What does 'anticapitalism' really mean for the politics and culture of the twenty-first century?Anticapitalism is an idea which, despite going global, remains rooted in the local, persisting as a loose collection of grassroots movements and actions. Anticapitalism needs to develop a coherent and cohering philosophy, something which cultural theory and the intellectual legacy of the New Left can help to provide, notably through the work of key radical thinkers, such as Ernesto Laclau, Stuart Hall, Antonio Negri, Gilles Deleuze and Judith Butler. Anticapitalism and Culture argues that there is a strong relationship between the radical tradition of cultural studies and the new political movements which try to resist corporate globalization. Indeed, the two need each other: whilst theory can shape and direct the huge diversity of anticapitalist activism, the energy and sheer political engagement of the anticapitalist movement can breathe new life into cultural studies.

What is wrong with capitalism, and how can we change it? Capitalism has transformed the world and increased our productivity, but at the cost of enormous human suffering. Our shared values—equality and fairness, democracy and freedom, community and solidarity—can provide both the basis for a critique of capitalism and help to guide us toward a socialist and democratic society. Erik Olin Wright has distilled decades of work into this concise and tightly argued manifesto: analyzing the varieties of anticapitalism, assessing different strategic approaches, and laying the foundations for a society dedicated to human flourishing. How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century is an urgent and powerful argument for socialism, and an unparalleled guide to help us get there. Another world is possible. Included is an afterword by the author’s close friend and collaborator Michael Burawoy.

What does 'anticapitalism' really mean for the politics and culture of the twenty-first century? Anticapitalism is an idea which, despite going global, remains rooted in the local, persisting as a loose collection of grassroots movements and actions. Anti-capitalism needs to develop a coherent and cohering philosophy, something which cultural theory and the intellectual legacy of the New Left can help to provide, notably through the work of key radical thinkers, such as Ernesto Laclau, Stuart Hall, Antonio Negri, Gilles Deleuze and Judith Butler. Anticapitalism and Culture argues that there is a strong relationship between the radical tradition of cultural studies and the new political movements which try to resist corporate globalization. Indeed, the two need each other: whilst theory can shape and direct the huge diversity of anticapitalist activism, the energy and sheer political engagement of the anticapitalist movement can breathe new life into cultural studies.

A refreshingly non-doctrinaire anthology of writings and interviews covering much of the intellectual geography of the new anti-market left. “Joel Schalit is one of that interesting new breed of young American leftist thinkers, with a large online presence, and a punk rock band and fanzine to run alongside his political collective and magazine Bad Subject . . . In just over 300 pages, Schalit and his contributors put forward an astounding array of anti-market arguments; survey countless pockets of anti-capitalist resistance (opposition to free-market logic comes from a surprisingly wide spectrum, from the WTO protesters in Seattle and the Zapatista rebellion, to fundamentalist religion and even some centrists and conservatives); and assess the role of culture as a public sphere in which opposition can be rehearsed. But what’s most striking about this book is not so much its multiplicity of viewpoints or intellectual rigour, but the faint hint of optimism it contains . . . These essays are addressed to the intelligent but not necessarily academic reader, and there’s a touching conviction that the ideas here should and will be discussed by ordinary people like me, and perhaps like you too.” —The Independent on Sunday (UK) “[A] must-read for any up-and-coming revolutionary who hates market economy, but isn’t sure why.” —Portland Mercury The collapse of Enron and WorldCom and the increasing evidence of corruption at the highest levels of corporate life has opened the door to a remarkable whirlwind of dialogue about the prevailing economic ideology of the post–Cold War era. While traditionally the province of the left, concerns about the legitimacy of market-driven societies are now being voiced by centrists and conservatives, who fear that their livelihoods and their investments are suddenly at the mercy of forces spinning out of control. Enter The Anti-Capitalism Reader, a refreshingly non-doctrinaire anthology of writings and interviews covering much of the intellectual geography of the new anti-market left that has become increasingly visible since anti-capitalist protests rocked the World Trade Organization’s 1999 meeting in Seattle. Featuring essays by Doug Henwood, Naomi Klein, Ali Abunimah, Annalee Newitz, Paul Thomas, Ultra-red, and the Bad Subjects collective—and interviews with Slavoj Žižek, Toni Negri, Thomas Frank, and Wendy Brown—The Anti-Capitalism Reader moves from politics to culture, gender, and alternative economic systems. Each contributor presents accessible, hard-hitting (and sometimes humorous) critical insights that together make this volume an ideal partner in contemporary discourse about globalization, war, and economic decline.

A study of the political implications of Abstract Expressionism.

Romantic Anti-capitalism and Nature examines the deep connections between the romantic rebellion against modernity and ecological concern with modern threats to nature. The chapters deal with expressions of romantic culture from a wide variety of different areas: travel writing, painting, utopian vision, cultural studies, political philosophy, and activist socio-political writing. The authors discuss a highly diverse group of figures - William Bartram, Thomas Cole, William Morris, Walter Benjamin, Raymond Williams, and Naomi Klein - from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first century. They are rooted individually in English, American, and German cultures, but share a common perspective: the romantic protest against modern bourgeois civilisation and its destruction of the natural environment. Although a rich ecocritical literature has developed since the 1990s, particularly in the United States and Britain, that addresses many aspects of ecology and its intersection with romanticism, they almost exclusively focus on literature, and define romanticism as a limited literary period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This study is one of the first to suggest a much broader view of the romantic relation to ecological discourse and representation, covering a range of cultural creations and viewing romanticism as a cultural critique, or protest against capitalist-industrialist modernity in the name of past, pre-modern, or pre-capitalist values. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of ecology, romanticism, and the history of capitalism.

Does contemporary anti-capitalism tend towards, as Slavoj Žižek believes, nihilism, or does it tend towards, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri believe, true egalitarian freedom? Within The Cultural Contradictions of Anti-Capitalism, Fletcher presents an answer that manages to tend towards both simultaneously. In entering into contemporary debates on radicalism, this innovative volume proposes a revised conception of Hardt and Negri’s philosophy of emancipatory desire. Indeed, Fletcher reassesses Hardt and Negri’s history of Western radicalism and challenges their notion of an alter-modernity break from bourgeois modernity. In addition to this, this title proposes the idea of Western anti-capitalism as a spirit within a spirit, exploring how anti-capitalist movements in the West pose a genuine challenge to the capitalist order while remaining dependent on liberalist assumptions about the emancipatory individual. Inspired by post-structuralism and rejecting both revolutionary transcendence and notions of an underlying desiring purity, The Cultural Contradictions of Anti-Capitalism offers new insight into how liberal capitalist society persistently produces its own forms of resistance against itself. This book will appeal to graduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as: Sociology, Politics, International Relations, Cultural Studies, History, and Philosophy.

After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. But it will also show that, because of a number of inconsistencies and glitches internal to the capitalist reality program capitalism in fact is anything but realistic.