How do we understand the new authoritarianism that has emerged in the context of global instabilities, trade wars, imperial rivalries, and political polarization? Is neoliberalism being replaced by authoritarianism or welded to it? Join Clara Mattei and David McNally for a discussion of these issues explored in the new issue of Spectre Journal.

Speakers:

Clara E. Mattei is Professor of Economics at The University of Tulsa and the President of FREE: Forum for Real Economic Emancipation. She is the author of The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism.

David McNally is the author of Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History. An editor of Spectre journal, he teaches history in Houston where he also directs the Project on Race and Capitalism.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Spectre Journal.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/PTS-cJ37SWc

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join Daniella Toosie-Watson, E. Hughes, and Hanif Abdurraqib for a launch and celebration of Toosie-Watson’s debut poetry collection, What We Do With God.

Daniella Toosie-Watson’s debut poetry collection meditates on the politics of mental health, pleasure, and the natural world. In this book, the everyday miracles of insects are studied, celebrated, and made sacrosanct. Prayer and pleasure are two sides of the same coin. Propriety has no bearing on sensual connection and exploration.

What We Do with God dives into the grotesque, the bestial, the surreal, as a means to defamiliarize abuse; it’s a practice of reclamation. With an unapologetic impiety to holiness and waywardness, What We Do with God invites readers to enter a world where care extends beyond ourselves and those closest to us to ecosystems holding the wider world together.

“Do not mistake the whimsy and irreverence blooming through this collection as a lack of gravity–it is quite the opposite. These poems reinforce how brutally essential a playful imagination is to reckon with a deadly world where faith and grace are hard-earned. Toosie-Watson has compiled a glorious collection burning bright with a wild wit and an even more ferocious wisdom.” Tarfia Faizullah

Speakers:

Daniella Toosie-Watson (she/they) is a writer, visual artist, and the author of What We Do with God (Haymarket Books, 2025). She has been published in the Atlantic, Paris Review, Oxford Poetry, Callaloo, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Her honors include the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize Shortlist, the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, and a Graduate Hopwood Award & Zell Fellowship from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program where she received her MFA in poetry. Daniella lives in New York.

E. Hughes is the author of Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water (Haymarket Books 2024). They received their MFA in poetry and MA in English Literature from the Litowitz Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University. Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in Guernica Magazine, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast Magazine, Colorado Review, and the Rumpus—among others. They are a Cave Canem fellow and have been a finalist for the 2021 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, longlisted for the 2021 Granum Fellowship Prize, and a semifinalist of the 2022 and 2023 92Y Discovery Contest. Currently, Hughes is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Emory University in Continental Philosophy.

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in the FADER, Pitchfork, New Yorker, and New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by Two Dollar Radio and was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Paste, CBC, Los Angeles Review, Pitchfork, and Chicago Tribune, among others. He released Go Ahead In The Rain: Notes To A Tribe Called Quest with University of Texas press in February 2019. The book became a New York Times Bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune For Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House, and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released the book A Little Devil In America with Random House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the The PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. The book won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize. Hanif is a graduate of Beechcroft High School.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/towhupw2ddA

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

For more than two decades, the movement to end mass incarceration has sought to challenge policing, criminalization and incarceration as harmful institutions. Amongst the harms perpetrated by these carceral systems is the punishment paradigm, a term that signifies the hegemonic power of punishment as it now exists in the U.S., embedded in culture, media, law, and policy. Despite a heightened consciousness around the negative impacts of punitive systems following the uprisings of 2020, the institutions of punishment have remained largely intact.

The Trump administration has significantly escalated the use of punishing institutions, like policing, detention, incarceration and deportation, to target migrants, dissidents, and all people at the margins. The federal government has also increased its use of punishment practices, like the threats to punish institutions for not complying with government demands, the outsourcing of punishment to everyday people, and the impunity offered for otherwise punishable offenses to those who side with the administration. This escalation has demonstrated the centrality of punishment to authoritarian regimes, and laid bare the devastating consequences for our communities.

