In his brilliant interdisciplinary analysis of the global financial crisis, Joseph Vogl aims to demystify finance capitalism—with its bewildering array of new instruments—by tracing the historical stages through which the financial market achieved its current autonomy. Classical and neoclassical economic theorists have played a decisive role here. Ignoring early warnings about the instability of speculative finance markets, they have persisted in their belief in the inherent equilibrium of the market, describing even major crises as mere aberrations or adjustments and rationalizing dubious financial practices that escalate risk while seeking to manage it. "The market knows best": this is a secular version of Adam Smith's faith in the market's "invisible hand," his economic interpretation of eighteenth-century providentialist theodicy, which subsequently hardened into an "oikodicy," an unquestioning belief in the self-regulating beneficence of market forces. Vogl shows that financial theory, assisted by mathematical modeling and digital technology, itself operates as a "hidden hand," pushing economic reality into unknown territory. He challenges economic theorists to move beyond the neoclassical paradigm to discern the true contours of the current epoch of financial convulsions.
The author argues that with the collapse of communism, world leaders must now answer the question about the kind of capitalism that is going to replace bankrupt economies. This book highlights the success of a mixed economy that combines a free market with state responsibility for infrastructure.
Postcolonial theory has become enormously influential as a framework for understanding the Global South. It is also a school of thought popular because of its rejection of the supposedly universalizing categories of the Enlightenment. In this devastating critique, mounted on behalf of the radical Enlightenment tradition, Vivek Chibber offers the most comprehensive response yet to postcolonial theory. Focusing on the hugely popular Subaltern Studies project, Chibber shows that its foundational arguments are based on a series of analytical and historical misapprehensions. He demonstrates that it is possible to affirm a universalizing theory without succumbing to Eurocentrism or reductionism. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital promises to be a historical milestone in contemporary social theory.
Prodigiously influential, Jacques Derrida gave rise to a comprehensive rethinking of the basic concepts and categories of Western philosophy in the latter part of the twentieth century, with writings central to our understanding of language, meaning, identity, ethics and values. In 1993, a conference was organized around the question, 'Whither Marxism?’, and Derrida was invited to open the proceedings. His plenary address, 'Specters of Marx', delivered in two parts, forms the basis of this book. Hotly debated when it was first published, a rapidly changing world and world politics have scarcely dented the relevance of this book.
Joseph Schumpeter oscillated in his view about the type of economic system that was most conducive to growth. In his 1911 treatise, Schumpeter argued that a more decentralized and turbulent industry structure where the pro cess of creative destruction was triggered by vigorous entrepreneurial ac tivity was the engine of economic growth. But by 1942 Schumpeter had modified his theory, arguing instead that a more centralized and stable industry structure was more conducive to growth. According to Schum peter (1942, p. 132), under the managed economy there was little room for entrepreneurship because, "Innovation itself is being reduced to routine. Technological progress is increasingly becoming the business of teams of trained specialists who turn out what is required to make it work in pre dictable ways" (p. 132). Schumpeter (1942) reversed his earlier view by arguing that the integration of knowledge creation and appropriation be stowed an inherent innovative advantage upon giant corporations, "Since capitalist enterprise, by its very achievements, tends to automize progress, we conclude that it tends to make itself superfluous - to break to pieces under the pressure of its own success.
Capitalism is stumbling, empire is faltering, and the planet is thawing. Yet many people are still grasping to understand these multiple crises and to find a way forward to a just future. Into the breach come the essential insights of Capital and Its Discontents, which cut through the gristle to get to the heart of the matter about the nature of capitalism and imperialism, capitalism’s vulnerabilities at this conjuncture—and what can we do to hasten its demise. Through a series of incisive conversations with some of the most eminent thinkers and political economists on the Left—including David Harvey, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Mike Davis, Leo Panitch, Tariq Ali, and Noam Chomsky—Capital and Its Discontents illuminates the dynamic contradictions undergirding capitalism and the potential for its dethroning. The book challenges conventional wisdom on the Left about the nature of globalization, neoliberalism, and imperialism, as well as the agrarian question in the Global South. It probes deeply into the roots of the global economic meltdown, the role of debt and privatization in dampening social revolt, and considers capitalism’s dynamic ability to find ever new sources of accumulation—whether through imperial or ecological plunder or the commodification of previously unpaid female labor. The Left luminaries in Capital and Its Discontents look at potential avenues out of the mess—as well as wrong turns and needless detours—drawing lessons from the history of post-colonial states in the Global South, struggles against imperialism past and present, the eternal pendulum swing of radicalism, the corrosive legacy of postmodernism, and the potentialities of the radical humanist tradition. At a moment when capitalism as a system is more reviled than ever, here is an indispensable toolbox of ideas for action by some of the most brilliant thinkers of our times. Full list of Interviewees: Noam Chomsky is a laureate professor at the University of Arizona and professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics and Chomsky is one of the foremost critics of U.S. foreign policy. He has published numerous groundbreaking books, articles, and essays on global politics, history, and linguistics. His recent books include Who Rules the World? and Hopes and Prospects. Tariq Ali is a historian, novelist, and filmmaker, and the author of many books. He is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review and a contributor to the Guardian and the London Review of Books. Mike Davis is an urban theorist, historian, and political activist, author of many works including City of Quartz. He is an editor of the New Left Review and received a MacArthur Fellowship Award and the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. Ellen Meiksins Wood, for many years professor of political science at York University, Toronto, is the author of a number of books, including The Origin of Capitalism and Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. David Harvey is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a pioneering radical geographer. He has written numerous books and is among the 20 most cited authors in the humanities. Leo Panitch teaches political economy at York University in Toronto and is coeditor of the Socialist Register. He is the author of numerous books, including In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives, published by PM Press. Doug Henwood is editor of Left Business Observer, author of After the New Economy and Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom, and a contributing editor to The Nation magazine. A South African native, Gillian Hart is professor of geography at UC Berkeley and the author of Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa. John Bellamy Foster is the editor of the independent socialist magazine Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon in Eugene. He is the coauthor, among other works, of The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences. Ursula Huws is the editor of the international interdisciplinary journal Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation, and the author of The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World. David McNally is professor of political science at York University in Toronto and the author of many books, including Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance, published by PM Press. Jason W. Moore is a research fellow at the Department of Human Geography at Lund University, Sweden. Vivek Chibber is professor of sociology at New York University and the author of Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India. John Sanbonmatsu teaches philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. He is the author of The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making? of a New Political Subject. Andrej Grubačić is a dissident from the Balkans. A radical historian and sociologist, he is the coauthor of Wobblies and Zapatistas and author of Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! (both from PM Press).
