World-renowned economist, Richard Wolf, explores the roots of the Great Recession and its immense impact on working people

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

This is the first English translation of one of the classical works of Marxist economic theory. When Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capitalwas first published in 1919 it was acclaimed by reviewers as a continuation of Marx’s Capital, and it has a major influence upon subsequent Marxist thought, especially in the analysis of imperialism where it provided some of the fundamental ideas for the theories of Bukharin and Lenin. But Hilferding’s work was much more than a study of imperialism, which was presented only in the last section of the book. It set out to examine the main tendencies in the development of the capitalist mode of production as a whole at the beginning of the twentieth century, beginning with an exposition of the theory of money (in which particular attention was paid to the growth of credit money), then analysing the increasingly important role of the banks in the mobilization of capital, along with the development of large corporations, cartels and trusts, and finally outlining a theory of economic crises. Hilferding’s book has, however, more than an historical interest. It is a model for any renewed attempt to understand the ‘latest phase of capitalist development’ in the closing decades of the twentieth century, and Hilferdin’s ideas still provide essential elements for the elaboration of theoretically enlightened and realistic policies in the socialist movement.

Business, Political Science, American Studies, Philosophy

Perturbed by stagflation? In pain from recession? Sick with worry about whether the world economy can survive? You've gone to your corner economist and you couldn't understand the cure? Finally! An amusing, soundly researched, and highly accessible book that tells you everything you want to know about capitalism- the system its greatest theorists though could never survive.In this fair, concise, and good-humoured book, Robert Lekachman, Distinguished Professor of Economics at the City University of New York, assesses capitalism for what it's supposed to do deliver the goods. He starts by questioning the United States, where capitalism seems as natural as breathing and the free market is as much a byword as Mom's apple pie. But what are the realities? To understand them, he wittily documents capitalism's history from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to late last night; from mercantilism to monetarism, with explanations in between of investment and money, business cycles, the postwar boom, and the present recession.No sermons are preached. Readers must consider for themselves the dilemma that confronts us the future of capitalism and its effect on the world.

"Legendary economist Hyman Minsky identified author William H. Janeway as a 'theorist-practitioner' of financial economics; this book is an expression of that double life. Interweaving his unique professional perspective with political and financial history, Janeway narrates the dynamics of the innovation economy from the standpoint of a seasoned practitioner of venture capital, operating on the frontier where financial speculation intersects with novel technology. In this fully revised and updated edition, Janeway develops his theory that asset bubbles play a central role in financing technological innovation and that state investment in national goals enable the innovation process. Now, the Digital Revolution, sponsored by the state and funded by speculation, has matured to attack the authority, and even the legitimacy, of governments. The populist response in the West, especially in the United States, opens the door for China to seize leadership of the innovation economy from America"--

In this revised and expanded edition of Long Waves of Capitalist Development , Ernest Mandel seeks to explain the underlying determinants of the booms and slumps of the trade cycle. Mandel first establishes that there have indeed been twenty- to twenty-five-year-long waves of capitalist expansion and contraction—and that these have persisted in the period since World War II. He then assembles evidence to show that while broad tendencies in the rate of profit have been decisive in triggering downturns, the ingredients necessary for a new upswing are, by contrast, generally political and extra-economic in character. He thereby demonstrates the falsity of neo-liberal doctrines, according to which the free market will itself generate a new formula for balanced and sustainable expansion. Long Waves of Capitalist Development not only offers a penetrating analysis of the ills that have afflicted contemporary capitalist economies but also surveys, and takes forward, one of the classical debates of modern economic history.

In Third Wave Capitalism, John Ehrenreich documents the emergence of a new stage in the history of American capitalism. Just as the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century gave way to corporate capitalism in the twentieth, recent decades have witnessed corporate capitalism evolving into a new phase, which Ehrenreich calls "Third Wave Capitalism." Third Wave Capitalism is marked by apparent contradictions: Rapid growth in productivity and lagging wages; fabulous wealth for the 1 percent and the persistence of high levels of poverty; increases in the standard of living and increases in mental illness, personal misery, and political rage; the apotheosis of the individual and the deterioration of democracy; increases in life expectancy and out-of-control medical costs; an African American president and the incarceration of a large percentage of the black population. Ehrenreich asserts that these phenomena are evidence that a virulent, individualist, winner-take-all ideology and a virtual fusion of government and business have subverted the American dream. Greed and economic inequality reinforce the sense that each of us is "on our own." The result is widespread lack of faith in collective responses to our common problems. The collapse of any organized opposition to business demands makes political solutions ever more difficult to imagine. Ehrenreich traces the impact of these changes on American health care, school reform, income distribution, racial inequities, and personal emotional distress. Not simply a lament, Ehrenreich's book seeks clues for breaking out of our current stalemate and proposes a strategy to create a new narrative in which change becomes possible.--Book flap

Isaak Illich Rubin (12 June 1886, Dinaburg, now Latvia - 27 November 1937, Aktobe, now Kazakhstan) was a Soviet Marxian economist. His main work Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was published in 1924. He was executed in 1937 during the course of the Great Purge, but his ideas have since been rehabilitated. Rubin's main work emphasised the importance of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism in the labor theory of value. Against those who counterposed Marx's early interest in alienation with his later economic theory, Rubin argued that Marx's mature economic work represented the culmination of his lifetime project to understand how human creative power is shaped, defined, and limited by social structures, which take on a uniquely "objective" economic form under capitalism. Significantly, Rubin is at pains to argue that simple commodity production is not a historical phenomenon that developed into capitalism, as it is often understood by both Marxists and critics of Marx; rather, it is a theoretical abstraction that explains one aspect of a fully developed capitalist economy. The concept of value, as understood by Rubin, cannot exist without the other elements of a full-blown capitalist economy: money, capital, the existence of a proletariat, and so on. Rubin's work was never reissued in the Soviet Union after 1928, but in 1972 Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was translated into English by Fredy Perlman and Milos Samardzija. This work became a foundation stone of the "value-form" approach to Marxist theory, exemplified by Hans-Georg Backhaus, Chris Arthur, Geert Reuten, and the "Konstanz-Sydney" group (Michael Eldred, Mike Roth, Lucia Kleiber, and Volkbert Roth). In this interpretation of Marx, "it is the development of the forms of exchange that is seen as the prime determinant of the capitalist economy rather than the content regulated by it". Capitalism is here understood as a method of regulating human labor by giving it the social form of an exchangeable commodity (the "value-form"), rather than a disguised or mystified system that is otherwise similar in content to other class-based societies. According to Arthur, the rediscovery of Rubin's "masterly exegesis" was "the most important single influence on the value form approach to Capital". (wikipedia.org)