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The Death of the Millennial Left

The Millennial Left, facing the War on Terror, the Great Recession, the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, and the Black Lives Matter protests, as well as the Presidencies of Obama and Trump and the political discontents expressed by Bernie Sanders, Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn, SYRIZA et al, was tasked with the struggle for socialism in the core of global capitalism. It failed to even attempt this task. In the essays collected here, spanning the Millennial generation’s many agonies, Chris Cutrone cuts through the accumulated legacy of failures that the Millennials inherited from the Left of the 20th century and that blocked their view of the socialist politics needed to turn the crisis of neoliberal capitalism into a struggle to overcome capitalism. 
 
A critique of the history of the recent and current Left, the book is also a lesson in politics: the politics marking the 21st century and the absence of Marxism informing the Left as much as the Right. It is essential reading for anyone interested in a socialist politics of freedom.

How to Stop Being a Teenage Nihilist

In 2017 Stefan Bertram-Lee decided to walk away from their computer keyboard, from their life in the UK as an extremely online 22-year-old edgelord and join the Kurdish YPG in Rojava. Their first book explores the many ways the online left has become truly nihilist and how that nihilism is realized. Offering their own experience in Rojava as a counter to the pessimism of the western left, Bertram Lee argues that, rather than looking to destroy what’s wrong in the world, the left aim at finding a creative political project.
 
Stefan Bertram-Lee is the co-host of the Culture Deconstructed podcast, they are the subject of the motion picture “Stefan vs. Isis,” a graduate student in Sociology at Swansea University in London.

Beyond Family: A Case for Another Regime of Reproduction, Sexuality and Kinship

Beginning by declaring ‘Familia delenda est!’ or “the Family is (to be) destroyed” Bülent Somay argues that the nuclear family is repressive and regressive and needs to be replaced.
 
“The family has now become a hindrance against expanding our horizons, increasing our knowledge, imagining and experimenting new modes of existence, not only for women, but also for children who will become men, women, straight and gay persons, transgender and fluid-gender people, in short, all of us.”
 
Bulent Somay’s previous books include Something is Missing: Things We Don’t Want to Know about Love, Sex and Life, The End of Truth, The Psychopolitics of the Oriental Father and The View from the Masthead

Enjoyment Right & Left

While understanding the psychological structure of pleasure and desire might seem to be unrelated to understanding our current political crisis, Todd McGowan argues that the intrinsically excessive nature of what Lacan would call jouissance, what McGowan calls Enjoyment, is critically important to understand as we try to overcome the contradictions and conflicts that arise in a world that appears split between right and left.
 
The discursive analysis of ideology fails to capture the mode of enjoyment an ideology mobilizes. In his new path-breaking book, Todd McGowan elaborates on the formal structure of enjoyment which distinguishes the Left from the Right. The enjoyment mobilized by the Left is not sustained by envy and resentment. It leaves behind the motifs of the theft of enjoyment that permeates racism and sexism. Enjoyment Right and Left deserves to become an instant classic - it cuts into the very heart of what is wrong in today's fundamentalism and its apparent opposite, permissive liberalism. - Slavoj Žižek, author of Less Than Nothing

I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It

Norman Finkelstein first made his name while still in graduate school when he exposed an acclaimed national bestseller as a hoax. He went on in subsequent decades to subject Israel's apologists as well as Holocaust hucksters to withering scrutiny.
 
In his new book, Finkelstein focuses his keen forensic eye on the canonical texts of identity politics. After methodically parsing them, Finkelstein concludes that they're lacking in intellectual substance. Instead, the real purpose of identity politics is to derail a class-based movement bent on radical change.
 
In a long, scathing chapter, Finkelstein analyzes the cult surrounding Barack Obama, which he reveals as the ultimate product of identity politics. The first Black president rose to power by having, in Obama's own cynical words, "pulled off a neat trick" by standing for nothing except his skin color. If "woke" liberals embraced him, it was because, beneath his hip veneer, Obama was a sure bet to prop up the corrupt status quo.
 
Along the way, Finkelstein recalls his own life in radical politics and his close encounters with cancel culture, which left him unemployed and unemployable. He situates his personal story within broader debates on academic freedom and poignantly concludes that, although occasionally bitter, he harbors no regrets about the choices he made.
 
"If I can't laugh, I don't want your revolution," Finkelstein declares. Laced with his signature wit, readers of this book will get to laugh along with him.