What the opioid epidemic teaches us about the addiction at the root of our social life—and how we free ourselves from it.

How To Break An Addiction paints an original and dynamic portrait of the nature of the opioid crisis while offering original commentary on what the crisis portends about the present historical conjuncture. Interrogating long- and short-run, macro and micro, national and global, structural and personal factors, it takes the ongoing US opioid crisis as a jumping off point to illustrate the profound conclusion: capitalism at its core is an addiction.

In a blend of memoir, historical record, original research, and theoretical and cultural analysis, critical geographer and harm reduction activist Annie Spencer argues against a dominant ‘progressive’ presumption of the need to reform (or ‘save’) capitalism, demonstrating instead the imperative to think, organize, and enact new ways of being and provisioning together on a living Earth. 

How To Break An Addiction renders visible the extent to which the world we inhabit today is made by addiction—in capital’s image—and against life and well-being. Spencer calls for redress of the deepening crisis of addiction and the so-called ‘epidemic’ of pain at its root; for a paradigm shift away from the dominant economic logic in favor of new kinds of ecosystemic social practice and provision. We must innovate a new way of being human together in the here and now. Spencer’s first-person narration anchors rigorous and far-reaching research and theory, making for an original and impactful tour through capital’s addiction to crisis and our ability—and need—to break from it.

This is the century of homeland security. 

The federal government created a monster. They said it would keep us safe. The monster hatched in November 2002. It was named the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). An appetite for control and conquest was in its DNA. Its early influences, in the years after 9/11, were paranoia and vengeance. 

The DHS is the only new department the United States has spawned in this century. With its birth, issues that were previously seen as separate—immigration control, policing, and counter-terrorism—were brought into a single, sprawling entity. Twenty-two preexisting agencies were absorbed into what became the nation’s third largest government department. Today it has a budget of over $100 billion and employs a quarter of a million people. Every danger is now conceived

of as a threat to “homeland security,” and as the 9/11 Commission said in 2003, “the American homeland is the planet.”

We study the world in order to change it.

What you are holding in your hands is not a finished product. But it is the product of the first year of our work at the Du Bois Movement School. And what a year it has been. The Du Bois Movement School was the product of a particular time and place. We came together amid the long wake of the 2020 rebellions, which mobilized hundreds of thousands nationwide and pushed abolitionist narratives into the mainstream. This raised pressing questions for abolitionists across the country and the world, and more than any other, the question was this: what do we mean when we say abolition?

The system had two responses to this question: co-optation and counterinsurgency. While sectors of the political and media apparatus have embraced the language of abolition (and decolonization) to water down and co-opt them, the state has also

subjected revolutionary abolitionists to severe repression—we experienced both in Philly. In this context, we engaged in conversations among movement educators and radical organizers across the city to ask what kind of political education would help to take abolitionist struggles to the next level. We realized that this required not only training in concrete organizing skills but real understanding of the world, history, economics, and power. We realized that we need to study our world if we want to change it.

Public higher education’s future is being held hostage by financial institutions and actors. How did it get this way? 

Lend and Rule reveals the “shadow governance” of debt and credit in the United States higher education system. With sharp and hard-hitting insight, the Coalition Against Campus Debt exposes how institutional debt is a primary driver of university austerity, miseducation, and the deepening of societal inequality. 

Addressing how our lives are entangled in a debt economy, they develop the analysis necessary to transform higher education in today’s neoliberal racial capitalist political economy. 

Part theoretical analysis, part toolbox for organizers in higher education, Lend and Rule is an invaluable resource for anyone engaged in debt abolition struggles or looking to acquire a critical and transformative vision of higher education today.

“This outstanding book is a crystal-clear analysis of how and why higher education got captured by the finance industry. It's also the definitive guide for those who want to free themselves and their institutions from the sticky trap set by Wall Street.” —Andrew Ross, author of Creditocracy: And the Case for Debt Refusal

The essential political and theoretical work of one of Latin America’s most important contemporary theorists.

Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar is one of the foremost Latin American political thinkers. From armed Indigenous struggle in the Bolivian altiplano to the contemporary wave of feminist uprisings, Raquel Gutiérrez's life and work have spanned and spurred on some of the most important political sequences in the last forty years in Latin America. 

Almost unknown in the United States, Raquel is one of the Latin American anticapitalist, antistate Left's most important contemporary theorists.  She has produced important work on communal struggles and political forms and has been at the center of some of the most important political organizing in Bolivia and Mexico in the last forty years. 

With the publication of In Defense of Common Life, a new audience of English-language readers can finally engage with the thought and political experience of a thinker and militant, whose contributions to social movements span an incredible political and regional breadth, and resonate deeply with current debates with the US about the conditions and practices of revolutionary change, feminism, and popular struggle.

A young Kurdish woman discovers a commitment to liberation, both personal and collective, through a harrowing journey to Rojava and the heart of armed struggle.

Jînçin is a young professor living in Berlin, born to a Yezedi father who years earlier was shunned and exiled for marrying outside his community, and who late in life makes the surprising and fateful decision to return to his homeland to join the Kurdish People’s Defense Units (YPG) in their fight against the Islamic State.