Imagine a capitalist paradise. An island utopia governed solely by the rules of the market and inspired by the fictions of Ayn Rand and Robinson Crusoe. Sound far-fetched? It may not be. The past half century is littered with the remains of such experiments in what Raymond Craib calls “libertarian exit.” Often dismissed as little more than the dreams of crazy, rich Caucasians, exit strategies have been tried out from the southwest Pacific to the Caribbean, from the North Sea to the high seas, often with dire consequences for local inhabitants. Based on research in archives in the US, the UK, and Vanuatu, as well as in FBI files acquired through the Freedom of Information Act, Craib explores in careful detail the ideology and practice of libertarian exit and its place in the histories of contemporary capitalism, decolonization, empire, and oceans and islands. Adventure Capitalism is a global history that intersects with an array of figures: Fidel Castro and the Koch brothers, American segregationists and Melanesian socialists, Honolulu-based real estate speculators and British Special Branch spies, soldiers of fortune and English lords, Orange County engineers and Tongan navigators, CIA operatives and CBS news executives, and a new breed of techno-utopians and an old guard of Honduran coup leaders. This is not only a history of our time but, given the new iterations of privatized exit—seasteads, free private cities, and space colonization—it is also a history of our future.
Global Slump analyzes the global financial meltdown as the first systemic crisis of the neoliberal stage of capitalism. It argues that—far from having ended—the crisis has ushered in a whole period of worldwide economic and political turbulence. In developing an account of the crisis as rooted in fundamental features of capitalism, Global Slump challenges the view that its source lies in financial deregulation. The book locates the recent meltdown in the intense economic restructuring that marked the recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s. Through this lens, it highlights the emergence of new patterns of world inequality and new centers of accumulation, particularly in East Asia, and the profound economic instabilities these produced. Global Slump offers an original account of the “financialization” of the world economy during this period, and explores the intricate connections between international financial markets and new forms of debt and dispossession, particularly in the Global South. Analyzing the massive intervention of the world’s central banks to stave off another Great Depression, Global Slump shows that, while averting a complete meltdown, this intervention also laid the basis for recurring crises for poor and working class people: job loss, increased poverty and inequality, and deep cuts to social programs. The book takes a global view of these processes, exposing the damage inflicted on countries in the Global South, as well as the intensification of racism and attacks on migrant workers. At the same time, Global Slump also traces new patterns of social and political resistance—from housing activism and education struggles, to mass strikes and protests in Martinique, Guadeloupe, France and Puerto Rico—as indicators of the potential for building anti-capitalist opposition to the damage that neoliberal capitalism is inflicting on the lives of millions.
In this groundbreaking study of the financial meltdown, renowned radical political economists lay bare the roots of the crisis in the inner logic of capitalism itself. Objective and detailed, this account provocatively challenges the call for a return to a largely mythical golden age of economic regulation as a check on finance capital. In addition, it deftly illuminates how the era of neoliberal free markets has been, in practice, under-girded by state intervention on a massive scale. Arguing for genuinely transformative alternatives to capitalism, and discussing how to build the collective capacity to realize these goals, this record is a critique of the crisis and an indispensable springboard for a renewed political left.
In contrast to the traditional view that Marx's work is restricted to a critique of capitalism and does not contain a detailed or coherent conception of its alternative, this book shows, through an analysis of his published and unpublished writings, that Marx was committed to a specific concept of a post-capitalist society that informed his critique of value production, alienated labor and capitalist accumulation. Instead of focusing on the present with only a passing reference to the future, Marx's emphasis on capitalism's tendency towards dissolution is rooted in a specific conception of what should replace it. In critically re-examining that conception, this book addresses the quest for an alternative to capitalism that has taken on increased importance today.
