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2 books match the query 'After Capitalism'

cover of After Capitalism: Horizons of Finance, Culture, and Citizenship

After Capitalism

Horizons of Finance, Culture, and Citizenship

Ferguson, Kennan

Rutgers University Press, 2016

From Thomas Piketty to David Harvey, scholars are increasingly questioning whether we are entering into a post-capitalist era. If so, does this new epoch signal the failure of capitalism and emergence of alternative systems? Or does it mark the ultimate triumph of capitalism as it evolves into an unstoppable entity that takes new forms as it engulfs its opposition? 
 
After Capitalism brings together leading scholars from across the academy to offer competing perspectives on capitalism’s past incarnations, present conditions, and possible futures.  Some contributors reassess classic theorizations of capitalism in light of recent trends, including real estate bubbles, debt relief protests, and the rise of a global creditocracy. Others examine Marx’s writings, unemployment, hoarding, “capitalist realism,” and coyote (trickster) capitalism, among many other topics. Media and design trends locate the key ideologies of the current economic moment, with authors considering everything from the austerity aesthetics of reality TV to the seductive smoothness of liquid crystal. 
 
Even as it draws momentous conclusions about global economic phenomena, After Capitalism also pays close attention to locales as varied as Cuba, India, and Latvia, examining the very different ways that economic conditions have affected the relationship between the state and its citizens. Collectively, these essays raise provocative questions about how we should imagine capitalism in the twenty-first century. Will capitalism, like all economic systems, come to an end, or does there exist in history or elsewhere a hidden world that is already post-capitalist, offering alternative possibilities for thought and action?  
 
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cover of After Capitalism: Science Fiction and the End of the End of the World

After Capitalism

Science Fiction and the End of the End of the World

Jo Lindsay Walton

Lever Press, 2027

In After Capitalism, Jo Lindsay Walton uses speculative fiction to tackle some of the largest, most urgent, and strangest political questions of our time. Is climate science itself a speculative practice, even as it conveys some of the hardest facts we know? Does the end of capitalism require the end of money, or might money mutate into something new—a currency based on time, labor or reputation? As AI threatens to take over more aspects of social life, might we think of money itself as a kind of AI, one that could be reprogrammed? Why do ecological forms of calculation—from real world carbon credits to speculative energy currencies—fail to protect the planet that sustains us?

Drawing on the works of Edward Bellamy, Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Cory Doctorow, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yoon Ha Lee, Karen Lord, Malka Older, Nnedi Okorafor, Marge Piercy, Adam Roberts, Joanna Russ, Wole Talabi, and more, Walton explores whether science fiction can create space for fugitive dreams to thrive, or whether it serves merely as a laboratory for capitalism’s own reinvention.Weaving together literary criticism, critical political economy, and perspectives from the environmental humanities, After Capitalism argues that the worlds beyond capitalism are neither unimaginable nor entirely elsewhere. 

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