Download or read book Commodification and Its Discontents written by Nicholas Abercrombie and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-10-28 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should human organs be bought and sold? Is it right that richer people should be able to pay poorer people to wait in a queue for them? Should objects in museums ever be sold? The assumption underlying such questions is that there are things that should not be bought and sold because it would give them a financial value that would replace some other, and dearly held, human value. Those who ask questions of this kind often fear that the replacement of human by money values – a process of commodification – is sweeping all before it. However, as Nicholas Abercrombie argues, commodification can be, and has been, resisted by the development of a moral climate that defines certain things as outside a market. That resistance, however, is never complete because the two regimes of value – human and money – are both necessary for the sustainability of society. His analysis of these processes offers a thought-provoking read that will appeal to students and scholars interested in market capitalism and culture.

Download or read book Commodification and Its Discontents written by Nicholas Abercrombie and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-10-14 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should human organs be bought and sold? Is it right that richer people should be able to pay poorer people to wait in a queue for them? Should objects in museums ever be sold? The assumption underlying such questions is that there are things that should not be bought and sold because it would give them a financial value that would replace some other, and dearly held, human value. Those who ask questions of this kind often fear that the replacement of human by money values – a process of commodification – is sweeping all before it. However, as Nicholas Abercrombie argues, commodification can be, and has been, resisted by the development of a moral climate that defines certain things as outside a market. That resistance, however, is never complete because the two regimes of value – human and money – are both necessary for the sustainability of society. His analysis of these processes offers a thought-provoking read that will appeal to students and scholars interested in market capitalism and culture.

Download or read book Capital and Its Discontents written by Sasha Lilley and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2011-03-07 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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).

Download or read book Rentier Capitalism and Its Discontents written by Balihar Sanghera and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-08-31 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explains and evaluates today’s economic, political, social and ecological crises through the lens of rentier capitalism and countermovements in Central Asia. Over the last three decades the rich and powerful have increased their wealth and political power to the detriment of social and environmental well-being. But their activities have not gone unchecked. Grassroots activism has resisted the harmful and damaging effects of the neoliberal commodification of things. Providing a much-needed theorisation of the moral economy and politics of rent, this book offers in-depth case studies on finance, real estate and natural resources in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The authors show the mechanisms of rent extraction, their moral justifications and legitimacy, and social struggles against them. This book highlights the importance of class relations, state-countermovement interactions and global capitalism in understanding social and economic dynamics in Central Asia. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in political economy, development studies, sociology, politics and international relations.

Download or read book Reluctant Capitalists written by Laura J. Miller and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the past half-century, bookselling, like many retail industries, has evolved from an arena dominated by independent bookstores to one in which chain stores have significant market share. And as in other areas of retail, this transformation has often been a less-than-smooth process. This has been especially pronounced in bookselling, argues Laura J. Miller, because more than most other consumer goods, books are the focus of passionate debate. What drives that debate? And why do so many people believe that bookselling should be immune to questions of profit? In Reluctant Capitalists, Miller looks at a century of book retailing, demonstrating that the independent/chain dynamic is not entirely new. It began one hundred years ago when department stores began selling books, continued through the 1960s with the emergence of national chain stores, and exploded with the formation of “superstores” in the 1990s. The advent of the Internet has further spurred tremendous changes in how booksellers approach their business. All of these changes have met resistance from book professionals and readers who believe that the book business should somehow be “above” market forces and instead embrace more noble priorities. Miller uses interviews with bookstore customers and members of the book industry to explain why books evoke such distinct and heated reactions. She reveals why customers have such fierce loyalty to certain bookstores and why they identify so strongly with different types of books. In the process, she also teases out the meanings of retailing and consumption in American culture at large, underscoring her point that any type of consumer behavior is inevitably political, with consequences for communities as well as commercial institutions.

Download or read book Creativity and Its Discontents written by Laikwan Pang and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Laikwan Pang offers a complex critical analysis of creativity, creative industries, and the impact of Western copyright laws on creativity in China.

Download or read book Politicising Commodification written by Roland Erne and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-31 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyses the EU's post-2008 economic governance regime and the labour protests it triggered that threw a lifeline to EU democracy.

