Results by title
343 books match the query 'Capitalism' and 12 start with l
Labor of Fire
The Ontology of Labor between Economy and CultureBruno Gullì
Temple University Press, 2005
Gullì lays the groundwork for his book by offering a critique of productive labor, and then maps out his productive/living labor distinction in detail, reviewing the work of Marx and others.
Labour, Nature and Capitalism
Exploring Labour-Environmental Conflicts in Kerala, IndiaSilpa Satheesh
University College London, 2025
Set against the industrial belt of Eloor-Edayar, Labour, Nature and Capitalism investigates the uneasy tensions between trade unions and environmental movements in Kerala, complicating the celebrated “Kerala Model” of development. Through ethnographic research and document analysis, Silpa Satheesh studies how capitalist interests shape and divide movements that appear to share common ground. The book challenges the simplistic “environment versus development” binary, depicting how industrial labor and grassroots environmental activism frequently find themselves at odds, despite both being embedded in struggles for justice.
By foregrounding the lived experiences of movement actors and examining the ideological fractures that emerge in postcolonial capitalism, Satheesh provides a much-needed intervention into debates on labor and ecology in the Global South. This interdisciplinary work is particularly valuable for scholars and activists working at the intersection of environmental justice and working-class mobilization, shedding light on the possibilities and limits of solidarity in the fight for just transitions.
Land Hunger
Ohio and the Western FrontiersMansel G. Blackford
Ohio University Press, 2025
Land's End
Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous FrontierTania Murray Li
Duke University Press, 2014
The book challenges complacent, modernization narratives promoted by development agencies that assume inefficient farmers who lose out in the shift to high-value export crops can find jobs elsewhere. Decades of uneven and often jobless growth in Indonesia meant that for newly landless highlanders, land's end was a dead end. The book also has implications for social movement activists, who seldom attend to instances where enclosure is initiated by farmers rather than coerced by the state or agribusiness corporations. Li's attention to the historical, cultural, and ecological dimensions of this conjuncture demonstrates the power of the ethnographic method and its relevance to theory and practice today.
Landscaping Indigenous Mexico
The Liberal State and Capitalism in the Purépecha HighlandsFernando Pérez Montesinos
University of Texas Press, 2025
2026 Bolton-Johnson Prize, Conference on Latin American History
2026 María Elena Martínez Prize in Mexican History, Conference on Latin American History
2026 Honorable Mention, Environment Section of the Latin American Studies Association
A history of the Purépecha people's survival amid environmental and political changes.
Landscapes are more than geological formations; they are living records of human struggles. Landscaping Indigenous Mexico unearths the history of Juátarhu, an Indigenous landscape shaped and nurtured by the Purépecha—a formidable Mesoamerican people whose power once rivaled that of the Aztecs. Although cataclysmic changes came with European contact and colonization, Juátarhu’s enduring agroecology continued to sustain local life through centuries of challenges.
Contesting essentialist narratives of Indigenous penury, Pérez Montesinos shows how Purépechas thrived after Mexican independence in 1821, using Juátarhu’s diverse agroecology to negotiate continued autonomy amid waves of national economic and political upheaval. After 1870, however, autonomy waned under the pressure of land privatization policies, state intervention, and industrial logging. On the eve of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, Purépechas stood at a critical juncture: Would the Indigenous landscape endure or succumb? Offering a fresh perspective on a seemingly well-worn subject, Pérez Montesinos argues that Michoacán, long considered a peripheral revolutionary region, saw one of the era’s most radical events: the destruction of the liberal order and the timber capitalism of Juátarhu.
Law & Capitalism
What Corporate Crises Reveal about Legal Systems and Economic Development around the WorldCurtis J. Milhaupt and Katharina Pistor
University of Chicago Press, 2008
Using comparative case studies that address the United States, China, Germany, Japan, Korea, and Russia, Curtis J. Milhaupt and Katharina Pistor argue that a disparate blend of legal and nonlegal mechanisms have supported economic growth around the world. Their groundbreaking findings show that law and markets evolve together in a “rolling relationship,” and legal systems, including those of the most successful economies, therefore differ significantly in their organizational characteristics. Innovative and insightful, Law and Capitalism will change the way lawyers, economists, policy makers, and business leaders think about legal regulation in an increasingly global market for capital and corporate governance.
Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System
Henryk Grossmann
Pluto Press, 1992
Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich
How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the WorldDeirdre Nansen McCloskey and Art Carden
University of Chicago Press, 2020
For readers looking for a distillation of McCloskey’s magisterial work, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich is what you’ve been waiting for. In this lively volume, McCloskey and the economist and journalist Carden bring together the trilogy’s key ideas and its most provocative arguments. The rise of the west, and now the rest, is the story of the rise of ordinary people to a dignity and liberty inspiring them to have a go. The outcome was an explosion of innovation after 1800, and a rise of real income by an astounding 3,000 percent. The Great Enrichment, well beyond the conventional Industrial Revolution, did not, McCloskey and Carden show, come from the usual suspects, capital accumulation or class struggle. It came from the idea of economic liberty in Holland and the Anglosphere, then Sweden and Japan, then Italy and Israel and China and India, an idea that bids fair in the next few generations to raise up the wretched of the earth. The original shift to liberalism arose from 1517 to 1789 from theological and political revolutions in northwest Europe, upending ancient hierarchies. McCloskey and Carden contend further that liberalism and “innovism” made us better humans as well as richer ones. Not matter but ideas. Not corruption but improvement.
Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich draws in entertaining fashion on history, economics, literature, philosophy, and popular culture, from growth theory to the Simpsons. It is the perfect introduction for a broad audience to McCloskey’s influential explanation of how we got rich. At a time when confidence in the economic system is under challenge, the book mounts an optimistic and persuasive defense of liberal innovism, and of the modern world it has wrought.
Lenin Reloaded
Toward a Politics of Truth, sic viiSebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek, eds.
Duke University Press, 2007
These essays, some of which are appearing in English for the first time, bring Lenin face-to-face with the problems of today, including war, imperialism, the imperative to build an intelligentsia of wage earners, the need to embrace the achievements of bourgeois society and modernity, and the widespread failure of social democracy. Lenin Reloaded demonstrates that truth and partisanship are not mutually exclusive as is often suggested. Quite the opposite—in the present, truth can be articulated only from a thoroughly partisan position.
Contributors. Kevin B. Anderson, Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Daniel Bensaïd, Sebastian Budgen, Alex Callinicos, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Stathis Kouvelakis, Georges Labica, Sylvain Lazarus, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Lars T. Lih, Domenico Losurdo, Savas Michael-Matsas, Antonio Negri, Alan Shandro, Slavoj Žižek
Let Them Eat Junk
How Capitalism Creates Hunger and ObesityRobert Albritton
Pluto Press, 2009
Respected economist Robert Albritton argues that the capitalist system, far from delivering on the promise of cheap, nutritious food for all, has created a world where 25% of the world population are over-fed and 25% are hungry. This malnourishment of 50% of the world's population is explained systematically, a refreshing change from accounts that focus on cultural factors and individual greed. Albritton details the economic relations and connections that have put us in a situation of simultaneous oversupply and undersupply of food.
This explosive book provides yet more evidence that the human cost of capitalism is much bigger than those in power will admit.
Life in and against the Odds
Debts of Freedom and the Speculative Roots of U.S. CultureHeidi Hoechst
Temple University Press, 2015
Somehow people continue to imagine a world of justice against the odds of a deck that has been stacked against them. In her urgent and perceptive book, Life in and against the Odds, Hoechst focuses on the particular circumstances and conditions of different phases of speculative expansion in the United States. She traces the roots of the nation-state to nineteenth-century land markets and slave exchanges. Hoechst also chronicles how these racial foundations extend through corporate capitalism from the 1920s and ´30s to the present era of financialized capitalism and the recent housing bubble.
Life in and against the Odds identifies where and how speculative nationalism creates roadblocks to freedom. Hoechst retells the history of the United States with a perspective on how human lives are made, destroyed, reconfigured, and claimed under the systemic violence of a nation that is rooted in the racializing futurity of speculative capitalism.
Lifeblood
Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of CapitalMatthew T. Huber
University of Minnesota Press, 2013
If our oil addiction is so bad for us, why don’t we kick the habit? Looking beyond the usual culprits—Big Oil, petro-states, and the strategists of empire—Lifeblood finds a deeper and more complex explanation in everyday practices of oil consumption in American culture. Those practices, Matthew T. Huber suggests, have in fact been instrumental in shaping the broader cultural politics of American capitalism.
How did gasoline and countless other petroleum products become so central to our notions of the American way of life? Huber traces the answer from the 1930s through the oil shocks of the 1970s to our present predicament, revealing that oil’s role in defining popular culture extends far beyond material connections between oil, suburbia, and automobility. He shows how oil powered a cultural politics of entrepreneurial life—the very American idea that life itself is a product of individual entrepreneurial capacities. In so doing he uses oil to retell American political history from the triumph of New Deal liberalism to the rise of the New Right, from oil’s celebration as the lifeblood of postwar capitalism to increasing anxieties over oil addiction.
Lifeblood rethinks debates surrounding energy and capitalism, neoliberalism and nature, and the importance of suburbanization in the rightward shift in American politics. Today, Huber tells us, as crises attributable to oil intensify, a populist clamoring for cheap energy has less to do with American excess than with the eroding conditions of life under neoliberalism.