The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems

How most Western governments and elites have supported the destruction of Gaza and silenced voices calling for the rights of Palestinians. 

Providing a record of the first six months of the war waged by the Israeli army after the 7 October attacks and drawing on a rich range of international sources, Didier Fassin examines how most Western governments have acquiesced in and often contributed to the destruction, by the Israeli army, of Gaza, its homes, infrastructures, hospitals, institutions of education, and civilian population. To justify their support and prevent criticism, they have provided an official version of the events, adopting the Israeli narrative. It was largely taken up by mainstream media, which ignored the experiences and perspectives of Palestinians. Dissenting voices were silenced. A policing of language and thought was imposed. Censorship and self-censorship became normalized. 

To call for a ceasefire or to demand the respect of humanitarian law was enough to prompt the ever-ready accusation of antisemitism. Exploring the multiple dimensions of the extreme inequality of lives between the two sides of the conflict and analyzing the complex geopolitical, economic and ideological stakes that underlie it, Fassin intends to constitute an archive of this moral abdication. In his view, the abandonment of the values and principles proclaimed by Western elites to be foundational will leave a deep scar in the history of the world.

Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world. 

Around the globe, people are faced with a spiralling succession of crises, from the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change-induced fires, floods, and storms to the ongoing horrors of mass incarceration, racist policing, brutal immigration enforcement, endemic gender violence, and severe wealth inequality. As governments fail to respond to—or actively engineer—each crisis, ordinary people are finding bold and innovative ways to share resources and support the vulnerable.  

Survival work, when done alongside social movement demands for transformative change, is called mutual aid.  

This book is about mutual aid: why it is so important, what it looks like, and how to do it. It provides a grassroots theory of mutual aid, describes how mutual aid is a crucial part of powerful movements for social justice, and offers concrete tools for organizing, such as how to work in groups, how to foster a collective decision-making process, how to prevent and address conflict, and how to deal with burnout.  

Writing for those new to activism as well as those who have been in social movements for a long time, Dean Spade draws on years of organizing to offer a radical vision of community mobilization, social transformation, compassionate activism, and solidarity.

A young woman from a long line of assassins, lives her life with the ardent mission to avoid the trappings of any enduring romantic love, while keeping one on the pursuit of an untimely death for herself. 

Not yet thirty, Bathory, or 'Bat' to those near to her, has assembled a peculiar Model, sex worker, linguist and scholar of Latin. But nothing in her lively job history employs the singular traits she inherited from her strange family, chief among them an uncanny ability to sidestep seemingly certain death(s). An appropriate atavistic instinct, for someone from a long line of assassins and spies. Her clan are assassins of a romantic bent, her parents issuing theories on love galore. However Bat is set on swerving any enduring romantic loves, and she's set on dying young. Now, if she could only avoid that one alluring figure from her father's past.

A thriller, a love story, and a dynamic examination of class, violence and connection. The images we make to share and those we strive to conceal, alienation and salvation, magic and technology, LaCava's bold new novel is propelled by the compelling violence one can seed in contradiction.

One of America's most historic political trials is undoubtedly that of Angela Davis. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Davis, and including contributions from numerous radicals such as Black Panthers George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins, this book is not only an account of Davis's incarceration and the struggles surrounding it, but also perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of the prison system of the United State.  

Since the book was written, the carceral system in the US has seen unprecedented growth, with more of America's black population behind bars than ever before. The scathing analysis of the role of prison and the policing of black populations offered by Davis and her comrades in this astonishing volume remains as pertinent today as the day it was first published.  

Featuring contributions from George Jackson, Bettina Aptheker, Bobby Seale, James Baldwin, Ruchell Magee, Julian Bond, Huey P. Newton, Erika Huggins, Fleeta Drumgo, John Clutchette, and others.

The Salvage Editorial Collective on the Covid-19 crisis.

Including: ‘Mothering Against the World' by Sophie Lewis on ‘Momrades’, ‘The Bushes’ a new fiction by China Miéville, ‘Hookers and Other Angels’ photography from Juno Mac, ‘Prepared for the Worst’ by Richard Seymour on Disaster Nationalism, ‘Welfare State Populism and the “Left-Behind Left”’ by Kevin Ochieng Okoth, ‘A Glimmer of a Shell of a Husk’ by Maya Osborne; ‘The Phallic Road to Socialism’ by Sebastian Budgen; A newly translated interview with Daniel Guérin, ‘Nationalism After Coronavirus’ by Sivamohan Valluvan, ‘Striking in Striking Times: Capitalism’s Coronavirus Crisis’ by Gregor Gall, ‘Getting Dressed for a Pandemic’ by Camila Valle, ‘Out of the Iron Lung: A Miasma Theory of Coronavirus’ by Matthew Broomfield.

