasting signatures from 90 percent of residents—showed the democratic will of the community.

Operating in a democratic and participatory way is a means of building strong movements and strategic capacity.

In contrast, some movements mentioned suffered greatly from a lack of democracy. The early anti-nuclear movement in the UK was stymied in part by the paternalistic approach of Canon Collins. The potential of the Green Bans was ultimately thwarted by the hierarchy of Gallagher and the national union.

12. PERSISTENCE AND ENDURANCE

Movements that win are movements that last. In his book The Strategy of Social Protest, William Gamson argues that social movements that can last until a broad societal crisis are likely to achieve their goals. Movements need persistence for many reasons. One is that building relationships—building movements—takes a lot of time. This book includes several examples of movements that won quickly. Revolution of the Heart reached its goal after only ten days of action, while some of our municipal campaigns against Ford’s gas plants lasted less than a week.

But those efforts succeeded because they were the manifestation of many years of groundwork and relied on relationships and networks that had already been cultivated.

Building movements and making change isn’t easy. There are times, though, when it’s easier. A movement that can endure will eventually find opportunities that it can be ready to seize.

If the movement organizers are strategic, they’ll have used that time to strengthen relationships, gather resources, and develop shared skills.

In other cases, movements don’t need to wait for an opportunity so much as they need to outlast their opponent.

Many of the places protected by the Green Bans still exist today, in part because organizers were able to endure until the economic circumstances driving development had changed.

Even the win against Energy East resulted from delaying the process until that pipeline was no longer economically feasible.

I want to make an important caveat: Persistence is essential, but it doesn’t win campaigns. If doing the same thing for six months doesn’t lead to progress, doing the same thing over and over for six years is unlikely to be an improvement.

Endurance is valuable because of what we do with our time: grow our numbers, make alliances, learn new skills, try new tactics.

If we want to last in the long haul, however, we also need to think about how to retain people. What makes movement workers want to stick around? What makes them feel invested and have a stake in decision-making? How do we build a track record of wins that encourages people?

This quality, persistence, is in some way the result of all the other qualities combined. The ability to endure isn’t just a matter of willpower—it’s also a result of making many good strategic decisions along the way.

THE END OF THE BEGINNING

A nice, tidy novel can end in a nice, tidy way—resolve the major conflict, wrap up loose threads, and send the satisfied reader on their way. This is not that kind of book. We do not live in a novel. The real world is messy, and there is much work to be done. There are many reasons movement workers are unsatisfied.

So, let me conclude this book with a challenge: Let this not be the end. Help the stories, patterns, and victories in this book live beyond these pages.

If you haven’t already, gather your friends and comrades to discuss and learn from the victories that inspire you. Don’t just learn from the history of whatever movements you work in—learn from other struggles to cross-pollinate and invigorate your work.

Together, we can forge more intersectional and effective movements, building a better, more just, and more liveable future for all.

---

ARIC MCBAY is an organizer, a farmer, and author of five books. He writes and speaks about effective social movements, and has organized campaigns around prison justice, Indigenous solidarity, pipelines, unionization, and other causes. You can find his work at www.aricmcbay.org. 

Today is the 82nd birthday of Dr. Angela Y. Davis.

To celebrate her life and work, we’re proud to share an excerpt from our 2005 pamphlet Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture, an extended set of interviews with Dr. Davis, conducted by the late philosophy professor and noted scholar Dr. Eduardo Mendieta.

~

Angela Davis, you are probably one of the top five most important Black women in American history. In 1974, your book Angela Davis: An Autobiography was published by Random House. Since then it has become a classic of African-American letters that is central to the traditions of Black women writers and Black political thinkers. In many ways your autobiography also harkens back to the tradition of Black slave narratives. How do you see this work now with thirty years hindsight?

Well, thanks for reminding me that this is the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of my autobiography. At the time I wrote the book I did not see myself as a conventional autobiographical subject and thus did not locate my writing within any of the traditions you evoke. As a matter of fact, I was initially reluctant to write an autobiography. First of all, I was too young. Second, I did not think that my own individual accomplishments merited autobiographical treatment. Third, I was certainly aware that the celebrity—or notoriety—I had achieved had very little to do with me as an individual. It was based on the mobilization of the State and its efforts to capture me, including the fact that I was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. But also, and perhaps most importantly, I knew that my potential as an autobiographical subject was created by the massive global movement that successfully achieved my freedom. So the question was how to write an autobiography that would be attentive to this community of collective struggle. I decided then that I did not want to write a conventional autobiography in which the heroic subject offers lessons to readers. I decided that I would write a political autobiography exploring the way in which I had been shaped by movements and campaigns in communities of struggle. In this sense, you can certainly say that I wrote myself into the tradition of Black slave narratives.

In what way do you think that the Black political biography plays a role within this tradition of American letters?

Well of course the canon of American letters has been contested previously, and if one considers the autobiography of Malcolm X as an example, which, along with literature by such writers as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison, that has clearly made its way into the canon, one can ask whether the inclusion of oppositional writing has really made a difference. Has the canon itself has been substantively transformed? It seems to me that struggles to contest bodies of literature are similar to the struggles for social change and social transformation. What we manage to do each time we win a victory is not so much to secure change once and for all, but rather to create new terrains for struggle.

Since we are talking about canons, it seems to me that your work fits within another tradition—the philosophical canon. If we think of the work of Boethius, of Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Antonio Gramsci, Primo Levi . . . these are philosophical figures who have reflected upon their prison experiences. Do you see your work contributing to this philosophical tradition of prison writing, and if so, how?

Well, often times prison writing is described as that which is produced in prison or by prisoners, and certainly Gramsci’s prison notebooks provide the most interesting example. It is significant that Gramsci’s prison letters have not received the consideration they deserve. It would be interesting to read Gramsci’s letters alongside those of George Jackson. These are two examples of prison intellectuals who devoted some of their energies to the process of engaging critically with the implications of imprisonment—at a more concrete philosophical level. Personally, I found it rather difficult to think critically about the prison while I was a prisoner. So I suppose I follow in the tradition of some of the thinkers you mention. However, I did publish a piece while I was in jail that could be considered a more indirect examination of issues related to imprisonment. I wrote an article entitled “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,”10 which helped me formulate some of the questions that I would later take up in my efforts to theorize the relationship between the institution of the prison and that of slavery. I produced another piece—a paper I wrote for the conference for the Society for the Study of Dialectical Materialism, associated with the American Philosophical Association—entitled “Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation.” Both pieces were published in The Angela Y. Davis Reader in 1998. If They Come in the Morning, the book on political prisoners I wrote and edited with Bettina Aptheker, is another example of my prison writing. Finally, I also wrote an extended study of fascism which was never published. But it was only after I was released that I felt I had sufficient critical distance to think more deeply about the institution of the prison, drawing from and extending the work of the prison intellectual George Jackson.

You were trained as a philosopher, yet you teach in a program called the History of Consciousness at the University of California. Do you think that philosophy can play a role in political culture in the United States? And, has philosophy influenced your work on aesthetics, jazz, and in particular, the way in which you analyze the situation of Black women?

Absolutely, and I think that I draw from my background in philosophy in that I try to ask questions about contemporary and historical realities that tend to be otherwise foreclosed. Philosophy provides a vantage point from which to ask questions that cannot be posed within social scientific discourse that presumes to furnish overarching frameworks for understanding of our social world. I have earned a great deal from Herbert Marcuse about the relationship between philosophy and ideology critique. I draw particular inspiration from his work Counterrevolution and Revolt that attempts to directly theorize political developments of the late 1960s. But at the same time the framework is philosophical. How do we imagine a better world and raise the questions that permit us to see beyond the given?

There are beautiful pages in your autobiography about your relationship with Herbert Marcuse, who was your teacher and mentor, and part of the Frankfurt School. You spent some years in Frankfurt in the late 1960s. You also studied with Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and Max Horkheimer. Do you see yourself as a critical theorist in this Frankfurt School sense?

Well, I’ve certainly been inspired by critical theory, which privileges the role of philosophical reflection while simultaneously recognizing that philosophy cannot always by itself generate the answers to the questions it poses. When philosophical inquiry enters into conversation with other disciplines and methods, we are able to produce much more fruitful results. Marcuse crossed the disciplinary borders that separate philosophy, sociology, and literature. Adorno brought music and philosophy into the conversation. These were some of the first serious efforts to legitimate interdisciplinary inquiry.

You ran twice as the vice-presidential candidate of the Communist Party in the United States before leaving the party in the 1990s. After the fall of the Berlin wall and the demise of the Soviet Union, what role, if any, can communism play today?

Although I am no longer a member of the Communist Party, I still consider myself a communist. If I did not believe in the possibility of eventually defeating capitalism and in a socialist future, I would have no inspiration to continue with my political work. As triumphant as capitalism is assumed to be in the aftermath of the collapse of the socialist community of nations, it also continually reveals its inability to grow and develop without expanding and deepening human exploitation. There must be an alternative to capitalism. Today, the tendency to assume that the only version of democracy available to us is capitalist democracy poses a challenge. We must be able to disentangle our notions of capitalism and democracy so to pursue truly egalitarian models of democracy. Communism—or socialism—can still help us to generate new versions of democracy.