Searching for answers as to why the father she adored would give his life for such a cause, Jînçin embarks on a clandestine journey through various autonomous territories of embattled Kurdistan—from Başûr [northern Iraq, southern Kurdistan] to Bakûr [southeast Turkey, northern Kurdistan], to the remote mountains of Rojava [western Kurdistan] in northeastern Syria.

Ultimately, Rojava is the story of people living and fighting shoulder-to-shoulder who have decided, regardless of the present world order and in spite of the odds stacked against them, to build a society free from discrimination, based on shared dignity and collective autonomy.

A memoir of a mother and daughter’s return to Cabo Verde reveals the legacies of national liberation, a story of memory and migration, and the psychic and physical landscape that colonialism has wrought.

When Sonia Vaz Borges accompanied her mother, Maria Isabel Vaz, home to Santiago Island, Cabo Verde, it was the first time she experienced the island where her mother and family were born, and where her mother left forty years earlier. As a historian, documentarian, and a Black Cabo Verdean young woman born in Portugal, she booked a trip to a native land she’s never been to in order to conduct research on the history of militant resistance to Portuguese colonialism, of the education initiatives of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea Bissau and Cabo Verde (PAIGC), and the lessons for freedom available for today.   

As mother and daughter travel home together for the first time, they embark on a journey that takes them to new places in their relationship to each

other, a return and a rediscovery of a place and people imagined and conjured through memory, where history and place blur and where stories are created and shared.

Ragás is a Cabo Verdean creole word for the space created between the waist and the knees when seated: the lap. Here, it is a place to find nurturing, a place to be embraced, protected, and cared for, a place for reconnection and return to the memories that others carry for you when migration means both leaving and being left behind.

A story of family bonds amid political betrayal that explores the drastic steps that a young girl will take in order to find a sense of belonging.

Fred is lost, confused, almost certainly about to die. As he traces his steps back from the desert where he has been dropped by soldiers of a repressive Gulf Kingdom regime, his nine-year-old daughter, Nancy, is doing the same from six thousand miles away in a quiet neighborhood in the suburbs of Washington, DC. 

With his disappearance, she and her mother are forced to leave their comfortable house in DC for a new life in Virginia.  Abandoned by their friends and desperate for answers, Nancy and her mother must acclimate to the strange world of suburban anonymity. As Nancy grows into adulthood, she pieces together what happened to her father and devises a bold plan to avenge his disappearance.  

Unraveling an international web of deceit in order to find her father will take time and patience; and becoming a cold-blooded assassin takes commitment to a life at odds with everything she knows.

The home has become a laboratory for capital but also for forms of financial disobedience.

It has become increasingly clear that home is not a site of private life and isolation, but a battleground where the conflict over the reorganization of working days, over what even counts as labor, is waged. In the very spaces that capital historically sought to portray as an “unproductive” and apolitical space, and refused to pay for, now emerge new forms of debt and profit extraction. Although the home has been transformed into a favored site of finance’s colonization of social life and of experimentation for capital, this is not a finished process—or one without its resistance.

The Home as Laboratory traces this story through the links between debt and financial technologies, the violence of property, and reproductive and feminized labor, and everyday forms of feminist organizing.  

Drawing on militant research and interventions with feminist organizers in informal settlements and renters’ organizations in Buenos Aires, Luci Cavallero, Verónica Gago, and Liz Mason-Deese offer a powerful feminist methodology that points to the vital space of the home as an open dispute.

Storming Bedlam reimagines mental health care and its radical possibilities in the context of its global development under capitalism.

In Storming Bedlam: Madness, Utopia, and Revolt, Sasha Warren suggests that the intense contradictions that animate psychiatric care can only be conceptualized by situating its technical composition in its actual social, political, and economic conditions.

In a radical rereading of the history, theory, and practice of psychiatry, Storming Bedlam emphasizes the utopian origins of the psychiatric revolution and its roots in the political and economic revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Warren traces a double movement in the global development of mental health services from its origins through the 20th century: a radical current pushing totalizing and idealistic visions of care to their practical limits and a reactionary one content with managing or eliminating chronically idle surplus populations.

Chronicling and comparing these movements, Storming Bedlam argues that long standing divisions between social and biological approaches or between psychiatry and anti-psychiatry as discrete positions are tenuous and circular. Instead of avoiding these binaries, Warren travels through them, using their own internal logics to expose their hidden presuppositions in search of an approach to mental health care grounded in common struggles against conditions of scarcity, poverty, isolation, and exploitation.

On the centennial of Amílcar Cabral’s birth, and fifty years after his passing, Claim No Easy Victories brings to life the resonance of his thought for today’s freedom movements.

World-renowned revolutionary, poet, liberation philosopher, and leader of the anticolonial independence movement of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, Amílcar Cabral’s legacy stretches well beyond the shores of West Africa. His profound influence on the pan-Africanist movement and the Black liberation movement in the United States and the English-speaking world spans the ages—and is only growing in an era of renewed anti-imperialist internationalist struggle.

In this unique collection of essays, radical thinkers from across Africa, the United States, and internationally commemorate Cabral’s life and legacy and his relevance to contemporary struggles for self-determination and emancipation. 

“As a collection it is a timely one and will be valuable for anyone seeking to be introduced or reacquainted with debates about revolution, colonialism and culture, nationalism, and pan-Africanism.”—Claudia Gastrow, Feminist Africa