Little remembered today, the worker insurgencies in Portugal and Spain at the end of the Salazar and Franco dictatorships were, for a brief moment in the mid-1970s, at the center of world politics. They occurred in the midst of the 1973-75 crisis of world accumulation, in which capitalism was "changing gears" from the era of the big factory and the assembly line to the era of "globalization," deindustrialization, outsourtcing, downsizing and "just in time," the era in which we live today. They took place in a conjuncture that included the deepest economic downturn (to date) since the end of World War II, the oil crisis, the advance of "Euro-communism," the US defeat in Indochina, the triumph of "national liberation fronts" in the ex-Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique and Ginea-Bissau, and the crisis in the Horn of Africa. World capitalism, centered in the United States, seemed to be everywhere involved in putting out fires, but the Iberian insurgencies were unique among these simultaneous crises in being centered on the working class and, particularly in the case of Portugal, directly posing the question of the state and unmasking the pretensions of different factions of "progressive" state bureaucrats. They were the most genuinely radical moments of the (mainly statist) "red mirage" that, briefly, seemed to have placed world capitalism on the defensive. By the late 1970s, capitalism had returned to the offensive, and the era of Thatcher and Reagan inaugurated a rollback that swept away leftist statism, up to and including the Soviet Union itself.What was ending was the century of the "progressive" state bureaucrat, who had entered the international workers' movement in the German SPD and its 1875 Gotha Program, and who for 100 years seemed, in "socialist" and "communist" guise, to represent something "beyond capitalism." Events since 1975 have shown that the "progressive state bureaucrat," everywhere, from England to China, represented, rather, something before capitalism, throwing the old statist "left" into terminal crisis. This book analyzes the last two Western worker revolts just before this turn, and shows how they already pointed toward a new era, though hardly the immediately revolutionary era they seemed to portend.Now that the statist illusion of the revolutionary workers' movement has been laid to rest once and for all, the Portuguese and Spanish worker revolts of the min-1970s offer one benchmark from which to judge present and future struggles.

Following his acclaimed history of the Situationist International, The Beach Beneath the Street, McKenzie Wark continues the SI’s story, charting its post-sixties legacy and putting the late work of the Situationists in a broader, deeper context. He uncovers a contemporary relevance and searching critique of modernity. Wark builds on their work to map the historical stages of the society of the spectacle, from the diffuse to the integrated to what he calls the “disintegrating spectacle.” The Spectacle of Disintegration takes the reader through the critique of political aesthetics of former Situationist T.J. Clark, the Fourierist utopia of Raoul Vaneigem, René Viénet’s earthy situationist cinema, Gianfranco Sanguinetti’s pranking of the Italian ruling class, Alice Becker-Ho’s account of the anonymous language of the Romany, Guy Debord’s late films and his surprising work as a game designer. At once an extraordinary counter history of radical praxis and a call to action in the age of financial crisis and the resurgence of the streets, The Spectacle of Disintegration recalls the hidden journeys taken in the attempt to leave the twentieth century and plots an exit from the twenty-first. The dustjacket unfolds to reveal a fold-out poster of the collaborative graphic essay combining text selected by McKenzie Wark with composition and drawings by Kevin C. Pyle.

The historical studies presented here examine four ideologies— Leninism, Trotskyism, anarchism, and anti-imperialism— still with us, however different and diffuse in form. They are a contribution to the worldwide Marx renaissance of recent decades which has helped clear away the legacies of the Second, Third and Fourth Internationals, not to mention of the ‘real existing socialism’ of the Soviet Union and its bastard progeny. These revolutionary predecessors did not fail because ‘they had the wrong ideas’; in contrast to today, they were merely embedded in an earlier dynamic where capitalism, globally, was not yet fully dominant. The cases of Russia, Turkey, Spain and Bolivia allow us to measure the distance between their epoch and our own, and to clear away their problematic legacies.

The acclaimed history of the groundbreaking Situationist movement The Situationist International, which leaped to the fore during the Paris tumult of 1968, has extended its revolutionary influence right up to the present day. In Leaving the Twentieth Century, the movement is captured for the first time in its full range and diversity. McKenzie Wark traces the group’s development from the bohemian Paris of the ’50s to the explosive days of May ’68. She introduces the group as an ensemble, revealing the work and activities of thinkers previously obscured by the reputation of founding member Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and exploring the vital lives its members—including Constant, Asger Jorn, Michèle Bernstein, Alexander Trocchi, and Jacqueline de Jong—Wark uncovers a group riven with conflicting passions. She follows the narrative beyond 1968, to the Situationists International’s disintegration and beyond: the ideas of T. J. Clark, the Fourierist utopia of Raoul Vaneigem, René Vienet’s earthy situationist cinema, Gianfranco Sanguinetti’s pranking of the Italian ruling class, Alice Becker-Ho’s account of the anonymous language of the Romany, and Debord’s late films and his surprising work as a game designer.

Spain is at the epicentre of a crisis that threatens the future of the Eurozone. This book explains the deep historical and structural roots of the current crisis in Spain. It analyses the nexus between European circuits of financial capital, urbanisation, and the emergent dynamics of state austerity and popular revolt.

A moving firsthand account of migrant landings on the island of Lampedusa that gives voice to refugees, locals, and volunteers while also exploring a deeply personal father-son relationship. On the island of Lampedusa, the southernmost part of Italy, between Africa and Europe, Davide Enia looks in the faces of those who arrive and those who wait, and tells the story of an individual and collective shipwreck. On one side, a multitude in motion, crossing entire nations and then the Mediterranean Sea under conditions beyond any imagination. On the other, a handful of men and women on the border of an era and a continent, trying to welcome the newcomers. In the middle is the author himself, telling of what actually happens at sea and on land, and the failure of words in the attempt to understand the present paradoxes. Enia reveals the emotional consequences of this touching and disconcerting reality, especially in his relationship with his father, a recently retired doctor who agrees to travel with him to Lampedusa. Witnessing together the public pain of those who land and those who save them from death, alongside the private pain of his uncle's illness, pushes them to reinvent their relationship, to forge a new and unprecedented dialogue that replaces the silences of the past.

In this elegantly written and beautifully illustrated book, Nico Israel reveals how spirals are at the heart of the most significant literature and visual art of the twentieth century. Juxtaposing the work of writers and artists—including W. B. Yeats and Vladimir Tatlin, James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp, and Samuel Beckett and Robert Smithson—he argues that spirals provide a crucial frame for understanding the mutual involvement of modernity, history, and geopolitics, complicating the spatio-temporal logic of literary and artistic genres and of scholarly disciplines. The book takes the spiral not only as its topic but as its method. Drawing on the writings of Walter Benjamin and Alain Badiou, Israel theorizes a way of reading spirals, responding to their dual-directionality as well as their affective power. The sensations associated with spirals––flying, falling, drowning, being smothered—reflect the anxieties of limits tested or breached, and Israel charts these limits as they widen from the local to the global and recoil back. Chapters mix literary and art history to explore 'pataphysics, Futurism, Vorticism, Dada and Surrealism, "Concentrisme," minimalism, and entropic earth art; a coda considers the work of novelist W. G. Sebald and contemporary artist William Kentridge. In Spirals, Israel offers a refreshingly original approach to the history of modernism and its aftermaths, one that gives modernist studies, comparative literature, and art criticism an important new spin.

The essays in this book were written "against the grain" of much of the ideology of the past 50 years, that might be summarized with the term "middle-class radicalism." While such middle-class radicalism may have seemed to overlap with the Marxian project of communism, they are as ultimately opposed as Stirner and Bakunin on one hand and Marx and Luxemburg on the other.