138 results for "Capitalism"

People, power, and profits: progressive capitalism for an age of discontent

Stiglitz, Joseph E.
“Urgent work, by the foremost champion of ‘progressive capitalism.’ ” — The New Yorker An authoritative account of the dangers of unfettered markets and monied politics, People, Power, and Profits shows us an America in crisis. The American people, however, are far from powerless, and Joseph Stiglitz provides an alternative path forward through his vision of progressive capitalism, with a comprehensive set of political and economic changes.
W.W. Norton & Company 2019 371 pages

The battle for paradise: Puerto Rico takes on the disaster capitalists

Klein, Naomi
"We are in a fight for our lives. Hurricanes Irma and María unmasked the colonialism we face in Puerto Rico, and the inequality it fosters, creating a fierce humanitarian crisis. Now we must find a path forward to equality and sustainability, a path driven by communities, not investors. And this book explains, with careful and unbiased reporting, only the efforts of our community activists can answer the paramount question: What type of society do we want to become and who is Puerto Rico for?" --Carmen Yulín Cruz, Mayor of San Juan In the rubble of Hurricane Maria, Puerto Ricans and ultrarich "Puertopians" are locked in a pitched struggle over how to remake the island. In this vital and startling investigation, bestselling author and activist Naomi Klein uncovers how the forces of shock politics and disaster capitalism seek to undermine the nation's radical, resilient vision for a "just recovery." All royalties from the sale of this book in English and Spanish go directly to JunteGente, a gathering of Puerto Rican organizations resisting disaster capitalism and advancing a fair and healthy recovery for their island. For more information, visit http: //juntegente.org/. Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, documentary filmmaker and author of the international bestsellers No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, and No Is Not Enough.
Haymarket Books 2018 80 pages

Supercapitalism The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life

Robert B. Reich
Mid-twentieth-century capitalism has turned into global capitalism, and global capitalism - turbocharged, Web-based, and able to find and make almost anything just about anywhere - has turned into supercapitalism. But as Robert B. Reich makes clear in this eye-opening book, while supercapitalism is working wonderfully well to enlarge the economic pie, democracy - charged with caring for all citizens - is becoming less and less effective under its influence. Reich explains how widening inequalities of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and the spreading effects of global warming are the logical outcomes of supercapitalism. He shows us why companies, fighting harder than ever to maintain their competitive positions, have become even more deeply involved in politics; and how average citizens, seeking great deals and invested in the stock market to an unprecedented degree, are increasingly loath to stand by their values if it means biting the hands that feed them. As one of America's most influential voices, Reich sets out a clear course to a vibrant capitalism and a concurrent, equally vibrant democracy.
Scribe Publications 2008 272 pages

Supercapitalism: the transformation of business, democracy, and everyday life

Reich, Robert B.
From one of America's foremost economic and political thinkers comes a vital analysis of our new hypercompetitive and turbo-charged global economy and the effect it is having on American democracy. With his customary wit and insight, Reich shows how widening inequality of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and corporate corruption are merely the logical results of a system in which politicians are more beholden to the influence of business lobbyists than to the voters who elected them. Powerful and thought-provoking, Supercapitalism argues that a clear separation of politics and capitalism will foster an enviroment in which both business and government thrive, by putting capitalism in the service of democracy, and not the other way around.
Alfred A. Knopf 2007 272 pages

Revolutions in reverse: essays on politics, violence, art, and imagination

Graeber, David
"Capitalism as we know it appears to be coming apart. But as financial institutions stagger and crumble, there is no obvious alternative. There is good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism will no longer exist: for the simple reason that it's impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet. Yet faced with this prospect, the knee-jerk reaction is often to cling to what exists because they simply can't imagine an alternative that wouldn't be even more oppressive and destructive. The political imagination seems to have reached an impasse. Or has it? In this collection of essays David Graeber explores a wide-ranging set of topics including political strategy, global trade, debt, imagination, violence, aesthetics, alienation, and creativity. Written in the wake of the anti-globalization movement and the rise of the war on terror, these essays survey the political landscape for signs of hope in unexpected places"--
Autonomedia 2012 114 pages

Meat market: female flesh under capitalism

Penny, Laurie
Modern culture is obsessed with controlling women's bodies. Our societies are saturated with images of unreal, idealised female beauty whilst real female bodies and the women who inhabit them are alienated from their own personal and political potential. Under modern capitalism, women are both consumers and consumed: Meat Market offers strategies for resisting this gory cycle of consumption, exposing how the trade in female flesh extends into every part of women's political selfhood.
Zero 2011-04-29 68 pages