Do you think that the anti-globalization movement—the anti-WTO movement—can take up the role that Karl Marx assigned to the proletariat? In other words, can we say, “anti-globalists of the world unite”?

Well, this transition is a little too easy. But this is not to dismiss the importance of creating global solidarities, cross-racial solidarities attentive to struggles against economic exploitation, racism, patriarchy, and homophobia. And there is a link, it seems to me, between the internationalism of Karl Marx’s era and the new globalisms we are seeking to build today. Of course, the global economy is far more complicated than Marx could ever imagine. But at the same time his analyses have important contemporary resonances. The entire trajectory of Capital is initiated by an examination of the commodity, that seemingly simple unit of the capitalist political economy. As it turns out, of course, the commodity is a mysterious thing. And perhaps even more mysterious today than during Marx’s times. The commodity has penetrated every aspect of people’s lives all over the world in ways that have no historical precedent. The commodity—and capitalism in general—has insinuated itself into structures of feeling, into the most intimate spaces of people’s lives. At the same time human beings are more connected than ever before and in ways we rarely acknowledge. I am thinking of a song performed by Sweet Honey and the Rock about the global assembly line, which links us in ways contingent on exploitative practices of production and consumption. In the Global North, we purchase the pain and exploitation of girls in the Global South, which we wear everyday on our bodies.

The sweatshops of the world.

The global sweatshops. And the challenge is, as Marx argued long ago, to uncover the social relations that are both embodied and concealed by these commodities.

There is a great tradition of African-American political thought that has been deeply influenced by Marxism and communism. But one way that we sometimes talk about Black political thought is in terms of two figures in tension. For example, there are the comparisons made by John Brown versus Frederick Douglass; Booker T. Washington versus W. E. B. Du Bois; Malcom X versus Martin Luther King. And in this we are able to discuss the tensions between Black nationalism and assimilation or integration. How do you see yourself in relationship to the tension between nationalism and integration?

Well, of course it is possible to think about Black history as it has been shaped by these debates in various eras. And we shouldn’t forget the debate between W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. But I actually am interested in that which is foreclosed by the conceptualization of the major issues of Black history in terms of these debates between Black men. And I say men because the women always tend to be excluded. Where, for example, do Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells stand in these debates? But I am interested precisely in what gets foreclosed by this tension between nationalism and integration. And perhaps not primarily because the actors are male, but because questions regarding gender and sexuality are foreclosed.

So you see your work as contesting this way of viewing the Black tradition of political thought . . .

Yes.

. . . that way of making sense of integration.

Exactly.

So you wanted to displace the focus and say there’s another way in which Black political thought can proceed.

Absolutely, and I think that the assumption today that Black political thought must either advocate nationalism or must disavow Black formations and Black culture is very misleading.

Yes, but one of the things that is attributed to globalization is the end of nationalisms. Do you think that there is a role for Black nationalism in the United States? Has it become entirely obsolete, an anachronism?

Well, in one sense it has become obsolete, but in another sense one can argue that the nationalisms that have helped to shape Black consciousness will endure. First of all, I should say that I don’t think that nationalism is a homogeneous concept. There are many versions of nationalism. I’ve always preferred to identify with the pan-Africanism of W. E. B. Du Bois who argued that Black people in the West do have a special responsibility to Africa, Latina America, and Asia—not by virtue of a biological connection or a racial link, but by virtue of a political identification that is forged in struggle. We should be attentive to Africa not simply because this continent is populated by Black people, not only because we trace our origins to Africa, but primarily because Africa has been a major target of colonialism and imperialism. What I also like about Du Bois’s pan-Africanism is that it insists on Afro-Asian solidarities. This is an important feature that has been concealed in conventional narratives of pan-Africanism. Such an approach is not racially defined, but rather discovers its political identity in its struggles against racism.

In addition to the recent thirtieth anniversary of your autobiography, we are also celebrating fifty-plus years of Brown v. Board of Education. Do you think that the forces of Black integration, the forces of civil rights, have been betrayed and somehow rolled-back by the past two decades of Rehnquist serving as the Reagan-appointed chief justice?

The promise of those struggles has been betrayed. But I don’t think it is helpful to assume that an agenda that gets established at one point in history will forever claim success on the basis of its initial victories. It is misleading to assume that this success will be enduring, that it will survive all of the changes and mutations of the future. The civil rights movement managed to bring about enormous political shifts, which opened doors to people previously excluded from government, corporations, education, housing, etc. However, an exclusively civil rights approach—as even Dr. King recognized before he died—cannot by itself eliminate structural racism. What the civil rights movement did, it seems to me, was to create a new terrain for asking new questions and moving in new directions. The assumption that the placement of Black people like Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice in the heart of government would mean progress for the entire community was clearly fallacious. In this, there were no guarantees, to borrow from Stuart Hall. The civil rights movement demanded access, and access has been granted to some. The challenge of the twenty-first century is not to demand equal opportunity to participate in the machinery of oppression. Rather, it is to identify and dismantle those structures in which racism continues to be embedded. This is the only way the promise of freedom can be extended to masses of people.

But don’t you worry about the conservative court? I mean if we think about the role of the Warren Court in advancing the racial justice agenda . . .

Oh, absolutely!

The challenge of the twenty-first century is not to demand equal opportunity to participate in the machinery of oppression. Rather, it is to identify and dismantle those structures in which racism continues to be embedded. This is the only way the promise of freedom can be extended to masses of people.

The justices in today’s Supreme Court are very outspoken about their conservatism. What does this mean for racial justice in the future?

Of course I’m worried about that. The only point I’m attempting to make is that past struggles cannot correct current injustices and that people who tend to sit back and bemoan the betrayal of the civil rights movement are not prepared to imagine what might be necessary at this moment to challenge the conservatism of the Supreme Court. It’s very difficult to recognize contemporary racisms, especially when they are not linked to racist laws and attitudes and when they differently affect individuals who claim membership in racialized communities. I’m suggesting that we need a new age—with a new agenda— that directly addresses the structural racism that determines who goes to prison and who does not, who attends university and who does not, who has health insurance and who does not. The old agenda facilitates assaults on affirmative action, as Ward Connerly pointed out in his campaign for Proposition 209 in California. From his vantage point, what is most important today is the protection of the civil rights of white men.

Right. But very smart strategies are being used, ones that displace attention from issues of racial justice by speaking in terms of multiculturalism. An example is last year’s court decision in Michigan—Grutter v. Bollinger—that says that affirmative action must be administered for the sake of preserving multiculturalism. What is the difference between multiculturalism and racial justice?

There’s a huge difference. Diversity is one of those words in the contemporary lexicon that presumes to be synonymous with antiracism. Multiculturalism is a category that can admit both progressive and deeply conservative interpretations. There’s corporate multiculturalism because corporations have discovered that it is more profitable to create a diverse work place.

Benetton multiculturalism.

Yes. They have discovered that Blacks and Latinos and Asians are willing to work as hard, or even harder, than their white counterparts. But this means that we should embrace a strong politically inflected multiculturalism, which emphasizes cross-racial community and continued struggles for equality and justice. That is to say cross-racial community not for the purpose of creating a beautiful “bouquet of flowers” or an enticing “bowl of salad”—which are some of the metaphorical representations of multiculturalism—but as a way of challenging structural inequalities and fighting for justice. This version of multiculturalism has radical potential.

And along with the question of multiculturalism and racial justice, there’s another question that tremendously worries me personally, existentially. That is, we keep talking about the “browning” of the United States; that by the year 2050 a quarter of the American population will be of Latino descent. Do you think that this browning of America will entail an eclipse of the quest for racial justice?

Why should it?

Conservatives claim that questions of racial justice are essentially Black questions . . . and that multiculturalism and racial integration of Latinos are separate from racial justice work, affirmative action or reparations.

Well, you see, that’s the problem, and it seems to me that contemporary ideologies encourage this assumption that racial competition and conflict are the only possible relationships across communities of people of color. It is as if these communities are always separate and never intersect. But, if one looks at the labor movement, for example, there are numerous historical examples of Black-Latino solidarity and alliances. Regardless of which community might be numerically larger, without such solidarities and alliances, there can be no hope for an anti-racist future. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that this is a new era. Conditions of postcoloniality here in the United States and throughout the world convey the message that the “West” has been forever changed. Europe is not what it used to be. It is no longer defined by its whiteness. The same thing, of course, is true in the U.S. among Black people who are used to being the “superior minority.” We must let go of this claim. There is this prevalent idea that because Black people established the historical anti-racist agenda for the United States of Amer- ica, they will always remain its most passionate advocates. But Black people as a collective cannot live on the laurels of its historical past. We have recently received harsh lessons about conservative possibilities in Black communities. “Black” can not simply be considered an uncontestable synonym of progressive politics. The work of progressive activists is to build opposition to conservatism—regardless of the racial background of its proponents. That Black and Latino communities cannot find common cause is one example of this conservatism. Our job today is to promote cross-racial communities of struggle that arise out of common—and hopefully radical—political aspirations.

