Download or read book Bonfire of Illusions written by Alex Callinicos and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Something dramatic happened in the late summer and autumn of 2008. The post-Cold War world came to an abrupt end. This was the result of two conjoined crises. First, in its brief war with Georgia in August 2008, Russia asserted its military power to halt the expansion of NATO to its very borders. Secondly, on 15 September 2008 the Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed. This precipitated a severe financial crash and helped to push the world economy into the worst slump since the 1930s. Both crises marked a severe setback for the global power of the United States, which had driven NATO expansion and forced through the liberalization of financial markets. More broadly they challenged the consensus that had reigned since the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989 that a US-orchestrated liberal capitalist order could offer the world peace and prosperity. Already badly damaged by the Iraq debacle, this consensus has now suffered potentially fatal blows. In Bonfire of Illusions Alex Callinicos explores these twin crises. He traces the credit crunch that developed in 2007-8 to a much more protracted crisis of overaccumulation and profitability that has gripped global capitalism since the late 1960s. He also confronts the interaction between economic and geopolitical events, highlighting the new assertiveness of nation-states and analysing the tense, complex relationship of interdependence and conflict that binds together the US and China. Finally, in response to the revelation that the market is not the solution to the world's problems, Callinicos reviews the prospects for alternatives to capitalism.
Download or read book Capitalist Restructuring and the Pacific Rim written by Ravi Palat and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-07-31 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book situates the evolution of capitalist economies along Asia's Pacific Rim after the Second World War within broader global, political and economic changes. Specifically, it charts their growth at the interface of periodic crises and successive waves of restructuring, and links changes in the world economy to shifts in regional dynamics in east and southeast Asia. It suggests that while the expansion of Japanese corporate networks was crucial to the emergence of the region as a low-cost exporter to the world, the reintegration of China into the world market will free the region from its dependence on the US as a market of last resort.
Download or read book Cruel Illusions written by Margie Fuston and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-11 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eighteen-year-old Ava Perry leaves the safety of her foster care home and joins a troupe of vampire-hunting magicians, believing that she finally has her chance to discover the truth behind her mother's death.
Download or read book Marx s Revenge written by Meghnad Desai and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative and enthusiastically revisionist book, the distinguished economist Meghnad Desai argues that capitalism's recent efflorescence is something Karl Marx anticipated and indeed would, in a certain sense, have welcomed. Capitalism, as Marx understood it, would only reach its limits when it was no longer capable of progress. Desai argues that globalization, in bringing the possibility of open competition on world markets to producers in the Third World, has proved that capitalism is still capable of moving forwards. Marx's Revenge opens with a consideration of the ideas of Adam Smith and Hegel. It proceeds to look at the nuances in the work of Marx himself, and concludes with a survey of more recent economists who studied capitalism and attempted to unravel its secrets, including Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek.
Download or read book Capitalism at a Crossroads written by Ali Ari and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-02-25 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the current capitalist system has been increasingly struggling to respond to the problems and uncertainties in the global economy, this book aims to identify the main economic, social, and ecological problems and discusses solutions for a more inclusive and sustainable economic system. Written by an international selection of contributors, it takes a wider perspective beyond classical orthodox economics. By doing so, this book covers a wide range of topics, such as global warming and climate change, food and energy scarcity, rising inequality and debt issues, health, ecological, economic, and political crises, degrowth, green new deals, solidarity, economy, artificial intelligence, technological change, smart solutions, and smart cities. Discussing these topics, the book presents answers to the question of whether the current capitalist system is viable and provides suggestions for a fair, inclusive, and modern economic system. Taking a comprehensive approach, the book will appeal to students, scholars, and researchers of heterodox and alternative economics.
Download or read book Rammstein on Fire written by John T. Littlejohn and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains 13 original essays exploring Rammstein's stage performance and recorded works from multiple academic perspectives. Topics range from Rammstein's connection with 19th century German literature and their East German heritage to cannibalism and the supernatural. The panoramic view of approaches to Rammstein's music and performance goes beneath the surface and provides fan and scholar alike with a deeper appreciation for the band.