What then must we do? straight talk about the next American revolution

Alperovitz, Gar
Never before have so many Americans been more frustrated with our economic system, more fearful that it is failing, or more open to fresh ideas about a new one. The seeds of a new movement demanding change are forming. But just what is this thing called a new economy, and how might it take shape in America? In What Then Must We Do? Gar Alperovitz speaks directly to the reader about where we find ourselves in history, why the time is right for a new-economy movement to coalesce, what it means to build a new system to replace the crumbling one, and how we might begin. He also suggests what the next system might look like―and where we can see its outlines, like an image slowly emerging in the developing trays of a photographer's darkroom, already taking shape
Chelsea Green Publishing 2013 205 pages

Can American capitalism survive? why greed is not good, opportunity is not equal, and fairness won't make us poor

Pearlstein, Steven
Pulitzer Prize-winning economics journalist Steven Pearlstein argues that our thirty year experiment in unfettered markets has undermined core values required to make capitalism and democracy work. Thirty years ago, 'greed is good' and 'maximizing shareholder value' became the new mantras woven into the fabric of our business culture, economy, and politics. Although, around the world, free market capitalism has lifted more than a billion people from poverty, in the United States most of the benefits of economic growth have been captured by the richest 10%, along with providing justification for squeezing workers, cheating customers, avoiding taxes, and leaving communities in the lurch. As a result, Americans are losing faith that a free market economy is the best system. In Can American Capitalism Survive', Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Steven Pearlstein chronicles our descent and challenges the theories being taught in business schools and exercised in boardrooms around the country. We're missing a key tenet of Adam Smith's wealth of nations: without trust and social capital, democratic capitalism cannot survive. Further, equality of incomes and opportunity need not come at the expense of economic growth. Pearlstein lays out bold steps we can take as a country: a guaranteed minimum income paired with universal national service, tax incentives for companies to share profits with workers, ending class segregation in public education, and restoring competition to markets. He provides a path forward that will create the shared prosperity that will sustain capitalism over the long term ; Thirty years ago, 'greed is good' and 'maximizing shareholder value' became the new mantras woven into the fabric of our business culture, economy, and politics. Pearlstein argues that our thirty year experiment in unfettered markets has undermined core values required to make capitalism and democracy work. He challenges the theories being taught in business schools and in boardrooms, believing that we're missing a key tenet of Adam Smith's wealth of nations: without trust and social capital, democratic capitalism cannot survive. -- adapted from jacket
St. Martin's Press 2018 244 pages

The new spirit of capitalism

Boltanski, Luc,Chiapello, Eve
New edition of this major work examining the development of neoliberalism In this major work, sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello go to the heart of the changes in contemporary capitalism. Via an unprecedented analysis of the latest management texts that have formed the thinking of employers in their reorganization of business, the authors trace the contours of a new spirit of capitalism. They argue that from the middle of the 1970s onwards, capitalism abandoned the hierarchical Fordist work structure and developed a new network-based form of organization that was founded on employee initiative and autonomy in the workplace-a "freedom" that came at the cost of material and psychological security. The authors connect this new spirit with the children of the libertarian and romantic currents of the late 1960s (as epitomised by dressed-down, cool capitalists such as Bill Gates and "Ben and Jerry") arguing that they practice a more successful and subtle-form of exploitation. Now a classic work charting the sociological structure of neoliberalism, Boltanski and Chiapello show how the new spirit triumphed thanks to a remarkable recuperation of the left's critique of the alienation of everyday life that simultaneously undermined their "social critique." In this new edition, the two authors reflect on the reception of the book and the debates it has stimulated.
Verso 2018-01-16 619 pages

A failure of capitalism: the crisis of '08 and the descent into depression

Posner, Richard A.
"The financial and economic crisis that began in 2008 is the most alarming of our lifetime because of the warp-speed at which it is occurring. How could it have happened, especially after all that we've learned from the Great Depression? Why wasn't it anticipated so that remedial steps could be taken to avoid or mitigate it? What can be done to reverse a slide into a full-blown depression? Why have the responses to date of the government and the economics profession been so lackluster? Richard Posner presents a concise and non-technical examination of this mother of all financial disasters and of the, as yet, stumbling efforts to cope with it. No previous acquaintance on the part of the reader with macroeconomics or the theory of finance is presupposed. This is a book for intelligent generalists that will interest specialists as well. Among the facts and causes Posner identifies are: excess savings flowing in from Asia and the reckless lowering of interest rates by the Federal Reserve Board; the relation between executive compensation, short-term profit goals, and risky lending; the housing bubble fueled by low interest rates, aggressive mortgage marketing, and loose regulations; the low savings rate of American people; and the highly leveraged balance sheets of large financial institutions. Posner analyzes the two basic remedial approaches to the crisis, which correspond to the two theories of the cause of the Great Depression: the monetarist-that the Federal Reserve Board allowed the money supply to shrink, thus failing to prevent a disastrous deflation-and the Keynesian-that the depression was the product of a credit binge in the 1920's, a stock-market crash, and the ensuing downward spiral in economic activity. Posner concludes that the pendulum swung too far and that our financial markets need to be more heavily regulated".-- Provided by the publisher.
Harvard University Press 2011-05-31 346 pages

