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The Right To Useful Unemployment
And its professional enemies

In this political essay, Ivan Illich calls for the right to useful unemployment: a positive, constructive, and even optimistic concept dealing with that activity by which people are useful to themselves and others outside the production of commodities for the market.


The Sea Birds Are Still Alive

Ten stories of Black life written with Ms. Bambara's characteristic vigor, sensibility and winning irony. The stories range from the timid and bumbling confusion of a novice community worker in "The Apprentice" to the love-versus-politics crisis of an organizers wife, to the dark and bright notes of the title story about the passengers on a refugee ship from a war-torn Asian nation.


The Sex Lives of African Women

Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah spent decades talking openly and intimately to African women around the world about sex. In this book, she brings together their extraordinary stories, whilst also chronicling her own journey towards sexual freedom.

From finding queer community in Egypt to living a polyamorous life in Senegal to understanding the intersectionality of religion and pleasure in Cameroon, their necessary narratives are individual and illuminating. This stunning collection provides crucial insight into our quest for sexual power and offers all women inspirational examples to live a truly liberated life.


The Shoulders We Stand On
How Black and Brown people fought for change in the United Kingdom

** Eastern Eye's Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2023 **
** Shortlisted for the HWA Non-Fiction Crown 2024**

The UK is grappling with big questions about belonging, equality and the legacies of Empire and Colonialism. We've been here before. Embracing a broader history that encompasses all British people, The Shoulders We Stand On is fundamental to a better understanding of the past and gives many more people who fought for our future a voice in the present.

'One of the most important books I've ever read . . . this history matters and should never, ever, be forgotten' Dr Priya Atwal, Royals and Rebels

Have you heard of the Indian Workers' Association? The Grunwick Strike? The Brixton Black Women's Group? The Battle of Brick Lane? If the answer is no, you're not alone. The Shoulders We Stand On tells the stories of ten remarkable movements, campaigns and organisations led by Black and Brown people across Britain from the sixties to the eighties that fought against racism and capitalism and impacted the way we live now.

Researcher and historian Preeti Dhillon wants us to reclaim the history that has been kept from us, and use these vital movements and inspirational moments to better understand the UK we live in today and how change happens.

There is a long and deep history of activism by Black and Brown people spanning the UK. Their stories can inspire all of us to make a difference, just as they did. The Shoulders We Stand On is a book of hope. Hope that together we can make a difference, that together we are powerful, and that we don't have to tackle society's challenges alone.

We're not alone, we've been here before and this is the book we all need now.

'A vital contribution to our culture . . . This is beautiful storytelling' Mona Arshi, Somebody Loves You

Filled with inspiring narratives, Preeti Dhillon uncovers crucial moments from our history. If you loved the books Natives and Brit(ish), the TV series Small Axe or the film Pride, don't miss The Shoulders We Stand On.

 


The Starmer Project
A Journey to the Right

The Labour Party has virtually disappeared from view under the leadership of Keir Starmer. Hailed as a human-rights champion and political outsider, what sort of politician is Keir Starmer really, and what mark is he making on the new politics of Labour? In The Starmer Project, Oliver Eagleton provides a careful reading of Starmer’s record at the Crown Prosecution Service and as a member of Jeremy Corbyn’s Shadow Cabinet, tracing the political alliances he forged and the roots of his bid for the Party leadership. Starmer originally pledged to revitalise Corbynism with a dose of lawyerly competence. To understand what happened afterwards it is necessary to understand the man himself. So little remains known about Starmer that his actions are usually interpreted as overtures to others. On closer inspection, however, he is anything but an empty political vessel.


The State and Revolution

The State and the Revolution: The Marxist Doctrine of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution (1917) is a book by Vladimir Lenin describing the role of the state in society, the necessity of proletarian revolution, and the theoretic inadequacies of social democracy in achieving revolution to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.


The Stone House

The year is 1968. The recent Arab defeat in the Naksa has led to the loss of all of historic Palestine. In the midst of violent political upheaval, Mahmoud, a young Palestinian boy living in the Galilee, embarks on a school trip to visit the West Bank for the first time. For Mahmoud, his mother and his grandmother, the journey sets off a flood of memories, tracing moments that bond three generations together. How do these personal experiences become collective history? Why do some feel guilty for surviving war? Is it strange to long for a time never lived? In this groundbreaking novella, Yara Hawari harnesses the enduring power of memory in defiance of the constrictions on Palestinian life. Against a system bent on the erasure of their people, the family’s perseverance is unbroken in the decades-long struggle for their stone house.


The Struggle Within
Prisons, Political Prisoners, and Mass Movements in the United States

The Struggle Within is an accessible yet wide-ranging historical primer about how mass imprisonment has been a tool of repression deployed against diverse left-wing social movements over the last fifty years. Berger examines some of the most dynamic social movements across half a century: black liberation, Puerto Rican independence, Native American sovereignty, Chicano radicalism, white antiracist and working-class mobilizations, pacifist and antinuclear campaigns, and earth liberation and animal rights.

Berger’s encyclopedic knowledge of American social movements provides a rich comparative history of numerous social movements that continue to shape contemporary politics. The book also offers a little-heard voice in contemporary critiques of mass incarceration. Rather than seeing the issue of America’s prison growth as stemming solely from the war on drugs, Berger locates mass incarceration within a slew of social movements that have provided steep challenges to state power.


The Trinity of Fundamentals
Translated by Palestine Youth Movement

On the occasion of Palestinian Prisoners’ Day, the Palestinian Youth Movement’s (PYM) Popular University Committee is thrilled to announce the English translation and publication of Wisam Rafeedie’s The Trinity of Fundamentals. Written in 1993 during Rafeedie’s time in Zionist prison and confiscated by prison guards, the novel was smuggled out by Wisam’s comrades, and soon after became a significant text for the Palestinian prisoner’s movement.
The Trinity of Fundamentals follows the story of 22-year-old Kan’an during his nine years of hiding from the occupation between 1982 and 1991. Driven by an unshakable commitment to the Palestinian cause, Kan’an takes the reader through his compelling journey filled with sacrifice and struggle, love and pain, isolation and liberation. All the while, major political and historical transformations unfold across international, regional and local contexts, including the First Intifada. Throughout all this, Kan’an maintains a spirit of revolutionary optimism so strong that the reader is bound to be transformed. It is all the more moving to know that Kan’an’s story is inspired by the real life experience of Rafeedie as he organized and struggled against the Zionist oppression of his people.


Love, revolution, and life—these are the “Trinity of Fundamentals'' that pave Kan’an’s path of struggle. Although the novel is set in the past, it holds many lessons that resonate with our current political moment, mobilizing us into collective action.


The UK Border Regime
A critical guide

Throughout history, human beings have migrated. To escape war, oppression and poverty, to make a better life, to follow their own dreams. But since the start of the 20th century, modern governments have found ever more vicious ways to stop people moving freely.

The UK border regime includes the razor wire fences at Calais, the limbo of the asylum system, and the open violence of raids and deportations. Alongside the Home Office, it includes the companies running databases and detention centres, the media pushing hate speech, and the politicians posturing to win votes. It keeps on escalating, through Tony Blair’s war on refugees to Theresa May’s “hostile environment”, spreading fear and division.

This book describes and analyses the UK’s system of immigration controls. It looks at how it has developed through recent history, the different actors involved, and how people resist. The aim is to help understand the border regime, and ask how we can fight it effectively.