---

Over the last fifty-odd years, ANGELA YVONNE DAVIS has been active in numerous organizations challenging prison-related repression. Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1944, Davis studied at Brandeis University, the Sorbonne, and with Herbert Marcuse at the Goethe Institute. Her advocacy on behalf of political prisoners, and her alleged connection to the Marin County courthouse incident, led to three capital charges, sixteen months in jail awaiting trial, and a highly publicized acquittal in 1972. In 1998, Davis was one of the twenty-five organizers of the historic Berkeley, California conference “Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex.” She is the author of many books, including Are Prisons Obsolete?, Abolition Democracy, and The Meaning of Freedom.

EDUARDO MENDIETA (1963-2025) was a Colombian and American philosopher and academic. Until his death in December 2025, he was Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University, and acting director of the Rock Ethics Institute. His publications included The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy: Karl-Otto Apel's Semiotics and Discourse Ethics (2002), Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory (2007), and The Philosophical Animal: On Zoopoetics and Interspecies Cosmopolitanism (2024).

~

Revelations about U.S. policies and practices of torture and abuse have captured headlines ever since the breaking of the Abu Ghraib prison story in April 2004. Since then, a debate has raged regarding what is and what is not acceptable behavior for the world's leading democracy. It is within this context that Angela Davis, one of America's most remarkable political figures, gave a series of interviews to discuss resistance and law, institutional sexual coercion, politics and prison. Davis talks about her own incarceration, as well as her experiences as "enemy of the state," and about having been put on the FBI's "most wanted list." She talks about the crucial role that international activism played in her case and the case of many other political prisoners.

Throughout these interviews, Davis returns to her critique of a democracy that has been compromised by its racist origins and institutions. Discussing the most recent disclosures about the disavowed "chain of command," and the formal reports by the Red Cross and Human Rights Watch denouncing U.S. violation of human rights and the laws of war in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, Davis focuses on the underpinnings of prison regimes in the United States.

With her characteristic brilliance, grace and radical audacity, Angela Y. Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was sheerest illusion. Similarly, the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.

In Are Prisons Obsolete?, Professor Davis seeks to illustrate that the time for the prison is approaching an end. She argues forthrightly for "decarceration," and argues for the transformation of the society as a whole.

A Free E-book Against Police Repression

"The ideas that can and will sustain our movement for total freedom and dignity of the people cannot be imprisoned, for they are to be found in the people, all the people, wherever they are. As long as the people live by the ideas of freedom and dignity, there will be no prison that can hold our movement down.” ―Huey P. Newton

Defund the Police. Abolish Prisons. Refuse State Repression.

Contents:
- “Fighting to Win” from Full Spectrum Resistance: Building Movements and Fighting to Win by Aric McBay (2019)
- “The Problem is Civil Obedience” from The Zinn Reader: Writings on Disobedience and Democracy, Updated and Expanded 2nd Edition by Howard Zinn (2009)
- “Slavery, Civil Rights, and Abolitionist Perspectives Toward Prison” from Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis (2005)
- “Women in Prison: How We Are” by Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard), 1978, from Voices of a People’s History of the United States, 10th Anniversary Edition, edited by Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove (2014)
- “We Remember the Days of Glory but Tend to Forget They Were Fourteen-Hour Days” from ’68: The Mexican Autumn of the Tlatelolco Massacre by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (2019)
- “Even Liars Know the Truth” from ’68: The Mexican Autumn of the Tlatelolco Massacre by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (2019)
- “Prison, Where Is Thy Victory?: January 3, 1970” by Huey P. Newton (1969), from The New Huey P. Newton Reader, edited by David Hilliard and Donald Weise (2020)”

We’re thrilled to share that Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, translated from French by Natasha Lehrer, was chosen as a finalist for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle’s Gregg Barrios Award for Books in Translation!

Neige Sinno has created a powerful literary form with Sad Tiger, a book that took France by storm and has become an international phenomenon.

“Reading Sad Tiger is like descending into an abyss with your eyes open. It forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult, for years. Everyone should read it. Especially teenagers.” —Annie Ernaux

Sad Tiger is built on the facts of a series of devastating events. Neige Sinno was 7 years old when her stepfather started sexually abusing her and at 14 or 15 the abuse stopped. At 19, she decided to break the silence that is so common in all cultures around sexual violence. This led to a public trial and prison for her stepfather and Sinno started a new life in Mexico.

Through the construction of a fragmented narrative, woven together with documents and thoughts like a peculiar personal investigation, Sinno explores the different facets of memory—her own, her mother’s, as well as her abusive stepfather’s; and of abuse itself in all its monstrosity and banality. Her account is woven together with a close reading of literary works by Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, and Virginie Despentes among others.

Sad Tiger—the title inspired by William Blake’s poem “The Tyger”—is a literary exploration into how to speak about the unspeakable. In this extraordinary book there is an abiding concern: how to protect others from what the author herself endured? In the midst of so much darkness, an answer reads crystal clear: by speaking up and asking questions. A striking, shocking, and necessary masterpiece.

PRAISE FOR SAD TIGER

"I need everyone to stop what they're doing and read this book; I started it last night and finished it this morning, breaking only to sleep." —Catherine Lacey

"[A] richly literary and starkly shattering account of childhood sexual abuse. . . [T]he author of ‘Sad Tiger’ is aiming for her own quiet revolution.” —Leslie Camhi, The New Yorker

“‘You have looked evil in the eye,’ Sinno writes in “Sad Tiger,” her achingly vivid, cerebral memoir of her abuse and its long aftermath, ‘and now no one can look at you.’ First published in France in 2023, where it won multiple awards including the Le Monde Literary Prize, the Prix Femina and the Goncourt des Lycéens, “Sad Tiger” eschews the 10-foot pole for the scalpel, approaching the subjects of pedophilia and incest with the determined curiosity of a forensic pathologist. Sinno dissects not only her own memories and their impact on the ensuing decades of her life but also the perspective of her abuser. . . . Close-reading her own shards of memory alongside these texts, Sinno contends with both the power and the inevitable impotence of writing, particularly about abuse.” —Lauren Christensen, The New York Times Book Review

“The U.S. debut from French writer Sinno blends autobiography and literary criticism for a staggering portrait of her rapist. . . . Sinno’s prose is equal parts raw and lucid, and it’s enriched by fascinating readings of the sexual abuse depicted in Lolita and other works of literature.This is brilliant.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A work of immolation and rebirth, of winking and wincing, Neige Sinno's mesmerizing interdisciplinary memoir, in Natasha Lehrer's excellent translation, illuminates the darkness and it burns the house down.” —Chad Felix, Center for the Art of Translation

“When it came out in France, Neige Sinno’s heart-stopping Sad Tiger, which pieces together in fragments the lifelong impact of the sexual abuse of a girl in the French Alps by her mountain guide stepfather, blew the literary world apart. Its experimental form of creative nonfiction – a memoir that ditches linear narrative, yet races along like a thriller – was hailed as groundbreaking, the book an instant classic.” —Angelique Chrisafis, The Guardian

“[An] extraordinary personal and literary examination of child sexual abuse and its aftermath. . . . What makes Sinno’s deeply personal book exceptional is that so many impersonal questions crop up again and again, ones that cannot be answered but all the same must be asked.” —Elias Altman, Bookforum

“In spite of her reservations about making art out of trauma, Sinno braids together personal narrative with cultural and literary criticism, analyzing the portrayal of victims and perpetrators across books and film. She toys with the nuances of genre and various storytelling forms, invoking fairy tales, poetry, and legal documents. . . . Sinno has compiled a precise and sweeping depiction of the harm wrought by childhood sexual abuse. . . . Sinno refuses to impose an artificial happy ending and invites the reader into the ambiguity of living with trauma. Sad Tiger extends to its reader the opportunity to witness, and to wrestle.” —McKenzie Watson-Fore, Full Stop

"To celebrate the launch of Anthropause: The Beauty of Degrowth, a new book by environmentalist and former Land Institute fellow Stan Cox, we’ve unlocked a portion of the introductory chapter. In the book, Cox makes the case for embracing degrowth, posing it not only as a means for preventing climate collapse but also for our collective emancipation from other systemic ills. He writes that “we can free ourselves from the growth economy and its many harmful impacts by seeing true wealth as the collective pursuit of meaning, social justice, and beauty while living within ecological limits.” As you read these passages, we invite you to imagine what a degrowth future might look like for you and your community." —Irina Costache, assistant publicist

A rallying cry to save the Earth with an “anthropause”—a term that can apply to any broad rollback of economic activity that gives nature room to recover and flourish.

“An iconoclast of the best kind, Stan Cox has an all-too-rare commitment to following arguments wherever they lead, however politically dangerous that turns out to be.” —Naomi Klein

In Anthropause, Stan Cox writes that by embracing degrowth, we are not turning our backs on progress. Instead, we are redefining it. We can produce enough goods to satisfy everyone’s needs, Cox argues, while liberating ourselves from ecocidal economies and the injustices they impose. This book lays out a clear vision of what we will gain and how as we embrace this revolutionary transition.