Download or read book The Bonfire of the Vanities written by Tom Wolfe and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2002-02-21 with total page 708 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vintage Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, the #1 bestseller that will forever define late-twentieth-century New York style. "No one has portrayed New York Society this accurately and devastatingly since Edith Wharton" (The National Review) “A page-turner . . . Brilliant high comedy.” (The New Republic) Sherman McCoy, the central figure of Tom Wolfe's first novel, is a young investment banker with a fourteen-room apartment in Manhattan. When he is involved in a freak accident in the Bronx, prosecutors, politicians, the press, the police, the clergy, and assorted hustlers high and low close in on him, licking their chops and giving us a gargantuan helping of the human comedy, of New York in the 1980s, a city boiling over with racial and ethnic hostilities and burning with the itch to Grab It Now. Wolfe's novel is a big, panoramic story of the metropolis that reinforces the author's reputation as the foremost chronicler of the way we live in America. Adapted to film in 1990 by director Brian De Palma, the movie stars Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman.
Download or read book Corporations and Cultural Industries written by Scott W. Fitzgerald and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Corporations and Cultural Industries: Time Warner, Bertelsmann, and News Corporation, by Scott Warren Fitzgerald, provides an introduction to the political economy of international media corporations. This text fills a fundamental gap in the critical media studies field, expanding on the relative paucity of academic studies. To ground the discussion, Fitzgerald focuses on the growth of three specific media conglomerates: Time Warner, Bertelsmann and News Corporation. Adopting an approach rooted in critical political economy, the book explains the corporations' growth through an engagement with broader social theories: the wider conditions of capital accumulation (especially theories of corporate competition and financialization); issues of institutional logic and corporate strategies; and the role of states as regulators, mediators of opposed interests, and facilitators of corporate expansion. The first section presents debates in social theory, addressing issues that pertain to cultural industries and dimensions in which they both challenge and extend these wider social theories. The second section presents detailed case studies of the three contemporary media 'mega companies' across the range of operations they coordinate, both within and outside the cultural industries. By analyzing the specifics and complexities of different media industries, Corporations and Cultural Industries examines how financialization processes re-gear the internal operations of media corporations in a manner that pits one sector against another. This book provides an in-depth study that can be used as stand-alone teaching resources or as a valuable supplement to a variety of media courses.
Download or read book Scouting Frontiers written by Nelson R. Block and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-01-23 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the fact that Scouting has touched the lives of a quarter of a billion boys and girls and their leaders around the world in the past century, its history has been largely ignored. Scouting Frontiers: Youth and the Scout Movement’s First Century is the first book to discuss the history and principal themes of the Boy Scout and Girl Guide movements on an international scale. Inspired by presentations at the ground-breaking 2008 Johns Hopkins University symposium, "Scouting: A Centennial History," the authors examine the world's greatest youth movement through the diverse experiences of its members and their organizations. From Muslim Scouts in Wales to French Scouts in Syria to Girl Guides in colonial Kenya, Scouting has responded to the challenges of international expansion and transformed itself to address cultural, political and social diversity. Scouting Frontiers focuses particularly on the intersections between Scouting’s origins and its transformations over the last century as it faced frontiers of nation, empire, religion, race, class, and gender.
Download or read book The Mammon of Unrighteousness written by Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen and published by . This book was released on 1891 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Zombie Capitalism written by Chris Harman and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We've been told for years that the capitalist free market is a self-correcting perpetual growth machine in which sellers always find buyers, precluding any major crisis in the system. Then the credit crunch of August 2007 turned into the great crash of September–October 2008, leading one apologist for the system, Willem Buiter, to write of "the end of capitalism as we knew it." As the crisis unfolded, the world witnessed the way in which the runaway speculation of the "shadow" banking system wreaked havoc on world markets, leaving real human devastation in its wake. Faced with the financial crisis, some economic commentators began to talk of "zombie banks"–financial institutions that were in an "undead state" and incapable of fulfilling any positive function but a threat to everything else. What they do not realize is that twenty-first century capitalism as a whole is a zombie system, seemingly dead when it comes to achieving human goals.
