Anti-Fascist Smart Thinking Books
Far-right fascists are being met in the streets of the UK with multiples more anti-fascist and anti-racist ordinary people. Let's keep going. These books will help.
No Pasarán.
Review From Bookshop.org:
Fascism and Democracy collects five brilliant examples of Orwell's writing during the darkest days of World War Two. Grappling with the principles of democracy and the potential of reform, the meaning of literature and free speech in times of violence, and the sustainability of objective truth, Orwell offers a compelling portrayal of a nation where norms and ideals can no longer be taken for granted. Like the best of Orwell's writing, these essays also serve as timeless reminders of the fragility of freedom.
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For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity—cuts to wages, fiscal spending, and public benefits—as a path to solvency. While these policies have been successful in appeasing creditors, they’ve had devastating effects on social and economic welfare in countries all over the world. Today, as austerity remains a favored policy among troubled states, an important question remains: What if solvency was never really the goal?
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The far right is on the rise across the world. From Modi's India to Bolsonaro's Brazil and Erdogan's Turkey, fascism is not a horror that we have left in the past; it is a recurring nightmare that is happening again - and we need to find a better way to fight it.
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In HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST Ibram X. Kendi, one of the world's most influential scholars on racism, demolishes the idea of a post-racial society, punctures the myths and taboos that cloud our understanding of racism and presents a radically new approach to tackling it.
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A moving, powerful, and deep look at the motivations and emotions that are all too often hijacked by the machinations of modern society, which often then fixates them on othering.
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Fascism and Democracy
Buy On:
Bookshop.org UK £1.89
Blackwells £3.55
Waterstones £1.99
The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism
In The Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital—and indeed capitalism—in times of social upheaval from below.
Mattei traces modern austerity to its origins in interwar Britain and Italy, revealing how the threat of working-class power in the years after World War I animated a set of top-down economic policies that elevated owners, smothered workers, and imposed a rigid economic hierarchy across their societies. Where these policies “succeeded,” relatively speaking, was in their enrichment of certain parties, including employers and foreign trade interests, who accumulated power and capital at the expense of labor. Here, Mattei argues, is where the true value of austerity can be observed: its insulation of entrenched privilege and its elimination of all alternatives to capitalism.
Drawing on newly uncovered archival material from Britain and Italy, much of it translated for the first time, The Capital Order offers a damning and essential new account of the rise of austerity—and of modern economics—at the levers of contemporary political power.
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Bookshop.org UK £24.00
Bookshop.org US $27.90
Blackwells £24.00
Waterstones £24.00
How to Stop Fascism: History, Ideology, Resistance
In How to Stop Fascism, Paul Mason offers a radical, hopeful blueprint for resisting and defeating the new far right. The book is both a chilling portrait of contemporary fascism, and a compelling history of the fascist phenomenon: its psychological roots, political theories and genocidal logic. Fascism, Mason powerfully argues, is a symptom of capitalist failure, and it has haunted us throughout the twentieth century.
History shows us the conditions that breed fascism, and how it can be successfully overcome. But it is up to us in the present to challenge it, and time is running out. From the ashes of COVID-19, we have an opportunity to create a fairer, more equal society. To do so, we must ask ourselves: what kind of world do we want to live in? And what are we going to do about it?
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Bookshop.org UK £10.44
Bookshop.org US $18.59
Blackwells £10.43
Waterstones £10.99
How to Be an Antiracist
He shows how everyone is, at times, complicit in maintaining the structure of racism though we rarely realise it, and gives us the tools to identify and change those behaviours.
Uncompromising but essential, HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST sparked a new conversation about being antiracist around the world, showing that until we become part of the solution, we can only be part of the problem.
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Bookshop.org UK £10.44
Bookshop.org US $17.66
Blackwells £10.43
Waterstones £10.99
How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division
Through the contemporary lenses of the pandemic, emigration, and the dichotomies of the social media landscape, Shafak explores how these emotions have become heightened in us all, and how we can actively work to mitigate them and their effects using more positive replacements.
A short read that stays with you long after.
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Bookshop.org UK £6.64
Blackwells £7.11
Waterstones £6.99
Image Copyrights: Penguin Books Ltd (Fascism and Democracy, How To Stop Facism), The University of Chicago Press (The Capital Order), Vintage Publishing (How To Be an Antiracist), Profile Books Ltd (How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division).
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