---

In spring 2020, a large share of the world’s people found themselves confined at home, either voluntarily or in response to lockdown orders. The goal, of course, was to slow transmission of the coronavirus causing Covid-19, but there were other consequences, and some of them turned out to be pleasant surprises.

After more than a century of exponential increase, global carbon emissions plunged 8.8 percent worldwide. Reductions were greatest in some of the highest-emitting regions: 13 percent in the United States and Europe, 12 percent in Brazil, and more than 15 percent in India. Walking and cycling increased dramatically. Air and noise pollution levels plummeted in large cities. Thanks to reductions in industrial activity and tourism, streams, rivers, and lakes became cleaner.

Even more striking was how animal life quickly filled spaces that humans had suddenly deserted. Enchanting photos flooded in from around the world. A herd of wild sheep and goats grazed alongside the expressway leading into Istanbul’s international airport. Mountain goats window-shopped on a main street in Wales; a deer strode through a striped crosswalk, Abbey Road–style, in Nara, Japan. Fallow deer grazed on lawns in East London. A herd of water buffalo took command of a major highway in New Delhi. A sea lion lounged on a Buenos Aires sidewalk, while a puma prowled through downtown Santiago, Chile. Raccoons romped in the surf at a public beach in Panama. Scientists who studied and documented this flourishing of nature in real time began referring to the phenomenon as an “anthropause.”

As animals roamed freely, the pandemic took a devastating toll on human life. Further hardship resulted from the very measures that were necessary to limit the number of people infected or killed. Alongside the misery, however, came some positive changes in people’s lives. A survey of more than three thousand adults under lockdown in Scotland found that many were enjoying more quality time and improved relationships with partners, family, and friends. Most had been exercising more than usual and paying better attention to their health. A whopping 83 percent had become “more appreciative of things usually taken for granted.”

In August 2020, with the second surge of the coronavirus underway, the Pew Research Center asked more than nine thousand US adults about their pandemic experience so far. As one would expect, a solid majority of the comments were negative, with 89 percent of those surveyed mentioning at least one unwelcome change in their lives. But 73 percent mentioned at least one unexpected positive change. Pew published verbatim quotes from some of the people they interviewed. The variety of responses is striking; furthermore, the lion’s share of people’s quotes, both negative and positive, referred not to the experience of the disease itself but to the measures they took to protect themselves from it.

To me, the positive side effects of efforts to suppress transmission of the coronavirus clearly suggest that if humanity adopts radical measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to near zero on an expedited schedule, many other problems might be ameliorated. To be sure, Covid-19 and climate change are very different kinds of problems. The former struck suddenly and hard, while the latter has unfolded slowly over decades, with dramatic impacts becoming clearly apparent only in recent years. Nevertheless, because affluent countries have procrastinated for three-plus decades and carbon has continued accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere, the need for forceful climate action is as immediate and urgent as was the need to suppress coronavirus transmission in spring 2020. The measures required to rein in greenhouse gas emissions are of much greater depth and breadth than those necessitated by the pandemic and will have an even broader range of consequences. But I anticipate that among those repercussions, we’ll find plenty of beautiful surprises.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UPSHOT

Over the past two centuries, industrial and postindustrial enterprises have been yanking societies back and forth between an improved and a degraded quality of life. Industry has developed preventatives and cures that increase lifespans but have also filled our world with toxic pollution, overmedication, and lethal weaponry, all of which shorten people’s lives. Industry has produced enough foodstuff per capita to keep everyone well fed—in theory—but billions suffer routine hunger while billions of others are oversupplied with unhealthful food. Corporations have made it possible—for privileged people at least—to move from place to place faster than any other organism on earth, but at a catastrophic cost to the environment and social justice. Big corporations have made intercontinental travel possible for hundreds of millions while providing the aircraft, ships, armored vehicles, missiles, and bombs that keep armed conflict raging somewhere on the globe every day of the year. They’ve developed systems that give us access to information from across the world in billionsfold greater quantities than before. Still, those systems have proven far more efficient in spreading disinformation, propaganda, and hate than in bringing us constructively together. All this economic production—the harmful, every bit as much as the useful—is aimed at keeping alive the impossible dream of exponential economic growth without end.

If we move boldly to prevent ecological collapse by deeply altering our values and curbing our material production and consumption, we will reap a host of other societal, ecological, and personal benefits that will enrich us with a more beautiful and meaningful life. In the process, I’ll show, we can free ourselves from a multitude of harms that plague us in today’s growth-at-any-cost society.

The public health policies of 2020 certainly had some beneficial side effects. Anthropologists, geographers, and other academics seemed especially inspired by an apparent resurgence of interest in humanity’s relationship with nature. A decades-long trend in which Americans had been spending more and more time indoors was reversed almost overnight. People took to gardening, hiking, bird-watching, cooking out, and playing backyard games. Whereas many national and state parks closed their gates, many urban parks and other communal green spaces stayed open, and they were in high demand.

In a 2020 study, 83 percent of US and UK survey subjects reported feeling an enhanced love of life and living things, an emotion that the surveyors, citing Edward O. Wilson, labeled biophilia, “the innate emotional affiliation that humans have with non-human life forms.” Even those respondents with the lowest interest in nature before the pandemic experienced a greater sense of biophilia during it.

Noting that the Global North’s retreat from “relentless consumerism and ‘always on’ economies” during the pandemic had immediate ecological benefits, a group of scholars wondered if the deadly pandemic might prompt the world’s privileged to pull back from the long-term damage we are doing to the earth and be better off for it. Urging that we take from the anthropause a lesson that a “fundamental scaling back of high-impact activities” can accomplish the kind of ecological healing that technology cannot, they argue that the “anthropause metaphor also implies that there are physical and spiritual benefits to slowing down, treading lightly, and limiting unnecessary human interventions in natural processes. We note that these associations are consistent with non-Western and Indigenous conceptualizations of human-nature relationships as requiring care, balance and reciprocity.”

Other academic observers hoped we would be prompted to “replace a sense of owning with a sense of belonging.”

HAPPY SUBTRACTIONS

The dramatic ecological transformation of society that’s needed to keep the earth livable for future generations would also yield some immediate environmental benefits. The 2020 anthropause illustrates some of those advantages: thriving biodiversity, reduced pollution, and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Otherwise, of course, life in the early Covid-19 pandemic was a lousy example for the future. For many, it was a time of increased deprivation, hunger, alienation, and labor exploitation.

The most affluent 1 percent of households captured most of the global economic wealth generated between 2020 and 2022 as Covid-19 raged; indeed, their share was nearly twice as large as the total that trickled down to the other 99 percent. The 1 percent also produced disproportionately large quantities of greenhouse gas emissions. But they’re only 1 percent. It’s the wealthiest 25 percent or so who account for the bulk of global emissions. That includes most but not all of us in rich countries. Economically stressed and racialized communities within the United States are not only responsible for less environmental damage than others; they are also most harshly impacted — not only by that damage but also by the political, economic, and technological forces that cause the damage.

Our economy is among those that cause the greatest damage to the earth’s living systems. If it continues to expand, it is doomed to fail eventually, causing widespread collapse of the ecosystem and society as we know it. Degrowth, therefore, is rational and imperative. A frequent tendency among those imagining material restraint in affluent societies is to dwell on the need for sacrifice and focus on the desirable elements of our lives that we would be required to give up. Sacrifice is indeed necessary, but it’s not the subject of this book. I instead direct attention to some of the pernicious features of twenty-first-century American life that people at various points up and down the economic pyramid can gleefully leave behind as we and future generations reduce the quantities of energy and material resources flowing through society.

Most people who are already being clobbered by the impacts of ecological breakdown, from the small island nations of the South Pacific, to East Africa, to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, to the charred forest lands of North America, already know very well that the affluent world needs to rein itself in, and quickly. Nor do racialized US communities, targeted over and over with the worst environmental consequences of capitalism, need to be convinced that the privileged must be constrained. But among many people who have known at least adequate material, environmental, and economic security, there may be a widespread worry that if that system is replaced with one that is just and sustainable, much of their security will be lost. It will indeed be a very different country and world, but if we all are to have a livable future, we must step into it. For encouragement, we can look around us at the system we’re leaving behind, recognize the calamities it’s causing, and imagine a better life without it.

Degrowth will relegate to the past all sorts of everyday problems that impact us collectively as well as personally, problems that can’t be banished solely by individual behavioral changes (although they can help). That banishment requires collective mobilization, both locally and globally. And it must account for the well-established fact that the multiplying impacts of climate chaos, land abuse, and pollution are distributed lopsidedly among households and communities, both locally and globally. In line with degrowth principles, this mobilization must ensure that the loss of economic dominance and the burden of reining in the overproduction that’s causing ecological breakdown must fall on people, communities, and businesses that have privileged status economically, racially, ethnically, and geographically. In contrast, both the avoidance of environmental calamity and the subtraction from everyday life of the myriad ills spun off by the current growth economy will be enjoyed by all.

