Radical Chains
by Chris Nineham

Class, consciousness and the end of capitalism.

At a time of almost unimaginable inequality, the mainstream still tries to ignore class. Radical Chains: Why Class Matters argues that denial of class is no coincidence but in fact central to the system’s survival. Exploring largely ignored histories of struggle and challenging the many myths about class today, Radical Chains puts forward the case that it is time to place class once again at the centre of emancipatory politics.

Reviews:
It would be an understatement to say that Radical Chains: Why Class Matters is needed on the left.

Socialists of all traditions always agree about one thing: the absolute centrality of class as a social relation to understanding the totality, and the necessity of the working class to be a class “for itself” as well as “in itself.”

The book provides a really useful reminder of that for the labour movement. ~ , Morning Star

Compelling, compact ... wide-ranging ... A much-needed explanation for why a return to class is essential if we are to have a future worthy of human beings. ~ Paul LeBlanc, author of A Short History of the US Working Class and From Marx to Gramsci

Beautifully written, Radical Chains shows how class struggle has put the issue of human freedom on the agenda over and over again. It is panoramic in its historical scope… a much needed challenge to the fragmentation wrought by academic postmodernism. ~ Tony McKenna, author of The War on Marxism

This important and timely book makes the argument that the side-lining of class in mainstream political debate today has only one winner: the establishment. ~ Holly Rigby, teacher, activist, and writer

Sets right the disastrous error of representing class as an identity or a cultural category equivalent to other twenty-first-century identities. An urgent read. ~ Rachel Holmes, author of Eleanor Marx: A Life

Covering a vast terrain from the necessity of organization to the problems of identity politics, this is a much-needed treatise on the emancipatory possibilities of understanding class as a social relation. ~ Alpa Shah, Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, author of the award-winning Nightmarch: Among India’s Revolutionary Guerrillas

This is a powerful book…It will be controversial with commentators, many academics and mainstream left politicians, but his case that the working class has always been the most important source of radical ideas in society is strong. Read it. ~ Raju J Das, Professor at York University, Toronto, and author of Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World

This fantastic and concise global survey of class struggles … raises questions and teaches lessons that we mustn’t ignore as we head into the coming storms. ~ Mike Wayne, author of England’s Discontents: Political Cultures and National Identities

A much-needed book at a time of growing class struggle, but when class still remains on the margins in the academy. A clear-sighted and accessible analysis of how to understand class in the neoliberal era. ~ Deepa Kumar, Professor of Media Studies, Rutgers University, author of Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike