Marx's Das Kapital: A Biography


Francis Wheen - 2006
    Wheen shows that, far from being a dry economic treatise, Das Kapital is like a vast Gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved by the monster they created: capitalism.

The Limits to Capital


David Harvey - 1982
    The Limits to Capital provides one of the best theoretical guides to the history and geography of capitalist development. In this new edition, Harvey updates his classic text with a substantial discussion of the turmoil in world markets today.In his analyses of ‘fictitious capital’ and ‘uneven geographical development’ Harvey takes the reader step by step through layers of crisis formation, beginning with Marx’s controversial argument concerning the falling rate of profit, moving through crises of credit and finance, and closing with a timely analysis geopolitical and geographical considerations.

For Marx


Louis Althusser - 1965
    For Marx, first published in France in 1968, has come to be regarded as the founding text of the school of “structuralist Marxism” which was presided over by the fascinating and enigmatic figure of Louis Althusser. Structuralism constituted an intellectual revolution in the 1960s and 1970s and radically transformed the way philosophy, political and social theory, history, science, and aesthetics were discussed and thought about. For Marx was a key contribution to that process and it fundamentally recast the way in which many people understood Marx and Marxism.This book contains the classic statements of Althusser's analysis of the young Marx and the importance of Feuerbach during this formative period, of his thesis of the “epistomological break” between the early and the late Marx, and of his conception of dialectics, contradiction and “overdetermination.” Also included is a study of the materialist theater of Bertolazzi and Brecht and the critique of humanist readings of Marxism. Since his death in 1990, Althusser's legacy has come under renewed examination and it is increasingly recognized that the influence of his ideas has been wider and deeper than previously thought: reading For Marx, in its audacity, originality and rigor, will explain why this impact was so significant.

The Theory of Capitalist Development


Paul M. Sweezy - 1942
    Written by an economist who was a master of modern academic theory as well as Marxist literature, it has been recognized as the ideal textbook in its subject. Comprehensive, lucid, authoritative, it has not been challenged or even approached by any later study.

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age


Tim Wu - 2018
    But concern over what Louis Brandeis called the "curse of bigness" can no longer remain the province of specialist lawyers and economists, for it has spilled over into policy and politics, even threatening democracy itself. History suggests that tolerance of inequality and failing to control excessive corporate power may prompt the rise of populism, nationalism, extremist politicians, and fascist regimes. In short, as Wu warns, we are in grave danger of repeating the signature errors of the twentieth century.In The Curse of Bigness, Columbia professor Tim Wu tells of how figures like Brandeis and Theodore Roosevelt first confronted the democratic threats posed by the great trusts of the Gilded Age--but the lessons of the Progressive Era were forgotten in the last 40 years. He calls for recovering the lost tenets of the trustbusting age as part of a broader revival of American progressive ideas as we confront the fallout of persistent and extreme economic inequality.

The Poverty of Philosophy


Karl Marx - 1847
    Marx specifically accuses Proudhon of wanting to rise above the bourgeoisie. In the history of Marx's thought and Marxism, this work is pivotal in the distinction between the Marxist concepts of utopian socialism and scientific socialism.This Elibron Classics edition is a facsimile reprint of a 1920 edition by Charles H. Kerr & Company, Chicago.

The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism


Daniel Bell - 1976
    With the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a new world order, this provocative manifesto is more relevant than ever.

Religion and the Rise of Capitalism


R.H. Tawney - 1926
    H. Tawney addresses the question of how religion has affected social and economic practices. He tracks the influence of religious thought on capitalist economy and ideology since the Middle Ages, shedding light on the question of why Christianity continues to exert a unique role in the marketplace. In so doing, the book offers an incisive analysis of the morals and mores of contemporary Western culture.Religion and the Rise of Capitalism is more pertinent now than ever, as today the dividing line between the spheres of religion and secular business is shifting, blending ethical considerations with the motivations of the marketplace. By examining the period that saw the transition from medieval to modern theories of social organization, Tawney clarifies the most pressing problems of the end of the century. In tough, muscular, richly varied prose, he tells an absorbing and meaningful story. And in his new introduction, which may well be a classic in its own right, Adam Seligman details Tawney's background and the current status of academic thought on these issues, and he provides a comparative analysis of Tawney with Max Weber that will at once delight and inform readers.

What Is Marxism?


Alan Woods - 2007
    

Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution


Dan Georgakas - 1975
    This new South End Press edition makes available the full text of this out-of-print classic--along with a new foreword by Manning Marable, interviews with participants in DRUM, and reflections on political developments over the past threee decades by Georgakas and Surkin.

Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One


Fredric Jameson - 2011
    The textual landscape that emerges is the setting for paradoxes and contradictions that struggle toward resolution, giving rise to new antinomies and a new forward movement. These immense segments overlap each other to combine and develop on new levels in the same way that capital itself does, stumbling against obstacles that it overcomes by progressive expansions, which are inthemselves so many leaps into the unknown. Marx's fundamental concepts are not presented philosophically, or in social-scientific terms, but rather as a series of figures produced by the development of the text. Jameson grasps Marx's work as a representational problem and an experiment in constructing the figure or model of the inexpressible phenomenon that is capital.

The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition


Maurizio Lazzarato - 2011
    They are all 'debtors,' guilty and responsible in the eyes of capital, which has become the Great, the Universal, Creditor."—from The Making of the Indebted ManDebt—both public debt and private debt—has become a major concern of economic and political leaders. In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato shows that, far from being a threat to the capitalist economy, debt lies at the very core of the neoliberal project. Through a reading of Karl Marx's lesser-known youthful writings on John Mill, and a rereading of writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, Lazzarato demonstrates that debt is above all a political construction, and that the creditor/debtor relation is the fundamental social relation of Western societies.Debt cannot be reduced to a simple economic mechanism, for it is also a technique of “public safety” through which individual and collective subjectivities are governed and controlled. Its aim is to minimize the uncertainty of the time and behavior of the governed. We are forever sinking further into debt to the State, to private insurance, and, on a more general level, to corporations. To insure that we honor our debts, we are at once encouraged and compelled to become the “entrepreneurs” of our lives, of our “human capital.” In this way, our entire material, psychological, and affective horizon is upended and reconfigured.How do we extricate ourselves from this impossible situation? How do we escape the neoliberal condition of the indebted man? Lazzarato argues that we will have to recognize that there is no simple technical, economic, or financial solution. We must instead radically challenge the fundamental social relation structuring capitalism: the system of debt.

An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory


Ernest Mandel - 1969
    A concise presentation of the basic principles of political economy.

Thomas Piketty’s 'Capital in the Twenty First Century': An Introduction


Stephan Kaufmann - 2017
    It has sparked major international debates, dominated bestseller lists and generated a level of enthusiasm—as well as intense criticism—in a way no other recent economic or sociological work has. Piketty has been described as a new Karl Marx and placed in the same league as the economist John Maynard Keynes. The ‘rock star economist’s’ (Financial Times) underlying thesis: inequality under capitalism has reached dramatic proportions in the last few decades and continues to grow—and not by coincidence. Thus, a small elite becomes simultaneously richer and richer and more and more powerful.Given the sensational reception of the not-so-easily digested 800-page study that spans back to the eighteenth century, the question as to where the hype around Piketty’s book comes from deserves to be asked. What is correct in it? What are the criticisms of it? And what should we make of it—both of the book itself and of the criticism it has received? This book lays out the argument of Piketty’s monumental work in a compact and understandable format, while also investigating the controversies that this book has caused. In addition, the two authors demonstrate the limits, contradictions and errors of the so-called ‘Piketty revolution’.

Workers' Councils


Anton Pannekoek - 1946
    Left Communism is the theory and practice of worker control and self-organization whose adherents provided the main opposition to the Bolsheviks. Rarely printed, often cited, Pannekoek’s Workers’ Councils is the Das Kapital of Left Communism. This updated edition includes a substantial introduction from Noam Chomsky, illuminating the continuing relevance of this classic text."An urgent message to the future— are we listening?—from the most brilliant theoretician of libertarian com-munism."—Mike Davis, author of City of QuartzAnton Pannekoek was a Dutch worker, Socialist, and astronomer. He wrote Workers’ Councils amidst Nazi occupation of Holland.