Either for fear of losing their audience or because of their own misplaced faith in technology, environmental activists and opinion leaders tend to steer clear of talk about limits, restraint, sacrifice, and the need to reject material overabundance. Could a focus on happy subtractions help make messaging about the need for ecological limitations more appealing? What if the movement adopts persuasive new talking points about the outrages, annoyances, and grave dangers that plague us and our communities right now but won’t be following us into a future that keeps within ecologically necessary limits?

The pursuit of degrowth will honor the living world around us with a new anthropause, one that eliminates our destructive interactions with the ecosphere while fostering healthy ones. In doing so, we can free our own species from the burdens that capitalism and economic growth impose on us every day.

---

STAN COX is the author of seven books, including Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (2010), The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can (2020), and The Path to a Livable Future: A New Politics to Fight Climate Change, Racism,and the Next Pandemic (2021). His writing about the economic and political roots of the global ecological crisis have been published by the New York Times, Washington Post, the Nation, the New Republic, Al Jazeera, Yes!, the Progressive, and local publications across 43 U.S. states. In 2012, The Atlantic named Cox their “Readers’ Choice Brave Thinker” for his critique of air conditioning. He lives in Dearborn, Michigan.

“How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is terrorism?” ―Howard Zinn

Truth — per Howard Zinn’s classic text Terrorism and War — is the first casualty of war. One can see evidence of this in every stage of the American imperial program, from the beginnings of empire to this past week's coup in Venezuela. The United States' relationship with and extortion of Latin America is a sprawling project, one that redraws boundaries and leaves casualties both material and ideological in its wake.

Below, we’ve compiled a timely selection of titles on U.S. imperialism in Latin America and beyond, ranging from classic texts by Che Geuvara, Fidel Castro, and José Martí, to Bush-era pamphlets on Colombia and Venezuela, to Clara Nieto's critical 20th-century history of U.S. aggression on Latin America, to works of anti-imperialist literature from Subcommandante Marcos, Jack D. Forbes, Angela Davis, Howard Zinn, and more.

In Masters of War, Clara Nieto adeptly presents the parallel histories of the countries of Latin America, histories which are intertwined, each reflecting the United States' "coherent policy of intervention set into motion by the Monroe Doctrine." As the value of this continued policy comes increasingly into question, Nieto argues for the need to evaluate the alarming precedent set in Latin America: the institution of client dictatorships, the roles played by the interests of U.S. corporations, the enormous tolls taken on civilian populations, and the irreversible disruption of regional stability.

Drawing from an impressive array of documents and sources as well as from her unique first-hand insights as a participant in crucial meetings and negotiations in the region from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, Nieto chronicles the Cuban Revolution, the CIA-sponsored coup against popularly elected President Allende in Chile, the U.S. invasions of Panama and Grenada, U.S. support for the cultivation and training of paramilitary death squads in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Colombia, as well as similarly severe but less well-known situations in other countries such as Uruguay, Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Honduras, and Guatemala.

Clara Nieto's Masters of War first appeared in Colombia, where it became a national best-seller. Available here for the first time in English, it has been revised and expanded to address new developments in U.S. and Latin American politics such as the conflicts in the Middle East, the U.S. rejection of the International Criminal Court, recent controversies over globalization, and the new governments of Chavez and Uribe in Venezuela and Colombia.

To celebrate the publication of Che and Medicine: On the Social Role of Doctors, the latest addition to our Che Guevara Library, we're excited to share an excerpt from the text: a speech given by Ernesto Che Guevara at the Cuban Ministry of Public Health on August 19, 1960. The text as a whole — a collection of his writings on medicine, initially concieved by the author as a complete book, but unfortunately not completed in his lifetime — argues for a collectivized health system and the integration of every health worker into the revolutionary movement. The following speech is an excellent distillation of the book's overall thesis, and offers a compelling vision of Che's larger attempt to reconcile the health needs of the individual (and the doctor as individual relating to an individual patient) versus the health needs of the society as a whole.

Che Guevara’s passion for public health contributed to his a legacy of social medicine in Latin America, and this book explores and reveals his thoughts on the role of a doctor.

Features an introduction by Aleida Guevara March, MD, a Cuban physician who is the eldest daughter of four children born to Ernesto "Che" Guevara and his second wife, Aleida March

Before Ernesto Che Guevara became “Che,” before he traveled Latin America, before he joined Fidel in Cuba, he was a medical school student. In 1956 he wrote to his mother before leaving to go and join the guerilla expedition to Cuba: “My path seems to be slowly but surely diverging from that of clinical medicine, but not so far that I have lost my nostalgia for hospitals. What I told you about the professorship in physiology was a lie, but not a big one. It was a lie because I never planned to accept it, but the offer was real and there was a strong possibility that they were going to give it to me, as I had an interview and everything. Anyway, that’s all history. Saint Carlos [Karl Marx] has made a new recruit.” 

He had started a book on the role of the doctor in Latin America, a work he fully intended to continue writing. It remained incomplete at the time of his death in Bolivia at the age of thirty-nine, just eleven years later.

ON REVOLUTIONARY MEDICINE

Speech given at the inauguration of a training course at the Ministry of Public Health on August 19, 1960. 

Compañeros:

Although this modest ceremony is only one among hundreds held as the of Cuban people celebrate day by day their freedom and the advance of all their revolutionary laws, their advance along the road to total independence, I nevertheless find it interesting. 

Almost everyone knows that I started my career as a doctor some years ago. And when I started off as a doctor, when I began to study medicine, the majority of the concepts I hold today as a revolutionary were absent from the storehouse of my ideals. 

I wanted to succeed, as everybody wants to succeed. I dreamed about being a famous researcher. I dreamed of working tirelessly to achieve something that could really be put at the disposal of humanity, but that, at the same time, would be a personal triumph. I was, as we all are, a child of my environment. 

Through particular circumstances, and perhaps also because of my character, after receiving my degree I set out to travel through Latin America and I got to know it intimately. Except for Haiti and the Dominican Republic, I have visited — in one way of another — all the other countries of Latin America. And in the way I traveled, first as a student and afterward as a doctor, I began to come into close contact with poverty, with hunger, with disease, with the inability to cure a child because of lack of resources, with the numbness that hunger and continued deprivation cause until a point is reached where a parent losing a child is an unimportant accident, as often happens among the embattled classes of our Latin American homeland. And I began to see that there was something that, at that time, seemed to me almost as important as being a famous researcher or making some substantial contribution to medical science, and that was helping those people.

But I continued being, as all of us always continue being, a child of my environment, and I wanted to help those people through my personal efforts. I had already traveled a lot — I was then in Guatemala, the Guatemala of Arbenz — and I had begun to make some notes to guide the conduct of a revolutionary doctor. I began to look into what I needed to be a revolutionary doctor.

However, the aggression came [in Guatemala], aggression unleashed by the United Fruit Company, the State Department, Foster Dulles — in reality, they're all the same thing — and the puppet they put in named Castillo Armas — that was his name. The aggression was successful, given that the people had not yet reached the level of [political] maturity the Cuban people have today. And one fine day, I, like so many others, took the road to exile, or at least I took the road of fleeing from Guatemala, since it was not my homeland.

Then I realized one fundamental thing: to be a revolutionary doctor or to be a revolutionary, there must first be a revolution. The isolated effort, the individual effort, the purity of ideals, the desire to sacrifice an entire lifetime to the noblest of ideals goes for naught if that effort is made alone, solitary, in some corner of Latin America, fighting against hostile governments and social conditions that do not permit progress. A revolution needs what we have in Cuba: an entire people mobilized, who have learned the use of arms and the practice of combative unity, who know what a weapon is worth and what the people's unity is worth.

And then we get to the heart of the problem that today lies ahead of us. We already have the right and even the obligation to be, before anything else, a revolutionary doctor, that is, a person who puts the technical knowledge of his profession at the service of the revolution and of the people. Then we come back to the earlier questions: How does one do a job of social welfare effectively? How does one reconcile individual effort with the needs of society?

We again have to recall what each of our lives was like, what each of us did and thought, as a doctor or in any other public health function, prior to the revolution. We have to do so with profound critical enthusiasm. And we will then conclude that almost everything we thought and felt in that past epoch should be filed away, and that a new type of human being should be created. And if each one of us is their own architect of that new human type, then creating that new type of human being — who will be the representative of the new Cuba — will be much easier.

It is good for you — those present, the residents of Havana — to absorb this idea: that in Cuba a new type of human being is being created, which cannot be entirely appreciated in the capital, but which can be seen in every corner of the country. Those of you who went to the Sierra Maestra on July 26 must have seen two absolutely unheard-of things: an army with picks and shovels, an army that takes the greatest pride in marching in the patriotic celebrations in Oriente Province with its picks and shovels ready, while the militia compañeros are marching with their rifles. But you must have also seen something much more important: You must have seen some children who by their physical stature appear eight or nine years old, but who nevertheless are almost all thirteen or fourteen. They are the most authentic children of the Sierra Maestra, the most authentic children of hunger and poverty in all its forms. They are the creatures of malnutrition.