Download or read book Cognitive Capitalism written by Yann Moulier-Boutang and published by Polity. This book was released on 2011 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that we are undergoing a transition from industrial capitalism to a new form of capitalism - what the author calls & lsquo; cognitive capitalism & rsquo;
Download or read book Realm of Lesser Evil written by Jean-Claude Michea and published by Polity. This book was released on 2009-07-27 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winston Churchill said of democracy that it was ‘the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’ The same could be said of liberalism. While liberalism displays an unfailing optimism with regard to the capacity of human beings to make themselves ‘masters and possessors of nature’, it displays a profound pessimism when it comes to appreciating their moral capacity to build a decent world for themselves. As Michea shows, the roots of this pessimism lie in the idea – an eminently modern one – that the desire to establish the reign of the Good lies at the origin of all the ills besetting the human race. Liberalism’s critique of the ‘tyranny of the Good’ naturally had its costs. It created a view of modern politics as a purely negative art – that of defining the least bad society possible. It is in this sense that liberalism has to be understood, and understands itself, as the ‘politics of lesser evil’. And yet while liberalism set out to be a realism without illusions, today liberalism presents itself as something else. With its celebration of the market among other things, contemporary liberalism has taken over some of the features of its oldest enemy. By unravelling the logic that lies at the heart of the liberal project, Michea is able to shed fresh light on one of the key ideas that have shaped the civilization of the West.
Download or read book Liberty and Security written by Conor Gearty and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-03 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All aspire to liberty and security in their lives but few people truly enjoy them. This book explains why this is so. In what Conor Gearty calls our 'neo-democratic' world, the proclamation of universal liberty and security is mocked by facts on the ground: the vast inequalities in supposedly free societies, the authoritarian regimes with regular elections, and the terrible socio-economic deprivation camouflaged by cynically proclaimed commitments to human rights. Gearty's book offers an explanation of how this has come about, providing also a criticism of the present age which tolerates it. He then goes on to set out a manifesto for a better future, a place where liberty and security can be rich platforms for everyone's life. The book identifies neo-democracies as those places which play at democracy so as to disguise the injustice at their core. But it is not just the new 'democracies' that have turned 'neo', the so-called established democracies are also hurtling in the same direction, as is the United Nations. A new vision of universal freedom is urgently required. Drawing on scholarship in law, human rights and political science this book argues for just such a vision, one in which the great achievements of our democratic past are not jettisoned as easily as were the socialist ideals of the original democracy-makers.
Download or read book Lost Illusions written by David A. Cook and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-03-15 with total page 722 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the development of film and the film industry during the 1970s and the political and economic background that influenced it.
Download or read book Greece Financialization and the EU written by V. Fouskas and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-07-30 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The debt crisis in Greece has sparked lively debates about the origins of the crisis and policy measures to be adopted in order to fix it. The authors offer the first original and comprehensive narrative on Greece.
Download or read book Resilient Life written by Brad Evans and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-04-10 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to live dangerously? This is not just a philosophical question or an ethical call to reflect upon our own individual recklessness. It is a deeply political issue, fundamental to the new doctrine of ‘resilience’ that is becoming a key term of art for governing planetary life in the 21st Century. No longer should we think in terms of evading the possibility of traumatic experiences. Catastrophic events, we are told, are not just inevitable but learning experiences from which we have to grow and prosper, collectively and individually. Vulnerability to threat, injury and loss has to be accepted as a reality of human existence. In this original and compelling text, Brad Evans and Julian Reid explore the political and philosophical stakes of the resilience turn in security and governmental thinking. Resilience, they argue, is a neo-liberal deceit that works by disempowering endangered populations of autonomous agency. Its consequences represent a profound assault on the human subject whose meaning and sole purpose is reduced to survivability. Not only does this reveal the nihilistic qualities of a liberal project that is coming to terms with its political demise. All life now enters into lasting crises that are catastrophic unto the end.