How to be an anticapitalist in the twenty-first century

Wright, Erik Olin
What is wrong with capitalism, and how can we change it? Capitalism has transformed the world and increased our productivity, but at the cost of enormous human suffering. Our shared values--equality and fairness, democracy and freedom, community and solidarity--can provide both the basis for a critique of capitalism and help to guide us toward a socialist and democratic society. Erik Olin Wright has distilled decades of work into this concise and tightly argued manifesto: analyzing the varieties of anticapitalism, assessing different strategic approaches, and laying the foundations for a society dedicated to human flourishing. How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century is an urgent and powerful argument for socialism, and an unparalleled guide to help us get there. Another world is possible. Included is an afterword by the author's close friend and collaborator Michael Burawoy.
Verso 2019-09-03 157 pages

The Jewish century

Slezkine, Yuri
Reflects on the 20th century as the Jewish Century; modernization is about everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, occupationally flexible, etc. In other words, modernization is about everyone becoming Jewish. Analyzes developments in Europe in particular, with a focus on Russia and the USSR. States that the Jews belong to a class of "Mercurian" peoples (i.e. nomadic, middlemen, intellectual, and landless) which had historically kept a distance from the "Apollonian" (i.e. agricultural and warrior) peoples. Because of their "Mercurian" training, the Jews excelled in the entrepreneurial and professional occupations but they were seen as tribal strangers who did not belong in the modern state. The Jewish Age was also the Age of Antisemitism. It was the processes of "Mercurianization" of the Europeans (rapid in the West, but slow in Russia and the USSR) and "Apollonization" of the Jews which brought about the rise of antisemitism. Stresses that, in Russia, the Jews were hated as agents of modernization. Discusses the myth of "Jewish Bolshevism", and Soviet Stalinist and post-Stalinist policies concerning the Jews, noting that Jews were far from being the main victims of Soviet "national" policy.
Princeton University Press 2004-09-12 438 pages

All together now: common sense for a fair economy

Bernstein, Jared.
So said American patriot Tom Paine. He, like the other Founders, saw this country as a unique opportunity to build a society that valued the wellbeing of all of its people over the interests of the few. In the past 230 years, we’ve lost sight of Paine’s vision. Our government has adopted a YOYO (you’re-on-your-own) response in the face of even the most pressing national problems—diminished job security, the rising number of Americans without health coverage, stagnant incomes, decaying public schools, and more. “Here’s a tax cut and a private account,” they tell us, “now go fend for yourself.” It hasn’t worked. The YOYO strategy has proven to be incapable of addressing the economic challenges that confront us and has instead led to a massive upward shift in wealth and opportunity favoring the few and deteriorating living standards and increasing insecurity for the rest of us. All Together Now details an alternative WITT (we’re-in-this-together) strategy for solving our most daunting problems. Detailing practical, collaborative responses to globalization, health care, employment, and other areas that could improve the lives of millions of Americans without increasing national spending, All Together Now shows that the challenges we face can be solved. Together, we can wield the tools of government to build a more just and equitable society.
Berrett-Koehler 2006-05-14 154 pages

The sane society

Fromm, Erich
In a true continuation of his thoughts in "Escape from Freedom," Dr. Fromm examines man's escape into over-conformity and the danger of robotism in contemporary industrial society. Then, affirmatively, he discusses the goals of a society in which the emphasis is on man and on social measures which would further his function as a responsible individual. This book is also, in many ways, an answer to Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents."
Rinehart 1955 370 pages

The nature and logic of capitalism

Heilbroner, Robert L.
In search of an answer, The Nature and Logic of Capitalism takes us on a far-ranging exploration to the unconscious levels of the human psyche and the roots of domination and submission; to the organization of primitive society and the origins of wealth; to the sources of profit and the conception of a "regime" of capital; to the interplay of relatively slow-changing institutions and the powerful force of the accumulation of wealth. By the end of this tour we have grappled not only with ideas of Adam Smith and Karl Marx but with Freud and modern anthropologists as well. And we are far closer to understanding capitalism in our time, its possibilities and limits.
W. W. Norton & Company 1985 225 pages