Drawing up alternate ways to “make a living” beyond capitalism To live in this world is to be conditioned by capital. Once paired with Western democracy, unfettered capitalism has led to a shrinking economic system that squeezes out billions of people—creating a planet of surplus populations. Wageless Life is a manifesto for building a future beyond the toxic failures of late-stage capitalism. Daring to imagine new social relations, new modes of economic existence, and new collective worlds, the authors provide skills and tools for perceiving—and living in— a post-capitalist future. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

First title of the new series Work in Global and Historical Perspective that introduces the conceptual approach towards the field of global labour history through a collection of essays chosen by the editors.

In Reclaiming the Discarded Kathleen M. Millar offers an evocative ethnography of Jardim Gramacho, a sprawling garbage dump on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, where roughly two thousand self-employed workers known as catadores collect recyclable materials. While the figure of the scavenger sifting through garbage seems iconic of wageless life today, Millar shows how the work of reclaiming recyclables is more than a survival strategy or an informal labor practice. Rather, the stories of catadores show how this work is inseparable from conceptions of the good life and from human struggles to realize these visions within precarious conditions of urban poverty. By approaching the work of catadores as highly generative, Millar calls into question the category of informality, common conceptions of garbage, and the continued normativity of wage labor. In so doing, she illuminates how waste lies at the heart of relations of inequality and projects of social transformation.

This volume challenges the idea of wage employment as the global norm, comparing lived experiences of ‘ordinary work’ across conceptual and geographical boundaries and opening up new possibilities for how work, income, identity and care might be woven together differently.

Dutch Racism is the first comprehensive study of its kind. The approach is unique, not comparative but relational, in unraveling the legacy of racism in the Netherlands and the (former) colonies. Authors contribute to identifying the complex ways in which racism operates in and beyond the national borders, shaped by European and global influences, and intersecting with other systems of domination. Contrary to common sense beliefs it appears that old-fashioned biological notions of “race” never disappeared. At the same time the Netherlands echoes, if not leads, a wider European trend, where offensive statements about Muslims are an everyday phenomenon. Dutch Racism challenges readers to question what happens when the moral rejection of racism looses ground. The volume captures the layered nature of Dutch racism through a plurality of registers, methods, and disciplinary approaches: from sociology and history to literary analysis, art history and psychoanalysis, all different elements competing for relevance, truth value, and explanatory power. This range of voices and visions offers illuminating insights in the two closely related questions that organize this book: what factors contribute to the complexity of Dutch racism? And why is the concept of racism so intensely contested? The volume will speak to audiences across the humanities and social sciences and can be used as textbook in undergraduate as well as graduate courses. Philomena Essed is professor of Critical Race, Gender and Leadership studies, Antioch University (USA), PhD in Leadership and Change Program. Her books and edited volumes include Everyday Racism; Understanding Everyday Racism, Race Critical Theories; A Companion to Gender Studies (“outstanding” 2005 CHOICE award); and, Clones, Fakes and Posthumans: Cultures of Replication. Isabel Hoving is diversity officer at the Leiden University and affiliated with the Department of Film and Literary Studies of Leiden University. Her books include In Praise of New Travellers, Veranderingen van het alledaagse, and several other volumes on migration, Caribbean literatures, African literature and art. In addition to her academic work, she is an awarded youth writer.

Over the last forty years, the human landscape of the United States has been fundamentally transformed. The metamorphosis is partially visible in the ascendance of glittering, coastal hubs for finance, infotech, and the so-called creative class. But this is only the tip of an economic iceberg, the bulk of which lies in the darkness of the declining heartland or on the dimly lit fringe of sprawling cities. This is America’s hinterland, populated by towering grain threshers and hunched farmworkers, where laborers drawn from every corner of the world crowd into factories and “fulfillment centers” and where cold storage trailers are filled with fentanyl-bloated corpses when the morgues cannot contain the dead. Urgent and unsparing, this book opens our eyes to America’s new heart of darkness. Driven by an ever-expanding socioeconomic crisis, America’s class structure is recomposing itself in new geographies of race, poverty, and production. The center has fallen. Riots ricochet from city to city led by no one in particular. Anarchists smash financial centers as a resurgent far right builds power in the countryside. Drawing on his direct experience of recent popular unrest, from the Occupy movement to the wave of riots and blockades that began in Ferguson, Missouri, Phil A. Neel provides a close-up view of this landscape in all its grim but captivating detail. Inaugurating the new Field Notes series, published in association with the Brooklyn Rail, Neel’s book tells the intimate story of a life lived within America’s hinterland.

In the mid-1990s, at the height of academic discussion about the inevitability of capitalist globalization, J. K. Gibson-Graham presented a groundbreaking and controversial argument for envisioning alternative economies. This new edition includes an introduction in which the authors address critical responses to The End of Capitalism and outline the economic research and activism they have been engaged in since the book was first published. “Paralyzing problems are banished by this dazzlingly lucid, creative, and practical rethinking of class and economic transformation.” —Meaghan Morris, Lingnan University, Hong Kong “Profoundly imaginative.” —Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, City University of New York “Filled with insights, it is clearly written and well supported with good examples of actual, deconstructive practices.” —International Journal of Urban and Regional Research J. K. Gibson-Graham is the pen name of Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, feminist economic geographers who work, respectively, at the Australian National University in Canberra and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.