BTS Reads...
The BTS editors are always reading, and sometimes writing, books on trafficking, slavery and exploitation. We are collecting our favourites below, and plan to post a new one each month.
Have a book to suggest? Email us at: beyond.slavery@opendemocracy.net
Envisioning Real Utopias
Erik Olin Wright
Rising inequality of income and power, along with recent convulsions in the finance sector, have made the search for alternatives to unbridled capitalism more urgent than ever. Yet few are attempting this task—most analysts argue that any attempt to rethink our social and economic relations is utopian. Erik Olin Wright’s major new work is a comprehensive assault on the quietism of contemporary social theory. A systematic reconstruction of the core values and feasible goals for Left theorists and political actors, Envisioning Real Utopias lays the foundations for a set of concrete, emancipatory alternatives to the capitalist system. Characteristically rigorous and engaging, this will become a landmark of social thought for the twenty-first century.
Envisioning Real Utopias was published June 2010 by Verso. For more information or to order, visit Verso or Amazon.
Modern Slavery: The Margins of Freedom
Julia O’Connell Davidson
There are 35 million ‘slaves’ in the contemporary world according to new abolitionist campaigners, but in a world where nobody is legally ascribed the status ‘slave’ and many are oppressed and exploited, who qualifies for this appellation and why? This book brings the literature on transatlantic slavery into dialogue with research on informal sector labour, child labour, migration, debt, the prison industrial complex, and sex work in the contemporary world in order to challenge received ideas and popular and policy discourses of injustice and suffering, which fail to attend to structural inequalities and suggest that victims are entirely eviscerated of will. In political life, the book argues, the figure of the ‘modern slave’ and her exceptional suffering is worked to protect the interests of the privileged rather than to transform the systems of domination such as race, caste, class, gender and nationality, which routinely restrict individual’s rights. ‘Modern slavery’ is a discourse of depoliticisation.
Calling for more serious political debates about the restriction of freedoms in the contemporary world, this book provides a unique, critical perspective of violence, injustice and exploitation in modern society.
“Passionately written, brilliantly researched and replete with powerfully logical analysis, Julia O’Connell Davidson’s book should be required reading for anyone claiming leadership in today’s ’new abolitionist movement.’”
— James Brewer Stewart, Founder, Historians Against Slavery and James Wallace Professor of History Emeritus, Macalester College, USA
Modern Slavery: The Margins of Freedom was published October 2015 by Palgrave Macmillan. For more information or to order, visit Palgrave Macmillan or Amazon.