Poetry by Nisha Ramayya, this issue’s featured poet, and an interview with her conducted by Salvage poetry editor, Caitlín Doherty. Plus the return of the Salvage Editorial Collective perspectives pamphlet, and a postcard.

Salvage is a bi-annual journal of revolutionary arts and letters. Salvage is written by and for the desolated Left, by and for those sick of capitalism and its planetary death-drive, implacably opposed to the fascist reflux and all ‘national’ solutions to our crisis, committed to radical change, guarded against the encroachments of ‘woke’ capitalism and its sadistic dramaphagy, and impatient with the Left’s bad faith and bullshit.

Published June 2020

David Graeber's interviews (with Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Nika Dubrovsky, and Assia Turquier-Zauberman) redefine the contours of what an anarchist morality could be today.

David Graeber's influential thinking was always at odds with the liberal and left-wing mainstream. Drawing on his huge theoretical and practical experience as an ethnologist and anthropologist, activist and anarchist, Graeber and his interlocutors develop a ramified genealogy of anarchist thought and possible perspectives for 21st-century politics.

Diverging from the familiar lines of historical anarchism, and against the background of movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the Gilets Jaunes, the aim is to provide new political impulses that go beyond the usual schemata of unavoidableness. The spontaneous and swift-moving polylogue shows Graeber as a spirited, unorthodox thinker and radical activist for whom the group can always achieve more than the individual.

David Graeber (1961-2020) was an American anthropologist, anarchist, political activist, the author of several books, and a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Until 2007 he was assistant and associate professor of anthropology at Yale University, until 2013 a reader for Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and until last a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics.

This book charts the journey of Black feminist, artist, researcher and curator Nydia A Swaby as she pieces together a biography of Pan-Africanist and feminist Amy Ashwood Garvey from her scattered archive. In turn, it offers a reflection on the future of Black feminist archival practice.

Often referred to as the first wife of Marcus Garvey, Amy Ashwood Garvey’s contributions to movements for social justice, and in particular Black women’s rights, have largely been forgotten, not least since archives about her life and work are spread across the various places she lived.

After helping Marcus Garvey set up the UNIA, one of the most influential Pan-African movements in the world, Amy moved to New York, where she thrived in the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1930s she emigrated to Britain, where she set up a boarding house and social centre called the Afro People’s Centre, and a club called the Florence Mills Social Parlour. Swaby recovers Amy’s life and work as an important political activist, cultural producer and Pan-Africanist in her own right, retracing her steps across the Caribbean, US, Britain and West Africa.

In addition to conducting traditional archival research, Swaby creates a series of ‘curatorial fabulations’, imagining into the gaps in the archive with her autoethnographic practice. Drawing on the work of contemporary Black feminist researchers, archivists, curators and artists, and her own creative practice, Swaby animates the process of creating and curating Ashwood Garvey’s archive. In doing so, she reflects on the practice of Black feminist archiving past, present and future.

This is the third book in LW’s Radical Black Women Series. It will be essential reading for scholars and students of Black feminism, Pan-Africanism, Black British history, Black arts and archival practice. Endorsements forthcoming from leading scholars in the field including Carole Boyce Davies, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, Kelly Foster, Kesewa John and Lola Olufemi.

"Absolutely what we need in these days of spreading gloom. A very well argued case for joyful militancy, and against the dead hand of puritanical revolution. Read it, live it!” — John Holloway, author of Crack Capitalism

Why do radical movements and spaces sometimes feel laden with fear, anxiety, suspicion, self-righteousness, and competition? Montgomery and bergman call this phenomenon rigid radicalism: congealed and toxic ways of relating that have seeped into social movements, posing as the “correct” way of being radical. In conversation with organizers and intellectuals from a wide variety of political currents, the authors explore how rigid radicalism smuggles itself into radical spaces, and how it is being undone.

Interviewees include Silvia Federici, adrienne maree brown, Marina Sitrin, Gustavo Esteva, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Walidah Imarisha, Margaret Killjoy, Glen Coulthard, Richard Day, and more.