In Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital, Marina Vishmidt offers a new perspective on one of the main categories of capitalist life in the historical present. Writing not under the shadow but in the spirit of Adorno’s negative dialectic, her work pursues speculation through its contested terrains of philosophy, finance, and art, to arrive at the most detailed analysis that we now possess of the role of speculation in the shaping of subjectivity by value relations. Featuring detailed critical discussions of recent tendencies in the artistic representation of labour, and a brilliant reconstruction of the philosophical concept of the speculative from its origins in German Romanticism, Speculation as a Mode of Production is an essential, widescreen theorisation of capital’s drive to self-expansion, and an urgent corrective to the narrow and one-sided periodisations to which it is most commonly subjected.

A unique insight into the interaction between the state, financiers and entrepreneurs in the modern innovation economy.

Can social theories forge new paths into an uncertain future? The future has become increasingly difficult to imagine. We might be able to predict a few events, but imagining how looming disasters will coincide is simultaneously necessary and impossible. Drawing on speculative fiction and social theory, Theory for the World to Come is the beginning of a conversation about theories that move beyond nihilistic conceptions of the capitalism-caused Anthropocene and toward generative bodies of thought that provoke creative ways of thinking about the world ahead. Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on such authors as Kim Stanley Robinson and Octavia Butler, and engages with afrofuturism, indigenous speculative fiction, and films from the 1970s and ’80s to help think differently about the future and its possibilities. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

In a capitalist system, consumers, investors, and corporations orient their activities toward a future that contains opportunities and risks. How actors assess uncertainty is a problem that economists have tried to solve through general equilibrium and rational expectations theory. Powerful as these analytical tools are, they underestimate the future’s unknowability by assuming that markets, in the aggregate, correctly forecast what is to come. Jens Beckert adds a new chapter to the theory of capitalism by demonstrating how fictional expectations drive modern economies—or throw them into crisis when the imagined futures fail to materialize. Collectively held images of how the future will unfold are critical because they free economic actors from paralyzing doubt, enabling them to commit resources and coordinate decisions even if those expectations prove inaccurate. Beckert distinguishes fictional expectations from performativity theory, which holds that predictions tend to become self-fulfilling prophecies. Economic forecasts are important not because they produce the futures they envision but because they create the expectations that generate economic activity in the first place. Actors pursue money, investments, innovations, and consumption only if they believe the objects obtained through market exchanges will retain value. We accept money because we believe in its future purchasing power. We accept the risk of capital investments and innovation because we expect profit. And we purchase consumer goods based on dreams of satisfaction. As Imagined Futures shows, those who ignore the role of real uncertainty and fictional expectations in market dynamics misunderstand the nature of capitalism.

The Das Kapital of the 20th century,Society of the Spectacle is an essential text, and the main theoretical work of the Situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960's, in particular the May 1968 uprisings in France, up to the present day, with global capitalism seemingly staggering around in it’s Zombie end-phase, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late 20th century. This ‘Red and Black’ translation from 1977 is Introduced by Notting Hill armchair insurrectionary Tom Vague with a galloping time line and pop-situ verve, and given a more analytical over view by young upstart thinker Sam Cooper.

In this groundbreaking critique of both traditional and Marxist notions of feudalism and of the pre-capitalist state, John Haldon considers the configuration of state and social relations in medieval Europe and Mughal India as well as in Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire. He argues that a Marxist reading of the pre-capitalist state can take account of the autonomy of power relations and avoid economic reductionism while still focusing on the forms of tribute which sustained the ruling power. Haldon explores the conflicts to which these gave rise and shows the Ottoman state elite, often held to be a clear example of independence from underlying social relations, to be deeply enmeshed in economic relationships and the extraction of tribute. Haldon argues that feudalism was the specifically European form of a much more widely diffused tributary mode, whose characteristic social relations and structural constraints can be seen at work in the Byzantine, Ottoman and Mughal empires as well. While acknowledging the range of ideological and cultural variation within and between these examples of the tributary mode, Haldon denies the thesis that such “superstructural” variations themselves yielded fundamentally contrasting social relations.

This book provides a comprehensive guide to all three volumes of Karl Marx’s ‘Capital’, with advice on further reading and points for further discussion. Recognizing the contemporary relevance of ‘Capital’ in the midst of the current financial crisis, Kenneth Smith has produced an essential guide to Marx’s ideas, particularly on the subject of the circulation of money-capital. This guide uniquely presents the three volumes of ‘Capital’ in a different order of reading to that in which they were published, placing them instead in the order that Marx himself sometimes recommended as a more user-friendly way of reading. Dr Smith also argues that for most of the twentieth century, the full development of the capitalist mode of production (CMP) has been undermined by the existence of a non-capitalist ‘third world’, which has caused the CMP to take on the form of what Marx called a highly developed mercantile system, rather than one characterized by an uninterrupted circuit of industrial capital of the kind he expected would develop. While the guide can be read as a book in its own right, it also contains detailed references to Volumes I–III so that students, seminars and discussion groups can easily make connections between Smith’s explanations and the relevant parts of ‘Capital’.

In this major, paradigm-shifting work, Kojin Karatani systematically re-reads Marx's version of world history, shifting the focus of critique from modes of production to modes of exchange. Karatani seeks to understand both Capital-Nation-State, the interlocking system that is the dominant form of modern global society, and the possibilities for superseding it. In The Structure of World History, he traces different modes of exchange, including the pooling of resources that characterizes nomadic tribes, the gift exchange systems developed after the adoption of fixed-settlement agriculture, the exchange of obedience for protection that arises with the emergence of the state, the commodity exchanges that characterize capitalism, and, finally, a future mode of exchange based on the return of gift exchange, albeit modified for the contemporary moment. He argues that this final stage—marking the overcoming of capital, nation, and state—is best understood in light of Kant's writings on eternal peace. The Structure of World History is in many ways the capstone of Karatani's brilliant career, yet it also signals new directions in his thought.

Art and Value is the first comprehensive analysis of art's political economy throughout classical, neoclassical and Marxist economics. It provides a critical-historical survey of the theories of art's economic exceptionalism, of art as a merit good, and of the theories of art's commodification, the culture industry and real subsumption. Key debates on the economics of art, from the high prices artworks fetch at auction, to the controversies over public subsidy of the arts, the 'cost disease' of artistic production, and neoliberal and post-Marxist theories of art's incorporation into capitalism, are examined in detail. Subjecting mainstream and Marxist theories of art's economics to an exacting critique, the book concludes with a new Marxist theory of art's economic exceptionalism.

Speculation is often associated with financial practices, but The Time of Money makes the case that it not be restricted to the financial sphere. It argues that the expansion of finance has created a distinctive social world, one that demands a speculative stance toward life in general. Replacing a logic of extraction, speculation changes our relationship to time and organizes our social worlds to maximize the productive capacities of populations around flows of money for finance capital. Speculative practices have become a matter of survival, and defining features of our age are hardwired to their operations—stagnant wages, indebtedness, the centrality of women's earnings to the household, workfarism, and more. Examining five features of our contemporary economy, Lisa Adkins reveals the operations of this speculative rationality. Moving beyond claims that indebtedness is intrinsic to contemporary life and vague declarations that the social world has become financialized, Adkins delivers a precise examination of the relation between finance and society, one that is rich in empirical and analytical detail.