• The national uprising that started in Minneapolis due to the horrific murder of George Floyd has since permeated the rest of the country and parts of the world, and with it calls to defund and abolish the police have grown in unprecedented ways. The Minneapolis City Council has voted to abolish their police department, Seattle has pledged to cut funding to police by 50%, and the uprisings have yet to slow down.  • Statues of violent historical figures such as Christopher Columbus and various slaveowners have been toppled by the people in Philadelphia and Atlanta all the way to Bristol, UK, police precincts and other buildings have been burned to the ground in rage over the extrajudicial killings of Black people. As a result, the US has had to reckon with its violent history of Native genocide, slavery, and the systems of white supremacy that are still ever-present in our current world through the forms of police and prisons. In this very moment, questions about accountability and transformative justice have proliferated across the country, setting the stage to radically reimagine how we protect and care for each other.  • In tandem with these uprisings, COVID-19 has laid bare the ways in which state institutions are not and have never been intended to protect and care for the people. With an unemployment rate of 11%, millions of people are unable to pay rent, buy groceries, and have only been aided by a singular $1,200 stimulus check. Meanwhile, US billionaire wealth has grown by $584 billion in the span of three months exposing the parasitic nature of capitalism. In turn, workers have organized strikes, demanded for better pay, and other necessary protections.  • All of these circumstances have forced a larger reckoning with the violence of our current capitalist system. With an election in November between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, faith in the electoral system has plummeted and instead imaginations have run wild in envisioning radical alternatives to move forward • With uprisings that are organizing directly against the state rising across the country, people in Minneapolis, Seattle, Philadelphia and beyond have begun to organize direct alternatives to the state in the form of the Minneapolis sanctuary hotel, the Capitol Hill Autonomous zone in Seattle, and the homeless encampment in the center of Philadelphia. Mutual aid networks have become commonplace and wealth, food, shelter, and other basic necessities are being redistributed to those most impacted by the US’ present conditions. • Spirals of Revolt: Study and Struggle to Abolish the Presentcomes at precisely the right time to collectively study and imagine what the world can and did look like before, during, and after revolution. Spanning centuries and continents from Haiti, France, and Russia and George situates this history within this current rebellion. • As college classes are going online, a whole new generation of activists and students are reinventing the ways they study together and reading and forming study groups of their own. • Chapters will be focused on presenting a reading of different traditions against each other. Sometimes there will be detailed exploration of a quoted passage other times there will be references to texts that inform the discussion. Chapters will conclude with questions to kickstart the conversation. • The online seminar (and the book) tap into a long history of self-political education in the radical tradition, the Black Panther study groups and the sprawling readers of the Sojourner Truth Organization are just two recentish examples that Spirals emerges from. • More recent examples which we also hope/expect to walk in is the Jacobin magazine reading groups and those guided readings of Capital by David Harvey (online & via his Companion volumes). • The book is written with a very dialogic approach which invites readers in and encourages the reading (& rereading) of texts. • Think of this book as Marie Kondo for social transformation, we “almost” called it: The Life Changing Magic of Dialectical Thinking: The Revolutionary Art of Questioning and Organizing. ; p • Geo is fully behind promoting this book and is willing to show up virtually and in real life to talk about the ideas in it and as a guest visitor to reading groups. • We will be recording short videos for many of the chapters to spur discussion of those who have the book and to get those who don’t to order it. • Geo has a few other books coming out in 2021 and we will be working to build attention for Spirals with those books. This book is written with a different approach than the others so the books will support rather than hurt each other. • There has been a growing trend of reading lists and woke-discussions on twitter; Spirals of Revolt helps people take those conversations to the next level. • The book will contain an annotated further reading list to take readers even further beyond the text. • This book appeals to those who are seeking to immerse themselves in the Black Radical Tradition, of Marx and Fanon, and the ways they speak to and past one another.