343 books match the query 'Capitalism' and 11 start with d

cover of Dead Labor: Toward a Political Economy of Premature Death

Dead Labor

Toward a Political Economy of Premature Death

James Tyner

University of Minnesota Press, 2019

A groundbreaking consideration of death from capitalism, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century

From a 2013 Texas fertilizer plant explosion that killed fifteen people and injured 252 to a 2017 chemical disaster in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, we are confronted all too often with industrial accidents that reflect the underlying attitude of corporations toward the lives of laborers and others who live and work in their companies’ shadows. Dead Labor takes seriously the myriad ways in which bodies are commodified and profits derived from premature death. In doing so it provides a unique perspective on our understanding how life and death drive the twenty-first-century global economy.

James Tyner tracks a history from the 1600s through which premature death and mortality became something calculable, predictable, manageable, and even profitable. Drawing on a range of examples, including the criminalization of migrant labor, medical tourism, life insurance, and health care, he explores how today we can no longer presume that all bodies undergo the same processes of life, death, fertility, and mortality. He goes on to develop the concept of shared mortality among vulnerable populations and examines forms of capital exploitation that have emerged around death and the reproduction of labor. 

Positioned at the intersection of two fields—the political economy of labor and the philosophy of mortality—Dead Labor builds on Marx’s notion that death (and truncated life) is a constant factor in the processes of labor. Considering premature death also as a biopolitical and bioeconomic concept, Tyner shows how racialized and gendered bodies are exposed to it in unbalanced ways within capitalism, and how bodies are then commodified, made surplus and redundant, and even disassembled in order to accumulate capital.

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cover of Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism

Debt to Society

Accounting for Life under Capitalism

Miranda Joseph

University of Minnesota Press, 2014

It is commonplace to say that criminals pay their debt to society by spending time in prison, but what is a “debt to society”? How is crime understood as a debt? How has time become the equivalent for crime? And how does criminal debt relate to the kind of debt held by consumers and university students?

In Debt to Society, Miranda Joseph explores modes of accounting as they are used to create, sustain, or transform social relations. Envisioning accounting broadly to include financial accounting, managerial accounting of costs and performance, and the calculation of “debts to society” owed by criminals, Joseph argues that accounting technologies have a powerful effect on social dynamics by attributing credits and debts. From sovereign bonds and securitized credit card debt to student debt and mortgages, there is no doubt that debt and accounting structure our lives.

Exploring central components of neoliberalism (and neoliberalism in crisis) from incarceration to personal finance and university management, Debt to Society exposes the uneven distribution of accountability within our society. Joseph demonstrates how ubiquitous the forces of accounting have become in shaping all aspects of our lives, proposing that we appropriate accounting and offer alternative accounts to turn the present toward a more widely shared well-being.

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cover of Decent Capitalism: A Blueprint for Reforming our Economies

Decent Capitalism

A Blueprint for Reforming our Economies

Sebastian Dullien, Hansjorg Herr, and Christian Kellermann

Pluto Press, 2011

The recent crisis, created by finance capitalism, has brought us to the economic abyss. The excessive freedom of international markets has rapidly transformed into international panic, with states struggling to rescue and bail out a globalised financial sector. Reform is promised by our leaders, but in governments dominated by financial interests there is little hope of meaningful change.

Decent Capitalism argues for a response that addresses capitalism’s systemic tendency towards crisis, a tendency which is completely absent from the mainstream debate. The authors develop a concept of a moderated capitalism that keeps its core strengths intact while reducing its inherent destructive political force in our societies. This book argues that reforming the capitalist system will have to be far more radical than the current political discourse suggests.

Decent Capitalism is a concept and a slogan that will inspire political activists, trade unionists and policy makers to get behind a package of reforms that finally allows the majority to master capitalism.

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cover of Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism

Delirium and Resistance

Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism

Gregory Sholette

Pluto Press, 2017

In the aftermath of the 2016 US election, Brexit, and a global upsurge of nationalist populism, it is evident that the delirium and the crisis of neoliberal capitalism is now the delirium and crisis of liberal democracy and its culture. And though capitalist crisis does not begin within art, art can reflect and amplify its effects to positive and negative ends. 
 