In this small Cuba, with four or five television channels, with hundreds of radio stations, with all the advances of modern science, when those children arrived at school at night for the first time and saw the electric lights, they exclaimed that the stars were very low that night. Those children, whom some of you would have seen, are now learning in the collective schools, from the ABCs right up to learning a trade, right up to the very difficult science of being revolutionaries.

These are the new types of human beings born in Cuba. They are being born in isolated places, in remote points in the Sierra Maestra and also in the cooperatives and centers of work. 

All that has a lot to do with the topic of our talk today: the integration of the doctor and every other medical worker into the revolutionary movement. Because the revolution's task — the task of training and nourishing the children, the task of educating the army, the task of distributing the lands of the old absentee landlords among those who sweated every day on that same land without reaping its fruit — is the greatest work of social medicine that has been done in Cuba.

The battle against disease should be based on the principle of creating a robust body — not creating a robust body through a doctor's artistic work on a weak organism, but creating a robust body through the world of the whole collectivity, especially the whole social collectivity. 

One day medicine will have to become a science that serves to prevent diseases, to orient the entire public toward their medical obligations, and that intervention is only necessary in cases of extreme urgency to perform some surgical operation or to deal with something uncharacteristic of that new society we are creating. 

The work that is today entrusted to the Ministry of Health, to all the institutions of this type, is to organize public health in such a manner that it aids the greatest possible number of people, that it prevents everything foreseeable related to diseases, and that it orients the people. But for the organizational task, as for all revolutionary tasks, what is required, fundamentally, is the individual. The revolution is not, as some claim, a standardizer of collective will, of collective initiative. To the contrary, it is a liberator of an individual's capacity.

What the revolution does do, however, is to orient that capacity. And our task today is to orient the creative talent of all the medical professionals toward the tasks of social medicine.

We are at the end of an era, and not only here in Cuba. Despite all that is said to the contrary and despite all the hopes of some people, the forms of capitalism we have known, under which we have been raised and have suffered, are being defeated throughout the world.

The monopolies are being defeated. Collective science every day registers new and important triumphs. And we have had the pride and the self-sacrificing duty of being the vanguard in Latin America of a liberation movement that began some time ago, in the other subjugated continents of Africa and Asia. And that very profound social change also demands very profound changes in the mentality of the people.

Individualism as such, as the isolated action of a person alone in a social environment, must disappear in Cuba. Individualism tomorrow should be the proper utilization of the whole person to the absolute benefit of the community. But even when all this is understood today, even when these things I am saying are comprehended, and even when everyone is willing to think a little about the present, about the past, and about what the future should be, changing the manner of thinking requires profound internal changes and helping bring about profound external changes, primarily social.

And those external changes are taking place in Cuba every day. One way of learning about this revolution, of getting to know the forces the people have within, forces that have been dormant for so long, is to visit every part of Cuba, visit the cooperatives and all the work centers being created. And one way of getting to the heart of the medical question is not only knowing, not only visiting these places, but also getting to know the people who make up these cooperatives and work centers. Go there and find out what diseases they have, what their ailments are, what extreme poverty they have lived in over the years, inherited from centuries of repression and total submission. The doctor, the medical worker, should then go to the heart of this new work, which is as a person among the masses, someone within the community.

Whatever happens in the world, by always being close to the patient, by knowing their psychology so deeply, by being the representative of those who come near pain and relieve it, the doctor always has a very important job, a job of great responsibility in social life.

Only a few months ago, it so happened here in Havana that a group of students, recently certified as doctors, did not want to go to the countryside and were demanding extra payment for going. From the viewpoint of the past it is most logical that this would occur; at least it seems that way to me, and I understand it perfectly. I simply remember that this was the way it was, the way it was regarded some years ago. Once more it is the gladiator in rebellion, the solitary fighter who wants to ensure a better future, better conditions, and to achieve recognition of the necessity of what he does.

But what would happen if it were not those kids — the majority of whose families could afford several years of study — who completed their courses and are now beginning to practice their profession? What if instead it was 200 or 300 peasants who had emerged, let's say by magic, from the university lecture halls? 

What would have happened, simply, is that those peasants would have run immediately, and with great enthusiasm, to attend to their brothers and sisters. They would have requested posts with the most responsibility and the most work, in order to show that the years of study given them were not in vain. What would have happened is what will happen within six or seven years, when the new students, children of the working class and the peasantry, receive their professional degrees of whatever type.

But we should not view the future with fatalism and divide people into children of the working class or peasantry and counterrevolutionaries. Because that is simplistic, because it is not true, and because there is nothing that educates an honorable person more than living within a revolution.

Because none of us, none of the first group that arrived in the Granma, who established ourselves in the Sierra Maestra, and who learned to respect the peasant and the worker, living together with them — none of us had had a past as a worker or peasant. Naturally, there were those who had to work, who had known certain wants in their childhood. But hunger, true hunger — that none of us had known, and we began to know it — temporarily — during the two long years in the Sierra Maestra. And then many things became very clear.

We, who at the beginning severely punished anyone who touched even an egg of some rich peasant or some landowner, one day took 10,000 head of cattle to the Sierra and told the peasants simply: “Eat.” And the peasants, for the first time in many years, and some for the first time in their lives, ate beef.

And the respect we had for the sacrosanct property of those 10,000 head of cattle was lost in the course of the armed struggle, and we understood perfectly that the life of a single human being is worth a million times more than all the property of the richest man on earth. And we learned it there, we who were not children of the working class or the peasantry. So why should we now shout to the four winds that we are the privileged ones and that the rest of the Cuban people cannot learn too? Yes, they can learn. In fact, the revolution today demands that they learn, demands that they understand well that the pride of serving our fellow human beings is much more important than a good income; that the people's gratitude is much more permanent, much more lasting than all the gold one can accumulate. And each doctor, in the sphere of their activity, can and should accumulate that prized treasure, the people's gratitude.

We must then begin to erase our old concepts and come even closer and ever more critically to the people. Not in the way we got closer before, because all of you will say: “No, I am a friend of the people. I enjoy talking with workers and peasants, and on Sundays I go to such and such a place to see such and such a thing.” Everybody has done that. But they have done it practicing charity, and what we have to practice today is solidarity. We should not draw closer to the people to say: “Here we are. We come to give you the charity of our presence, to teach you with our science, to demonstrate your errors, your lack of refinement, your lack of elementary knowledge.” We should go with an investigative zeal and with a humble spirit, to learn from the great source of wisdom that is the people.

Often we realize how mistaken we were in concepts we knew so well; they had become part of us and, automatically, of our consciousness. Every so often we ought to change all our ideas, not just general, social or philosophical concepts, but also, at times, our medical concepts. We will see that diseases are not always treated as one treats an illness in a big-city hospital. We will see then that the doctor also has to be a farmer, that one has to learn to cultivate new foods and, by their example, to cultivate the desire to consume new foods, to diversify this food structure in Cuba — so small and so poor in an agricultural country that is potentially the richest on earth. We will then see that under those circumstances we will have to be a little bit pedagogic, at times very pedagogic, that we will also have to be politic; that the first thing we will have to do is not go offering our wisdom, but showing that we are ready to learn with the people, to carry out that great and beautiful common experience — to build a new Cuba.

We have already taken many steps, and the distance between that January 1, 1959, and today cannot be measured in the conventional manner. It was some time ago that the people understood that not only had a dictator fallen here, but that a system had fallen as well. Now the people should learn that upon the ruins of a crumbled system, one must build a new one that brings about the people's absolute happiness.

I remember when Compañero [Nicolás] Guillén arrived from Argentina early last year. He was the same great poet he is today — perhaps his books were translated into one fewer language, because every day he wins new readers in all the languages of the world — but he was the same as today. But it was difficult for Guillén to read his poems, which were the poems of the people, because that was the first period, the period of prejudices. Nobody ever stopped to think that for years and years, with incorruptible dedication, the poet Guillén had put all his extraordinary artistic gifts at the service of the people and at the service of the cause he believed in. The people saw in him not the glory of Cuba, but the representative of a political party that was taboo. But all that is behind us. We have already learned that we cannot have divisions based on opinions about certain internal structures in our country, if we have a common enemy and if we are trying to reach a common goal.

We all know that we have definitively become convinced that there is a common enemy. We know that everyone looks around to see if someone will hear him, if someone is listening from some embassy who will transmit their opinion, before clearly stating an opinion against the monopolies, before saying clearly: “Our enemy, and the enemy of all Latin America, is the monopolistic government of the United States of America.”