Speakers:

Laura Whitehorn served 14+ years in federal prison for the “Resistance Conspiracy” case.” Released in 1999, she works in the Release Aging People in Prison Campaign (RAPPCampaign.com), and for the release of political prisoners. She edited the "The War Before" by late Black Panther political prisoner and organizer, Safiya Bukari (feministpress.org) and helped organized the 2014 Interference Archive exhibition "Self Determination Inside/Out" which showed how the struggles of incarcerated people affected and shaped social movements on the outside. With her partner, the writer Susie Day, she was part of the prison, labor, and academic delegation to Palestine in 2016.

Nadia Ben-Youssef (she/her) is the granddaughter of artists, refugees, and revolutionaries. A human rights lawyer by training, Nadia currently serves as the Advocacy Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal and advocacy organization working with social movements and communities under threat to dismantle racism, cisheteropatriarchy, economic oppression and abusive state practices. She has expertise in international human rights fora and mechanisms, and extensive experience developing advocacy strategies to influence U.S. decision-makers. Her work often centers at the intersection of art and advocacy, and she curates exhibits and artistic programming that document key human rights concerns, celebrate social movements, and allow creatives the space to chart the future. Central to Nadia's lifework is a commitment to the liberation of Palestine, and she is a proud co-founder of the Adalah Justice Project. Nadia is a member of the NY State bar, and serves on the Boards of Adalah Justice Project, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, and Multitude Films.

Silky Shah is the executive director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to abolish immigration detention in the US. She is also the author of the recently published book, Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition (Haymarket, 2024). Originally from Texas, she began fighting the expansion of immigrant jails on the US-Mexico border in the aftermath of 9/11 and has worked as an organizer on issues related to immigration detention, the prison industrial complex, and racial and migrant justice for over two decades. Her writing on immigration policy and organizing has been published in Teen Vogue, The Nation, Truthout, Inquest, and The Forge.

Charlene Allen is a writer and activist who works with community organizations to heal trauma and foster justice. She has been a restorative and healing justice practitioner for over a decade and advocates for policy changes to expand the use of community-based restorative practices. As a writer, Charlene’s debut novel, Play the Game, (HarperCollins, 2023), explores and advances restorative and healing justice practices in real life situations

Cameron W. Rasmussen is a social worker, researcher, educator, and facilitator. He is an assistant professor at the Thompson School of Social Work & Public Health at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa where he researches issues of accountability, violence, and justice, and the intersections of abolition and social work. Cameron is a Co-Editor of Abolition and Social Work: Possibilities, Paradoxes and the Practice of Community Care and is a Collaborator with the Network to Advance Abolition in Social Work (NAASW).

Co-Sponsors: Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative, Center for Justice at Columbia University, Center for Constitutional Rights, and Haymarket Books.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/CAyIxFkh7U4

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join us for a virtual book launch of How to End Family Policing: From Outrage to Action, a much-needed intervention arguing that the systems that claim to protect children make them—and our communities—less safe.

Based on decades of experience, organizing, and research, How to End Family Policing argues that the child welfare system cannot build genuine safety. In fact, rather than the misleading language of "child welfare," many scholars and activists describe these institutions as "family policing." Drawing on abolitionist principals, this much-needed intervention shows that no kinship network benefits from investigation, surveillance, policing, or forced separation. Contributors include community organizers, parents, civil rights attorneys, scholars, social workers, and survivors of family policing.

Dorothy Roberts, Andrea Ritchie, and Erin Miles Cloud will discuss the historical context of the family policing system and, vitally, how organizers have strategized against it. Order a copy of How to End Family Policing here.

Speakers:

Andrea J. Ritchie (she/her) is a Black lesbian immigrant survivor who has been documenting, organizing, advocating, litigating and agitating around policing and criminalization of Black women, girls, trans, and gender nonconforming people for the past three decades. She has been actively engaged in anti-violence, labor, and LGBTQ organizing, and in movements against state violence and for racial, reproductive, economic, environmental, and gender justice in the U.S., Canada, and internationally since the 1980s. Andrea is the author of Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color, and co-author of No More Police. A Case forAbolition, Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women; and of Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. She co-founded Interrupting Criminalization and the In Our Names Network, a network of over 20 organizations working to end police violence against Black women, girls, trans and gender nonconforming people, and led INCITE!'s work on law enforcement violence. In these capacities and through the Community Resource Hub and National Black Women's Justice Institute she worked with dozens of groups across the country organizing to divest from policing and secure deep investments in community-based strategies that will produce greater public safety.