In this follow-up to his influential 2010 book, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, Sholette engages in critical dialogue with artists’ collectives, counter-institutions, and activist groups to offer an insightful firsthand account of the relationship between politics and art in neoliberal society. Sholette lays out clear examples of art’s deep involvement in capitalism: the dizzying prices achieved by artists who pander to the financial elite, the proliferation of museums that contribute to global competition between cities in order to attract capital, and the strange relationship between art and rampant gentrification that restructures the urban landscape. 
 
With a preface by noted author Lucy R. Lippard and an introduction by theorist Kim Charnley, Delirium and Resistance draws on over thirty years of critical debates and practices both in and beyond the art world to historicize and advocate for the art activist tradition that radically—and, at times, deliriously—entangles the visual arts with political struggles.
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cover of Democratize Work: The Case for Reorganizing the Economy

Democratize Work

The Case for Reorganizing the Economy

Isabelle Ferreras, Julie Battilana, and Dominique Méda

University of Chicago Press, 2022

An urgent and deeply resonant case for the power of workplace democracy to restore balance between economy and society.

What happens to a society—and a planet—when capitalism outgrows democracy? The tensions between democracy and capitalism are longstanding, and they have been laid bare by the social effects of COVID-19. The narrative of “essential workers” has provided thin cover for the fact that society’s lowest paid and least empowered continue to work risky jobs that keep our capitalism humming. Democracy has been subjugated by the demands of capitalism. For many, work has become unfair. 

In Democratize Work, essays from a dozen social scientists—all women—articulate the perils and frustrations of our collective moment, while also framing the current crisis as an opportunity for renewal and transformation. Amid mounting inequalities tied to race, gender, and class—and with huge implications for the ecological fate of the planet—the authors detail how adjustments in how we organize work can lead to sweeping reconciliation. By treating workers as citizens, treating work as something other than an asset, and treating the planet as something to be cared for, a better way is attainable. Building on cross-disciplinary research, Democratize Work is both a rallying cry and an architecture for a sustainable economy that fits the democratic project of our societies.

Contributors include Alyssa Battistoni (Barnard College of Columbia University), Adelle Blackett (McGill University), Julia Cagé (Sciences Po), Neera Chandhoke (University of Delhi), Lisa Herzog (University of Groningen), Imge Kaya Sabanci (IE Business School), Sara Lafuente (European Trade Union Institute), Hélène Landemore (Yale University), Flávia Máximo (Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto, Brazil), and Pavlina R. Tcherneva (Levy Economics Institute of Bard College).
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cover of Desierto: Memories of the Future

Desierto

Memories of the Future

By Charles Bowden, foreword by William deBuys

University of Texas Press, 2018

“A dark, troubling vision of life in the desert, defined broadly; of mountain lions and drug kingpins, Mexican hopes and Indian feuds.”
—Los Angeles Times

“In these powerful epic tales of the Sonora Desert, Bowden peoples the harsh land on both sides of the US-Mexican border with saints and sinners, but his enduring hero is the desert itself.”
—Kirkus Reviews

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cover of Digital Demagogue: Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Trump and Twitter

Digital Demagogue

Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Trump and Twitter

Christian Fuchs

Pluto Press, 2018

From 'Covfefe' to #FraudNewsCNN and #FakeNews, Donald Trump's tweets have caused an international frenzy. He is a reality TV and Twitter-President, who uses digital and entertainment culture as an ideological weapon - as an expression of his authoritarianism.

This book delves into new political-economic structures as expressed through political communication to explain the rise of authoritarian capitalism, nationalism and right-wing ideology throughout the world. Christian Fuchs does this through updating Marxist theory and the Frankfurt School's critical theory. He re-invigorates the works on authoritarianism of Franz L. Neumann, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Wilhelm Reich, Leo Lowenthal and Klaus Theweleit in the age of Trump and Twitter.

In the age of big data and social media, Digital Demagogue studies the expressions of ideology, nationalism and authoritarianism today and discusses prospects for overcoming capitalism and renewing the Left.
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cover of Divide & Conquer: Race, Gangs, Identity, and Conflict

Divide & Conquer

Race, Gangs, Identity, and Conflict

Robert D. Weide

Temple University Press, 2022

Hyper-criminalization and the normalization of violence was an integral aspect of Robert Weide’s formative years growing up in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s, where Sureño, Crip, and Blood gangs maintained a precarious coexistence, often punctuated by racialized gang violence. His insider status informs Divide & Conquer, which considers how the capitalist economy, the race concept, and nationalist ideology have made gang members the instruments of their own oppression, resulting in racialized sectarian conflicts spanning generations between African American and Latino gangs in Los Angeles and California’s prisons. 

