Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-first Century by Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson and Vassilis Tsianos

Illegal migrants who evade detection, creators of value in insecure and precarious economies and those who refuse the constraints of sexual and biomedical classifications: these are the people who manage to subvert control and to craft unexpected sociabilities and experiences. Escape Routes shows how people can escape control and create social change by becoming imperceptible to the political system of Western societies. The authors offer two important tools for intervening. Firstly, they give an account of a new formation of power emerging today: postliberal control.
Postliberal control bypasses people’s demands for rights and representation and installs strong hierarchies which include some and exclude many others from participating in society. This new form of control is most evident and most effective in the fields of biotechnology, migration and labour. The second tool is a concrete approach to the subversion of postliberal control – an approach which is being and can be usefully adopted in organising radical political engagements today.
A profound and brilliant examination of the power of exodus to create radical interventions in perhaps the three most important and contested fields of society today: life, migration and precarious labour. It is in these fields that the present and future of multitude is at stake.

Escape Routes is a toolbox in the hands of multitude
Antonio Negri, author of Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State (1999), and co-author of Empire (2000) and Multitude (2005)

This is one of the most original treatments of some of the big questions we confront today. Even familiar subjects gain a new kind of traction as they are repositioned in the authors sharply defined lens of control and subversion. This is conceptualisation at its best – Escape Routes allows us to see what might otherwise be illegible and it continuously executes reversals of standard interpretations of the present
Saskia Sassen, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and author of Territory, Authority, Rights (2006)

Another world is here! So announce the authors in their preface to a stirring and intellectually inspiring book about the possibility, the necessity and the potency of escape. Rather than seeing social transformation in terms of revolt, event and abrupt shifts, the authors trace escape routes through the ordinary and through everyday practices. Escape Routes is required reading for anyone who believes in the alternative worlds produced alongside neoliberal capitalism
Judith Halberstam, Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California and author of In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives and Female Masculinity (2005)

Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee

The Coming Insurrection is an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe. Written by the anonymous Invisible Committee in the vein of Guy Debord and with comparable elegance it has been proclaimed a manual for terrorism by the French government (who recently arrested its alleged authors). One of its members more adequately described the group as “the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality.”
The Coming Insurrection is a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine to “spread anarchy and live communism.” Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and presaging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the “war on terror.” Hot-wired to the movement of ’77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point, The Coming Insurrection formulates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized forms-of-life. It is a philosophical statement that addresses the growing number of those in France, in the United States, and elsewhere who refuse the idea that theory, politics, and life are separate realms.

I am not calling for a ban on this book. It’s important that you read this book. [...] And let me tell you something: Don’t dismiss these people. Don’t dismiss them
Glenn Beck, Fox News / Glenn Beck Program

Aesthetics and Politics by Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht and Georg Lukacs

Features the text in the great controversies over literature and art between thinkers who have become giants of 20th-century philosophy.

This is vital reading for anyone concerned with the relationship between art and socialism
John Fowles

Key texts in the study of modernism
Raymond Williams