Download or read book Bodies and Artefacts Historical Materialism as Corporeal Semiotics 2 vols written by Joseph Fracchia and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-12-20 with total page 1450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a seemingly offhand, often overlooked comment, Karl Marx deemed ‘human corporeal organisation’ the ‘first fact of human history’. Following Marx’s corporeal turn and pursuing the radical implications of his corporeal insight, this book undertakes a reconstruction of the corporeal foundations of historical materialism. Part I exposes the corporeal roots of Marx’s materialist conception of history and historical-materialist Wissenschaft. Part II attempts a historical-materialist mapping of human corporeal organisation. Suggesting how to approach human histories up from their corporeal foundations, Part III elaborates historical-materialism as ‘corporeal semiotics’. Part IV, a case study of Marx’s critique of capitalist socio-economic and cultural forms, reveals the corporeal foundations of that critique and the corporeal depth of his vision of human freedom and dignity.

Download or read book Citizenship and Its Discontents written by Niraja Gopal Jayal and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breaking new ground in scholarship, Niraja Jayal writes the first history of citizenship in the largest democracy in the world—India. Unlike the mature democracies of the west, India began as a true republic of equals with a complex architecture of citizenship rights that was sensitive to the many hierarchies of Indian society. In this provocative biography of the defining aspiration of modern India, Jayal shows how the progressive civic ideals embodied in the constitution have been challenged by exclusions based on social and economic inequality, and sometimes also, paradoxically, undermined by its own policies of inclusion. Citizenship and Its Discontents explores a century of contestations over citizenship from the colonial period to the present, analyzing evolving conceptions of citizenship as legal status, as rights, and as identity. The early optimism that a new India could be fashioned out of an unequal and diverse society led to a formally inclusive legal membership, an impulse to social and economic rights, and group-differentiated citizenship. Today, these policies to create a civic community of equals are losing support in a climate of social intolerance and weak solidarity. Once seen by Western political scientists as an anomaly, India today is a site where every major theoretical debate about citizenship is being enacted in practice, and one that no global discussion of the subject can afford to ignore.

Download or read book Reckoning with Slavery written by Jennifer L. Morgan and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-26 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Reckoning with Slavery Jennifer L. Morgan draws on the lived experiences of enslaved African women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to reveal the contours of early modern notions of trade, race, and commodification in the Black Atlantic. From capture to transport to sale to childbirth, these women were demographically counted as commodities during the Middle Passage, vulnerable to rape, separated from their kin at slave markets, and subject to laws that enslaved their children upon birth. In this way, they were central to the binding of reproductive labor with kinship, racial hierarchy, and the economics of slavery. Throughout this groundbreaking study, Morgan demonstrates that the development of Western notions of value and race occurred simultaneously. In so doing, she illustrates how racial capitalism denied the enslaved their kinship and affective ties while simultaneously relying on kinship to reproduce and enforce slavery through enslaved female bodies.

Download or read book Rentier Capitalism and Its Discontents written by Balihar Sanghera and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2022-09-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explains and evaluates today’s economic, political, social and ecological crises through the lens of rentier capitalism and countermovements in Central Asia. Over the last three decades the rich and powerful have increased their wealth and political power to the detriment of social and environmental well-being. But their activities have not gone unchecked. Grassroots activism has resisted the harmful and damaging effects of the neoliberal commodification of things. Providing a much-needed theorisation of the moral economy and politics of rent, this book offers in-depth case studies on finance, real estate and natural resources in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The authors show the mechanisms of rent extraction, their moral justifications and legitimacy, and social struggles against them. This book highlights the importance of class relations, state-countermovement interactions and global capitalism in understanding social and economic dynamics in Central Asia. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in political economy, development studies, sociology, politics and international relations.