Dorothy Roberts is the 14th Penn Integrates Knowledge Professor, the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law & Sociology, and the Raymond Pace & Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights at University of Pennsylvania. She is a 2024 MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She is also the founding director of the Penn Program on Race, Science, and Society. An internationally acclaimed scholar, activist, and social critic, she has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning reproduction, bioethics, and child welfare. Her latest book, TORN APART is about how the child welfare system destroys black families and how abolition can build a safer world.

Erin Miles Cloud is a civil rights attorney. She is the co-founder of Movement for Family Power, co-editor of How to End Family Policing, and a former family defense public defender. She is a Black- mixed race mother of two beautiful children.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/dkkhftUco84

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join Tareq Baconi in conversation with Bill Ayers about his new book Fire in Every Direction, a memoir of political and queer awakening, of impossible love amidst generations of displacement, and what it means to return home.

One of LitHub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025, Fire in Every Direction is an account of finding oneself through histories of dispossession and reclaiming what has been silenced.

Speakers:

Tareq Baconi is a Palestinian writer, scholar, and activist. He is the grandson of refugees from Jerusalem and Haifa and grew up between Amman and Beirut. His work has appeared in, among others, The New York Times and The Baffler, and he contributes essays to The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. He has also written for film; his award-winning BFI short One Like Him, a queer love story set in Jordan, screened in over thirty festivals. He is the author of Hamas Contained: A History of Palestinian Resistance, which was shortlisted for the Palestine Book Award, and Fire in Every Direction.

Bill Ayers is an educator, organizer and author of numerous books including When Freedom is the Question Abolition is the Answer: Reflections on Collective Liberation (Beacon Press) and Demand the Impossible! A Radical Manifesto (Haymarket Books). This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Pilsen Community Books.

Watch the live event recording: https://youtube.com/live/KwvEPPKvD6w

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join Haymarket Books, Labor Notes, and the American Prospect for a discussion of how to build labor's power in the Trump era.

With an emboldened Trump in the White House for a second term, the ground has shifted dramatically for unions. The labor movement, like many institutions, is scrambling to devise strategies to build power—or even just survive—during these challenging times.

This authoritarian consolidation of power is testing unions. What can unions do to survive in the second Trump presidency? What tactics and strategies can help organize more new members and best survive an all-out assault on labor and other rights?

Speakers:

Brandon Mancilla, UAW Region 9A Director

Diamonte Brown, President, Baltimore Teachers Union

Jackson Potter, VP, Chicago Teachers Union

moderated by David Dayen, The American Prospect and Natascha Elena Uhlmann, Labor Notes.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books, Labor Notes, and the American Prospect.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/niZH5ErNG_g

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join Haymarket Books and Historical Materialism for a launch and discussion of The Founding of the Red Trade Union International.

In 1921 revolutionary trade-union leaders from across the world met to found the Red Trade Union International, representing millions of workers. The gathering brought together a wide variety of forces within the global labor movement, with proceedings that included acrimonious debates between syndicalists and other currents over the purpose and tasks of trade unions, the nature of class-struggle unionism, and union strategy and tactics. This launch event will discuss the contours of these debates and their relevance for revolutionaries today.

Order a copy here: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2689-the-founding-of-the-red-trade-union-international

Speakers:

Reiner Tosstorff teaches at the history department at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, and is author of The Red International of Labour Unions (RILU) 1920-1937. He has published monographs and articles on Spanish history as well as on the international workers’ movement in the twentieth century.

Daria Dyakonova is a history researcher who teaches at the International University in Geneva, Switzerland. She is co-editor of The Communist Women’s Movement, 1920-1922. Her Ph.D. thesis was on the Canadian Communist Youth and ties with the International Communist Movement during the interwar period.

Mike Taber is editor of The Founding of the Red Trade Union International and is the current director of the Comintern Publishing Project. He has edited a number of volumes on the history of the international socialist and communist movement.

This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books and Historical Materialism.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/Z0UOKR7W7os

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

Join authors David Camfield and brian bean as they discuss a historical approach to abolition, the state, and how our side can build a genuinely liberatory alternative to capitalism.