If everybody already knows that this is the enemy, and if our starting point is knowing that whoever struggles against that enemy has something in common with us, then comes the second part. What are our goals here in Cuba? What do we want? Do we want the people's happiness or not? Are we struggling for Cuba's absolute economic liberation or not? Are we or are we not struggling to be a free country among free countries, without belonging to any military bloc, without having to consult any embassy of any great power on earth about any domestic or foreign decision we make? Are we thinking of redistributing the wealth of those who have too much, to give to those who have nothing? Are we thinking here of making work a creative task, a dynamic daily source of all our happiness? If so, then we already have goals to which we referred. And everyone who shares those goals is our friend. If that person also has other ideas, if they belong to one or another [political] organization, those are discussions of lesser importance.

At times of great danger, at times of great tensions and great creativity, what counts are the great enemy and the great goals. If we agree, if we all already know where we are going, then whatever happens, we must begin our work.

I was telling you that to be a revolutionary requires having a revolution. We already have [a revolution]. And a revolutionary must also know the people with whom they work. I think we still don't know one another well. I think we still have to travel a while along that road. If someone asks me how to go about getting to know the people, in addition to going into the interior [of the country], learning about cooperatives, living in cooperatives (and not everybody can do that, and there are many places where the presence of a medical doctor is very important) … in those cases, I will tell you that one of the Cuban people's greatest expressions of solidarity is the revolutionary militias, militias that now give doctors a new function and prepare them for what was at least until recently a sad and almost fatal reality in Cuba: that is, that we were going to be prey — or if not prey at least victims — of a large-scale armed attack. 

As a revolutionary militia member, the doctor should be warned to always be a doctor. They should not commit the error we made in the Sierra — or perhaps it was not an error, but all the doctor compañeros of that period know it — that it appeared dishonorable for us to be at the side of a wounded or ill person, and we sought any means possible to grab a rifle and show on the battlefield what should be done.

Now conditions are different. The new armies being formed to defend the country should be armies that use different methods, as part of which the doctor will have an enormous importance. They should continue being doctors, which is one of the most beautiful and most important tasks of war. 

And not just doctors, but also nurses, laboratory technicians, all those who dedicate themselves to this humane profession. 

But all of us — even knowing that the danger is latent and even while preparing to repel the aggression that still hangs over us — should stop thinking about that. Because if we center our efforts on war preparations, we cannot build what we want, we cannot devote ourselves to creative work. 

All work, all capital that is invested in preparing for military action, is labor lost, money lost. Unfortunately, it has to be done, because there are others preparing. But the money I am most saddened to see leave the National Bank coffers — and I say this with all honesty and pride as a soldier — is the money to pay for some weapon of destruction.

The militias have a function in peacetime, however. The militias should be, in populated areas, the arm that unifies and gets to know the people. They should practice real solidarity, as the compañeros have told me is being done in the medical militias. They should immediately set out to resolve the problems of the impoverished throughout Cuba at all times of danger. But they are also an opportunity to get to know one another, an opportunity to live alongside people of all Cuba's social classes, made equal and made brothers by a common uniform. 

If we achieve this, medical workers — and allow me to use again a term I had forgotten some time ago — if we all use that new weapon of solidarity, if we know the goals, if we know the enemy, and if we know the direction in which we have to travel, then the only thing left for us is to know the daily stretch of the road and to take it. Nobody can point out that stretch; that stretch is the personal road of each individual; it is what he or she will do every day, what a person will gain from their individual experience, and what they will give of themselves in practicing their profession, dedicated to the people's well-being. 

If we already possess all the elements with which to march toward the future, let us recall that phrase of Martí, which at this moment I am not putting into practice, but which we must constantly put into practice: “The best form of saying is doing.” And let us then march toward the future of Cuba.

As you may have heard, our big holiday sale is in full swing — you may have even placed an order already! But we've published a lot of books since we opened in 1995, meaning there are many, many titles to sift through. So, we thought it might be helpful to share some recs* from Seven Stories staffers, to hopefully add a little structure to the literary madness and, crucially, open your eyes to some books that you may have otherwise missed. And all for 30% off list price (40% off for newsletter subscribers). What a delight.

* We love all of our children equally, of course. These are just some books we're really digging at the moment.

 

EXPLORE MORE BOOKS ON SALE

 

---

 Lithium for Medea by Kate Braverman
I've said this before and I will say it again: If Kate Braverman has million number of fans i am one of them . if Kate Braverman has ten fans i am one of them. if Kate Braverman have only one fan and that is me . if Kate Braverman has no fans, that means i am no more on the earth . . .. Highly recommended for those looking for an iconic 70s author who is 1) tragically overlooked & due for a posthumous renaissance 2) wacky and poetic 3) a connoisseur of mid men and injectable cocaine

Mundo Cruel by Luis Negrón
This book of stories is so beautiful and weird and gross and sexy and cool. Luis Negrón, who I’ve heard has a great bookstore in San Juan, is a delightful writer, and I long for the day that we get another one of his books translated into English (translators, hello!). Btw, the story about the taxidermied dog is my favorite, of course. 

Abolition is Love by Syrus Marcus Ware and Alannah Fricker
Abolition is Love is a great introduction to abolitionism for children, and a fantastic all-ages explanation of abolition as a tool for conflict resolution. And, of course, gorgeous illustrations abound. Sure, it's a kids' book, but I'm sure you can think of an adult or three who could use an illustrated explainer about prison and police abolition, and the concept of abolition as a whole. Or even just a guide to resolving conflicts without punishment (again, I'm sure you can think of someone who might need this book). For parents or older readers, I highly recommend pairing it with Talking About Abolition by Sonali Kolhatkar, and Abolition Democracy and Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis.

Also, because I'm incorrigible and I can't just pick three books like a normal person: Eye of the Monkey by Krisztina Tóth (tr. Ottilie Mulzet), Anarchy Explained to Children by José Antonio Emmanuel and Fábrica de Estampas (tr. NAFTA), Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, edited by Edumund Ghareeb and Naseer Aruri, and Orlanda by Jacqueline Harpman (new translation from Ros Schwartz) were my favorite books we published this year.

Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance by Edmund Ghareeb, ed.
This new edition of the beloved and powerful collection of Palestinian resistance poetry has a remarkable legacy of Black liberation solidarity—from its original publication by SNCC’s Drum and Spear to the discovery of the book and a handwritten copy of Sameeh Al-Qassem’s title poem in Black Panther George Jackson’s prison cell.”

At the Edge of the Woods by Kathryn Bromwich
Kathryn Bromwich's atmospheric and gorgeous mystery set in the forests of the Italian Alps is hard to put down. I loved the ending!

Going Around: Selected Journalism by Murray Kempton
Murray Kempton may seem an unlikely chronicler of Black freedom struggles, but this collection—spanning his pieces on the mafia, J. Edgar Hoover (who called him ‘a real stinker’), and his meticulous reporting on the 1969 NYC Black Panther trial (‘God bless him,’ said Afeni Shakur)—shows why his David Remnick called him 'the greatest newspaperman in town.' Don’t miss Andrew Holter’s introduction—it's a wonderful short biography of Kempton.”

Common Ground by Eileen Flanagan
Eileen Flanagan is a respected organizer with experience leading major direct action wins. She's a sought after expert in building cross-race and class coalitions— from college students to elders—and always grounded in spirituality. If you're feeling depressed about our current situation, pick up this book and get inspired about how to take action for climate justice that goes beyond electoral politics.

Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance by Edmund Ghareeb, ed.
Enemy of the Sun is a masterpiece of an anthology, one that defies time and draws lines across the decades from the militancy of 1970 to the militancy of now.

Miles Okazaki's Work: The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Monk on solo guitar
The great revelation here is just how percussive Okazaki's playing is, while at the same time so melodious and wonderfully strange. One has to imagine Monk himself loving this homage.

I Can Give You Anything But Love by Gary Indiana
Like sitting across a couch from Indiana and listening to him speak, in totally lucid sentences, about his youth, his family, boys he loved, boys he didn’t love, and every last detail of his travels and homes he lived in, right down to the amount of mirrors in one. Can we ask for much more? 

Mr. Distinctive by Olga Tokarczuk, illustrated by Joanna Concejo (tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones)
Filled with gorgeous and uncanny illustrations, Mr. Distinctive is a cautionary tale for our modern-day obsession with vanity and bodily reconstruction. If you’re feeling a tad fatigued of words, but still want an entire story to be engrossed in, I think you might love this.

The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux (tr. Alison L. Strayer)
The Other Girl is Ernaux’s dissecting letter to the “phantom” that underlies her life and writing. While Ernaux writes and recalls memories with complete specificity, she brings up a larger question for all of us: how do we address the past that allows us to exist in the present? 

Chicago's Nelson Algren by Art Shay
I was mocked in the office the other day for wistfully cradling a copy of this in my arms, but what can I say? I think Chicago is the greatest city in the world, and I love the way both Shay and Algren capture its dark corners and displays of humanity. There's a photo of Algren in here standing at what's now my bus stop that might be one of my favorites in the world—it connects me to a local heritage of literature that I'm proud to be able to share day in and day out. I love the joint for keeps. 