While gang members may fail to appreciate the deeper historical and conceptual foundations of these conflicts, they rarely credit naked bigotry as the root cause. As Weide asserts, they divide themselves according to inherited groupist identities, thereby turning them against one another in protracted blood feuds across gang lines and racial lines. 

Weide explores both the historical foundations and the conceptual and cultural boundaries and biases that divide gang members across racial lines, detailing case studies of specific racialized gang conflicts between Sureño, Crip, and Blood gangs. Weide employs mixed-methods research, having spent nearly a decade on ethnographic fieldwork and conducted over one hundred formal interviews with gang members and gang enforcement officers concerning taboo subjects like prison and gang politics, and transracial gang membership. 

Divide & Conquer concludes with encouraging developments in recent years, as gang members themselves, on their own volition, have intervened to build solidarity and bring racialized gang conflicts between them to an end.

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cover of Domesticating Brown: Movements of Racial Imagination

Domesticating Brown

Movements of Racial Imagination

Christopher B. Patterson

Duke University Press, 2026

Domesticating Brown interrogates the slippery senses that brownness as a racial form has manifested over time, charting its transitions across historical colonial contexts and into the transpacific dynamics of contemporary empire. Christopher B. Patterson rethinks universalist definitions of race to consider the constant movements in racial contexts, meanings, and practices that “brownness” reveals: as a site for the ungovernable brown mass, as peoples marked for domestication through strategies of colonial containment, and as the complex shades that reveal troubling genealogies and shameful intimacies. Tracing the emergences and transformations of brownness in various contexts of transpacific encounter—from the Mongol Empire to Filipino plantation migration in Hawaiʻi, from the imperial management of Hong Kong to contemporary brown authorship—Domesticating Brown explores how colonial subjects and other marginalized peoples have strategized ways of resisting and reversing dominating notions of brownness through art, story, and embodied difference.
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cover of Dos X: Disability and Racial Dysphoria in Latinx and Filipinx Culture

Dos X

Disability and Racial Dysphoria in Latinx and Filipinx Culture

Sony Coráñez Bolton

University of Texas Press, 2025

An examination of the interconnectedness of brown-racialized people across multiple identities, told through case studies of television, literature, and writing.

As a Filipinx immigrant to the United States, Sony Coráñez Bolton has frequently been mistaken as Mexican. Dos X theorizes such misrecognition. What does it mean to exist in this liminal state, which Coráñez Bolton dubs the “racial uncanny”? What generative possibilities emerge from the presumed interchangeability of Latinx and Filipinx bodies—and from the in-betweenness of brownness as such?

Dos X tracks misrecognition through cultural products like the TV series Undone, Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son, and the nonfiction work of Jose Antonio Vargas. Misrecognition, Coráñez Bolton argues, produces moments of uncanniness in which subjects experience dysphoric attachments to identities that aren’t supposed to be theirs. In the context of racial capitalism, racial dysphoria is a disability because it undermines certainty about what one’s body is and therefore what role one is meant to play as a laborer. But racial dysphoria can also be revealing. Coráñez Bolton identifies vast potential in this supposed disability, which compels its “sufferers” to confront their shared position within the social, political, and economic organization of capital’s empire, opening new avenues for liberatory solidarity.

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cover of Dream Zones: Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India

Dream Zones

Anticipating Capitalism and Development in India

Jamie Cross

Pluto Press, 2014

Dream Zones explores the dreamed of and desired futures that constitute, sustain and disrupt capitalism in contemporary India.

Drawing on five years of research in and around India's Special Economic Zones (SEZs), the book follows the stories of regional politicians, corporate executives, rural farmers, industrial workers and social activists to show how the pursuit of growth, profit and development shapes the politics of industrialisation and liberalisation.

This book offers a timely reminder that the global economy is shaped by sentiment as much as reason and that un-realised expectations are the grounds on which new hopes for the future are sown.

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