Increasingly, people are responding to the contemporary crises underwritten by capitalism by exploring the politics of communism. Camfield and bean will draw on historical lessons and debates to bring nuance to the meaning of “solidarity” and clarity to what “abolition” and “revolution” look like in practice as they take on key questions on what this current period of radicalization means for the future of the left.

More on Red Flags:

Red Flags traces the path from the 1917 Russian Revolution to the construction of the world’s first AES society: the USSR. It also looks at the post-revolution societies created along the same lines in China and Cuba. Using the intellectual tools of historical materialism, Red Flags argues that they were not in fact moving towards communism because the social relations remained fixed in class exploitation. The workers were never liberated.

At a time of burgeoning anti-communism from both conservatives and liberals, this book is an accessible, vibrant synthesis of the history of communism that draws on the latest research to develop a rigorous analysis of the contradictions and uneasy truths the left needs to confront if it is to build a genuinely liberatory alternative to capitalism.

https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/red-flags

More on Their End is Our Beginning:

Where do cops come from and what do they do? How did “modern policing” as we know it today come to be? What about the capitalist state necessitates policing? In this clear and comprehensive account of why and how the police—the linchpin of capitalism—function and exist, organizer and author brian bean presents a clear case for the abolition of policing and capitalism.

Their End Is Our Beginning traces the roots and development of policing in global capitalism through colonial rule, racist enslavement, and class oppression, along the way arguing how police power can be challenged and, ultimately, abolished. bean draws from extensive interviews with activists from Mexico to Ireland to Egypt, all of whom share compelling and knowledgeable perspectives on what it takes to—even if temporarily—take down the cops and build a thriving community-organized society, free from the police.

Get Their End is Our Beginning: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2540-their-end-is-our-beginning

Speakers:

David Camfield’s most recent book is Red Flags: A Reckoning with Communism for the Future of the Left. David’s other books are Future on Fire: Capitalism and the Politics of Climate Change, We Can Do Better: Ideas for Changing Society, and Canadian Labour in Crisis: Reinventing the Workers’ Movement. David lives in Winnipeg and teaches in Labour Studies and Sociology at the University of Manitoba. A longtime active socialist, David is on the editorial board of Midnight Sun and hosts the podcast Victor’s Children. His website is prairiered.ca

brian bean is a Chicago-based socialist organizer, writer, and agitator originally from North Carolina. They are one of the founding editors of Rampant Magazine. Their work has been published in Truthout, Jacobin, Tempest, Spectre, Red Flag, New Politics, Socialist Worker, International Viewpoint, and more. They coedited and contributed to the book Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, and wrote Their End is Our Beginning: Cops, Capitalism, and Abolition, both from Haymarket Books.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ac6I29c07N0

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org

The U.S. is experiencing one of the largest waves of political repression in its history. Academics, socialists, leftists, intellectuals, Palestinians, Muslims, labor organizers, trans people, queer folks, migrants, immigrants, people of color, the disabled, the working-class, the poor are all under attack. The state’s efforts to repress free speech are part of a larger campaign to silence and stamp out dissent of all kinds, andmove the U.S. further towards authoritarianism. Recently, Tom Alter, a tenured historian, was fired from his job at Texas State University, simply for speaking as a Socialist.

We must fight back. Join us for this 90 minute Speak Out! with activists, organizers and writers who will share ideas about the meaning of MAGA McCarthyism and how we can together resist.

Speakers:

Tom Alter. Tom Alter is a scholar and activist who was recently fired by Texas State University. He is the author of Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas. He is a member of the Texas State Employees Union, the American Association of University Professors, and Socialist Horizon.

Eman Abdelhadi is a scholar, organizer, and writer based in Chicago. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on Arab and Muslim communities in the United States and has been cited by NPR, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, and other outlets. She co-wrote the revolutionary sci-fi novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions Press, 2022). She writes a regular column on Palestine and politics for In These Times magazine. Her essays have appeared in Jacobin, Truthout, Zeteo, and other publications.

Jodi Dean is Professor of Politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Her most recent books are Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging and Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle, both published by Verso.

Catarina Kissinger is an organizer with the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU / CWA Local 6186), where she helps lead the union’s campaign in defense of Dr. Tom Alter and works to build collective power among faculty, staff, and student workers in higher education.