The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich
I'm so psyched about 2 Dollar Radio joining us this year for dozens of reasons, but the top one has to be this book, which captures the tragedy of the Pacific Northwest and its dirtbags (affectionate) like nothing else I've read. Krilanovich's prose is a funnel towards doom, spitting you out on a bed of moss, covered in scars you don't remember. I was lucky enough to re-read it with my book club this year, and was moved by the ways everyone found their own misspent youths reflected in the prism of these "teenage vampire junkies". I'll be first in line for Krilanovich's follow-up, ACID GREEN VELVET, when it finally arrives this summer. 

Guardianas by ARPA, edited by Noemi Delgado (tr. Emma Lloyd)
Getting to know the women of APRA this year through a book made with such care was an honor. You can feel the investment of everyone involved in this story, from the midwives themselves to its fastidious editor and translator. 2025 was a tough one, and this book was a continuous guiding light, reminding me of the myriad ways we can show up for each other, and the better worlds we're building towards but cannot yet see. 

Horse Crazy by Gary Indiana
Let's just say there's a reason this book is currently out of stock... Gary Indiana really was one of the best writers of our time, and this novel is proof of it. He builds up a rhythm through these fantastic paragraphs and then punctuates them with aphorisms worthy of Kafka—“Affection is the mortal illness of lonely people”; “Love like a stone in the stomach, a penance, a noose: love like a crime.” Indiana squeezes the "archetypal" relationship that Burroughs notes in a blurb for all it can possibly be, leaving both parties far from blameless and yet rendering each with a careful and heartbreaking innocence. A wonderful read for those in the wake of a Big Fat Crush.

Exteriors by Annie Ernaux (tr. Tanya Leslie)
This is such an underrated Ernaux title, I think in part because it strays a little bit from the qualities that typically characterize her writing. The voice that we’ve become accustomed to from Annie Ernaux—confessional, interior—is obscured, replaced by observations of buildings, highways, advertisements, fragments heard in passing. And yet it retains that quintessential Ernaux-ness, revealing the poignant in the everyday, the places where the self emerges from behind unexpected exteriors (…). For fans of Renata Adler, or anyone who pays a lot of attention to the conversations of strangers.

From the Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Film Reader, edited by Ed Halter and Barney Rosset
Shout out to our very own social media team (hi Allison and Lou) for posting about this book on our Saturday Spotlight series! I had no idea it existed & it is an absolute gold mine. Featuring interviews with Marguerite Duras, John Cassavetes, and writing by Dziga Vertov and Jacques Rivette, (among many others) in a wonderfully playful typesetting, this book is overflowing with excellent film criticism and history. The perfect gift for the lefty cinephile in your life, or maybe just yourself.

Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno (tr. Natasha Lehrer)
2025 was punctuated for me by the publication of Sad Tiger, which I think is one of the most important books we've ever published. Neige Sinno weaves her own story of abuse at the hands of her stepfather with a close reading of literary texts from Lolita to works by Toni Morrison and Claude Ponti and many others, and in so doing explores memory and the power of words to shine a light into society's darkest corners. What could be more important than that? But don't listen to me: Annie Ernaux wrote that "Everyone should read it"--enough said.

I Want You to Know by Mona Damluji and Human Rights by Yayo Herrero and Luis Demano (tr. Paul David Martin and Martin J. Perazzo)
Two of my favorite picture books this year are I Want You to Know by Mona Damluji, a beautiful poem illustrated by Ishtar Backlund Dakhil, for anyone whose family has had to leave a war-torn home and start a new life somewhere else; and Human Rights, a big, bold visual exploration of the variety of human rights and those activists who have fought for those rights that protect us and the world around us.

The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich
Lastly, since we acquired Two Dollar Radio this year I've been enjoying a deep dive into their backlist. I loved The Orange Eats Creeps, an absolutely brilliant, bonkers, trippy, highly original vampire-youth-living-rough story that one reviewer called "like something you read on the underside of a freeway overpass in a fever dream." It's not surprising that the director of "American Psycho," Mary Herron, is adapting it for film. Run, don't walk, to your nearest indie store to get a copy before author Grace Krilanovich's new novel comes out next fall.

Eye of the Monkey by Krisztina Tóth (tr. Ottilie Mulzet)
This book is CRAZY. It is DARK. It is deeply, unexpectedly, and necessarily HILARIOUS. Kriztina Töth is THE Hungarian author to look out for—her pen is cutting, and this fragmented, labyrinthine tale is an eerie peek into a not-so-unrealistic future. 10/10.

Living in Your Light by Abdellah Taïa (tr. Emma Ramadan)
This story makes my heart race, my stomach drop, and my eyes water. Abdellah Taïa effortlessly writes Arab women and their experiences in elegant, mystical prose.

Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance by Edmund Ghareeb, ed.
Never before have I read a collection of poetry that sings quite like this one does. A beautiful, heart-wrenching, and powerful example of the undying struggle for collective liberation.

Behold, our Holiday Gift Guide for all of your Holiday Gifting needs.

Explore this year's holiday gift guide with everything you need for those hard-to-please loved ones... and it's all up to 40% off!

The perfect excuse to grab yourself a little present too :)

VIEW GIFTS FOR ADULTS

VIEW HYPER-SPECIFIC GIFT RECS

VIEW GIFTS FOR KIDS

VIEW GIFTS FOR TEENS

EXPLORE ALL ADULT BOOKS

EXPLORE ALL KIDS BOOKS

---

GIFT RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ADULTS

---

HYPER-SPECIFIC GIFT RECOMMENDATIONS FOR EVERYONE ON YOUR LIST

---

GIFT RECOMMENDATIONS FOR KIDS

---

GIFT RECOMMENDATIONS FOR TEENS 

Here at Seven Stories, we’re proud to publish radical world literature for people of all ages, including books for kids and young adults with our imprint Triangle Square Books for Young Readers.

Last year, we introduced Triangle Square Book Clubs, monthly kids’ book subscriptions for book lovers large and small. Compiled into thematic collections and organized by age range, the books included in these subscriptions present stories from all over the globe that share the power of community, promote a radical kindness towards others, and emphasize the importance of standing up for what’s right.

For readers of Seven Stories Press books — and parents and children of all ages — a subscription to one of our Triangle Square book club is the perfect gift for the holiday season. And this year we’re offering something special: a free Triangle Square Books for Young Readers tote with every subscription. Spacious and sturdy and extremely cool,** the TSBYR tote is adorned with beautiful woodcut artwork by J. Borges from José Saramago’s picture book The Lizard, translated by Nick Caistor and Lucia Caistor (Note: The Lizard is included in the Global Kid Lit Book Club).

Grab a subscription for your precocious niece, or your friend’s new baby, or your favorite neighbor’s kid (or your Republican cousin’s middle schooler ;-) ). And you'll get a free tote! There’s no better present than new books!

(**It’s such a cool tote that even Lorde has one!)

Please note, all totes will ship out in early January 2026!

Books for future changemakers

For readers ages 4-8

Six picture books that emphasize the power of community and promote a radical kindness towards others: Abolition is Love, 10,000 Dresses, Together, Grandpa Stops a War, The Wedding Portrait, and Oh! The Things We’re For.

Picture books from around the world

For readers ages 4-8 

Six picture books from all over the globe, from countries such as Indonesia, Portugal, Iran, Brazil, and Palestine: The Lizard, The Duel, The Donkey’s Gone!, The Story of Hurry, My Night in the Planetarium, and The Best Tailor in Pinbaue.

Books for a better tomorrow

For readers ages 8-12

Six picture books and chapter books that encourage kids to be true to themselves and stand up for what’s right: Sing It!, Stories for Kids Who Want to Save the World, M is for Movement, Trevor, Human Rights, and Atty at Law.

Kids’ books from around the world

For readers ages 8-12

Seven picture books and chapter books from all over the globe, including Portugal, Iceland, Chile, Denmark, and more: An Unexpected Light, Adam and Thomas, The Silence of Water, The Story of the Blue Planet, A Rabbits Rebellion, Zenobia, and Julia and the Triple C.

Thought-provoking books for tweens and teens

For readers ages 10+

The stuff you won’t learn in school — stories of activists, workers, and other changemakers fighting for a better world: A Young People’s History of the United States, A Different Mirror for Young People, Freedom Summer for Young People, 1493 for Young People, Jane Jacobs, Escape ‘56, and Breaking the Chains.

ABOUT TRIANGLE SQUARE BOOK CLUBS

Triangle Square Book Clubs are monthly kids’ book subscriptions focused on highlighting social justice kids' books and kids' books from around the world. 

Triangle Square Book Club subscribers receive one (1) book per month over the course of the subscription period, which is typically six or seven months, depending which of the book clubs are selected by the subscriber. The payment method is only charged one time, and the subscription never auto-renews.

To give a Triangle Square Book Club subscription as a gift, simply input the recipient's mailing address on the shipping page during checkout. If you have any questions, send us an email and we'd be happy to help. 

Sometimes good things happen, but not without the hard work of people fighting for a better world. To celebrate this hard-won victory, and all the people who've worked so diligently to make it happen, here are some stories of hope and resistance that feel right for the current moment, all 30% off.