Download or read book Modernity and Whiteness written by Bolivar Echeverria and published by Polity. This book was released on 2019-11-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bolívar Echeverría was one of the leading philosophers and critical theorists in Latin America and his work on capitalism and modernity offers a distinctive account, informed by the experiences of Latin American societies, of the social and historical forces shaping the modern world. For Echeverría, capitalism and modernity do not coincide: modernity is a long-term historical phenomenon that involved a new set of relations between human beings and nature and between the individual and the collective, while capitalism is a particular form in which modernity has been realized. As Marx showed, capitalism is a mode of reproduction that involves the growing commodification of social life – everything, even human labor power itself, is turned into a commodity. Echeverría introduces the notion of blanquitud or “whiteness” to capture the new form of identity that is brought into being by the totalizing and homogenizing character of capitalism. While blanquitud includes certain ethnic features, it is not so much an ethnic category as an ethical and cultural one, referring to a type of human being, homo capitalisticus, which threatens to spread throughout the world, overcoming and integrating identities that might otherwise resist it. But capitalism is not the only form of modernity – there are alternative modernities. In the final part of the book Echeverría explores the baroque as a characteristic of Latin American identity and sees it as a way of theatricalizing and transforming reality that takes some distance from Eurocentric paradigms and resists the homogenizing forces of capitalism. Echeverría’s analysis of the dynamics of capitalism and modernity represents one of the most important contributions to critical theory from a Latin American perspective. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical theory and postcolonial theory and anyone concerned with the global impact of capitalism on social and cultural life.

Download or read book The New Spirit of Capitalism written by Luc Boltanski and published by Verso. This book was released on 2005 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A century after the publication of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism , a major new work examines network-based organization, employee autonomy and post-Fordist horizontal work structures.

Download or read book Society Of The Spectacle written by Guy Debord and published by Bread and Circuses Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Das Kapital of the 20th century,Society of the Spectacle is an essential text, and the main theoretical work of the Situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960's, in particular the May 1968 uprisings in France, up to the present day, with global capitalism seemingly staggering around in it’s Zombie end-phase, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late 20th century. This ‘Red and Black’ translation from 1977 is Introduced by Notting Hill armchair insurrectionary Tom Vague with a galloping time line and pop-situ verve, and given a more analytical over view by young upstart thinker Sam Cooper.

Download or read book Neoliberal Legality written by Honor Brabazon and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Neoliberalism has been studied as a political ideology, an historical moment, an economic programme, an institutional model, and a totalising political project. Yet the role of law in the neoliberal story has been relatively neglected, and the idea of neoliberalism as a juridical project has yet to be considered. That is: neoliberal law and its interrelations with neoliberal politics and economics has remained almost entirely neglected as a subject of research and debate. This book provides a systematic attempt to develop a holistic and coherent understanding of the relationship between law and neoliberalism. It does not, however, examine law and neoliberalism as fixed entities or as philosophical categories. And neither is its objective to uncover or devise a ‘law of neoliberalism’. Instead, it uses empirical evidence to explore and theorise the relationship between law and neoliberalism as dynamic and complex social phenomena. Developing a nuanced concept of ‘neoliberal legality’, neoliberalism, it is argued here, is as much a juridical project as a political and economic one. And it is only in understanding the juridical thrust of neoliberalism that we can hope to fully comprehend the specificities, and continuities, of the neoliberal period as a whole.

Download or read book Climate Change Solutions written by Diana Stuart and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-07-17 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate Change Solutions represents an application of critical theory to examine proposed solutions to climate change. Drawing from Marx’s negative conception of ideology, the authors illustrate how ideology continues to conceal the capital-climate contradiction or the fundamental incompatibility between growth-dependent capitalism and effectively and justly mitigating climate change. Dominant solutions to climate change that offer minor changes to the current system fail to address this contradiction. However, alternatives like degrowth involve a shift in priorities and power relations and can offer new systemic arrangements that confront and move beyond the capital-climate contradiction. While there are clear barriers to a systemic transition that prioritizes social and ecological well-being, such a transition is possible and desirable.

Download or read book Tokyo Boogie Woogie written by Hiromu Nagahara and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-10 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emerging in the 1920s, the Japanese pop scene gained a devoted following, and the soundscape of the next four decades became the audible symbol of changing times. In the first English-language history of this Japanese industry, Hiromu Nagahara connects the rise of mass entertainment with Japan’s transformation into a postwar middle-class society.