Karim Mattar is Associate Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A descendant of survivors of the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, he works at the intersection of Palestine studies, the humanities, and higher education. He is currently at work on "Writing the Catastrophe: Trauma and Responsibility Across Generation," a monograph that interweaves personal experience, family history, cultural critique, and political analysis to tell a multigenerational, transcontinental story of responsibility to Palestine. Karim is co-chair of the CAHE Palestine Caucus and Faculty Editor of the AAUP's Journal of Academic Freedom."

David McNally has taught history and political economy at the University of Houston and York University in Toronto. He is currently director of the Project on Race and Capitalism. David is the author of eight books including most recently, Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History published earlier this year by the University of California Press.

This event is sponsored by Committee to Defend Tom Alter, Texas State Employees Union/CWA Local 6186, and Haymarket Books.

Join Kelly Hayes in conversation with Shane Burley, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and Atena O. Danner as they discuss the launch of Read this When Things Fall Apart, bundle of letters to activists and organizers on the frontlines in catastrophic times.

In social movements, some heartbreaks are all but inevitable. Campaigns will be lost. Mental health crises will occur. Social ills, like gender-based violence, will manifest themselves in movement spaces. People will experience profound personal losses. Grief, alienation, and despair can grind us under. Sometimes, we need accompaniment. Sometimes, we need to be met where we’re at by a caring voice of experience. Read This When Things Fall Apart is a care package for activists and organizers building power under fascistic, demoralizing conditions. It’s an outstretched hand, offering history lessons, personal anecdotes, and practical advice about how to navigate the woes of justice work. A survival guide for the heart, this is a book for activists to keep close, and to share with co-strugglers in need.

Personal, reflective, and hopeful, Read This When Things Fall Apart harnesses the writers' individual moments of despair into living, breathing wisdom that chips away at the supposed inevitability of fascist life. Restorative like a letter from a trusted friend and invigorating like a story from a mentor, the book is an indispensable companion for all of us navigating challenging times. Featuring letters from Mariame Kaba, Ashon Crawley, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Eman Abdelhadi, Brian Merchant, and more.

Get the book: https://www.pilsencommunitybooks.com/item/vCQt68DQBH3U0CUUWZyWRw

Speakers:

Kelly Hayes is a Menominee author, organizer, movement educator and photographer. They host Truthout’s podcast Movement Memos and are co-author of the book Let This Radicalize You, with Mariame Kaba. Hayes is also the creator of Organizing My Thoughts, a weekly newsletter about politics and justice work.

Shane Burley is a journalist and filmmaker based in Portland, Oregon. He is the author and editor of four books, including ¡No Pasaran!: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis (AK Press and the Institute for Anarchist Studies, 2022) and Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism (coauthored with Ben Lorber; Melville House, 2024). His work has been featured in places like NBC News, The Daily Beast, Jacobin, Al Jazeera, Truthout, In These Times, Jewish Currents, The Baffler, Yes! Magazine, and Oregon Humanities.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (they/she) is an older cousin, regular person, memory worker, disability and transformative justice uncle bytch, and the author or coeditor of ten books including The Future Is Disabled (coedited with Ejeris Dixon; Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022), Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement (AK Press, 2020), Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018), Tonguebreaker (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019), and Dirty River (Arsenal, 2016). A 2020–2021 Disability Futures Fellow, Lambda and Jeanne Córdova Award winner, five-time Publishing Triangle short-lister, and longtime disabled QTBIPOC space maker, they are currently building Living Altars, a cultural space by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers.

Atena O. Danner is a cultural worker who imagines Black liberation, engaged in boundless curiosity. As a poet, singer, and visual artist, Atena creates work that encompasses kitchen-table specificity and folk story relatability, covering topics including neurodiversity, human connection, and collective liberation. As an organizer and activist, she has worked to incorporate struggles for justice into her life as a caregiver in a family of complex needs while also writing and publishing in journals, antholo- gies, and her own book of poetry, Incantations for Rest: Poems, Meditations & Other Magic (Skinner House, 2022), which was awarded a Nautilus Silver Award for poetry in 2023.

Watch the live event recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/qrpIX72ivqs

Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org