Capitalism is stumbling, empire is faltering, and the planet is thawing. Yet many people are still grasping to understand these multiple crises and to find a way forward to a just future. Into the breach come the essential insights of Capital and Its Discontents, which cut through the gristle to get to the heart of the matter about the nature of capitalism and imperialism, capitalism’s vulnerabilities at this conjuncture—and what can we do to hasten its demise. Through a series of incisive conversations with some of the most eminent thinkers and political economists on the Left—including David Harvey, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Mike Davis, Leo Panitch, Tariq Ali, and Noam Chomsky—Capital and Its Discontents illuminates the dynamic contradictions undergirding capitalism and the potential for its dethroning. The book challenges conventional wisdom on the Left about the nature of globalization, neoliberalism, and imperialism, as well as the agrarian question in the Global South. It probes deeply into the roots of the global economic meltdown, the role of debt and privatization in dampening social revolt, and considers capitalism’s dynamic ability to find ever new sources of accumulation—whether through imperial or ecological plunder or the commodification of previously unpaid female labor. The Left luminaries in Capital and Its Discontents look at potential avenues out of the mess—as well as wrong turns and needless detours—drawing lessons from the history of post-colonial states in the Global South, struggles against imperialism past and present, the eternal pendulum swing of radicalism, the corrosive legacy of postmodernism, and the potentialities of the radical humanist tradition. At a moment when capitalism as a system is more reviled than ever, here is an indispensable toolbox of ideas for action by some of the most brilliant thinkers of our times. Full list of Interviewees: Noam Chomsky is a laureate professor at the University of Arizona and professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. His work is widely credited with having revolutionized the field of modern linguistics and Chomsky is one of the foremost critics of U.S. foreign policy. He has published numerous groundbreaking books, articles, and essays on global politics, history, and linguistics. His recent books include Who Rules the World? and Hopes and Prospects. Tariq Ali is a historian, novelist, and filmmaker, and the author of many books. He is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review and a contributor to the Guardian and the London Review of Books. Mike Davis is an urban theorist, historian, and political activist, author of many works including City of Quartz. He is an editor of the New Left Review and received a MacArthur Fellowship Award and the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. Ellen Meiksins Wood, for many years professor of political science at York University, Toronto, is the author of a number of books, including The Origin of Capitalism and Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. David Harvey is the Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a pioneering radical geographer. He has written numerous books and is among the 20 most cited authors in the humanities. Leo Panitch teaches political economy at York University in Toronto and is coeditor of the Socialist Register. He is the author of numerous books, including In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives, published by PM Press. Doug Henwood is editor of Left Business Observer, author of After the New Economy and Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom, and a contributing editor to The Nation magazine. A South African native, Gillian Hart is professor of geography at UC Berkeley and the author of Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa. John Bellamy Foster is the editor of the independent socialist magazine Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon in Eugene. He is the coauthor, among other works, of The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences. Ursula Huws is the editor of the international interdisciplinary journal Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation, and the author of The Making of a Cybertariat: Virtual Work in a Real World. David McNally is professor of political science at York University in Toronto and the author of many books, including Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance, published by PM Press. Jason W. Moore is a research fellow at the Department of Human Geography at Lund University, Sweden. Vivek Chibber is professor of sociology at New York University and the author of Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India. John Sanbonmatsu teaches philosophy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. He is the author of The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making? of a New Political Subject. Andrej Grubačić is a dissident from the Balkans. A radical historian and sociologist, he is the coauthor of Wobblies and Zapatistas and author of Don’t Mourn, Balkanize! (both from PM Press).

This book contains the most important interviews and speeches that Prof. Hudson has given over the past decade (2003-2012). They span the political spectrum from COUNTERPUNCH.COM and KPFK radio's GUNS AND BUTTER to to iTULIP.COM and SANKT GEORGE in Berlin. It also includes his now-famous Rlmini, Italy, speeches that were given at a packed sports arena in early 2012 on the topic of how finance capitalism is pushing the world, starting with Europe, into austerity and neo-feudalism.

This book explains and evaluates today’s economic, political, social and ecological crises through the lens of rentier capitalism and countermovements in Central Asia. Over the last three decades the rich and powerful have increased their wealth and political power to the detriment of social and environmental well-being. But their activities have not gone unchecked. Grassroots activism has resisted the harmful and damaging effects of the neoliberal commodification of things. Providing a much-needed theorisation of the moral economy and politics of rent, this book offers in-depth case studies on finance, real estate and natural resources in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The authors show the mechanisms of rent extraction, their moral justifications and legitimacy, and social struggles against them. This book highlights the importance of class relations, state-countermovement interactions and global capitalism in understanding social and economic dynamics in Central Asia. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in political economy, development studies, sociology, politics and international relations.

This powerful, unsettling book gives us a rare glimpse behind the closed doors of global financial institutions by the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. When it was first published, this national bestseller quickly became a touchstone in the globalization debate. Renowned economist and Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz had a ringside seat for most of the major economic events of the last decade, including stints as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist at the World Bank. Particularly concerned with the plight of the developing nations, he became increasingly disillusioned as he saw the International Monetary Fund and other major institutions put the interests of Wall Street and the financial community ahead of the poorer nations. Those seeking to understand why globalization has engendered the hostility of protesters in Seattle and Genoa will find the reasons here. While this book includes no simple formula on how to make globalization work, Stiglitz provides a reform agenda that will provoke debate for years to come. Rarely do we get such an insider's analysis of the major institutions of globalization as in this penetrating book. With a new foreword for this paperback edition.

"One of the most comprehensive histories of modern capitalism yet written." —Michael Hirsh, New York Times An authoritative, insightful, and highly readable history of the twentieth-century global economy, updated with a new chapter on the early decades of the new century. Global Capitalism guides the reader from the globalization of the early twentieth century and its swift collapse in the crises of 1914–45, to the return to global integration at the end of the century, and the subsequent retreat in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008.

Michael Hudson is one the world's foremost critics of contemporary financial capitalism. He is also one of a tiny handful of eminent economists who is leading us to look at old questions in startling new ways. Professor Hudson is the author numerous books on international finance and economic history, and a frequent contributor to leading newspapers and public affairs sites. "There are few people alive who have taught me more than Michael Hudson. The incisive and brilliant essays in this book should really be assigned to every first-year student of economics. The fact they never will be is the ultimate testimony to the fact economics has betrayed its own most noble tradition - and Hudson here so magnificently embodies - to become a sheer instrument of power." David Graeber, author of Debt: the First 5,000 Years and co-organizer of Occupy Wall Street "Michael Hudson... I consider to be the best economist in the West." The Saker "Economist's theoretical edifice does not explain economic reality. Economists need to begin anew. Michael Hudson shows them the way." Paul Craig Roberts, Institute for Political Economy

“Urgent work, by the foremost champion of ‘progressive capitalism.’ ” —The New Yorker An authoritative account of the dangers of unfettered markets and monied politics, People, Power, and Profits shows us an America in crisis. The American people, however, are far from powerless, and Joseph Stiglitz provides an alternative path forward through his vision of progressive capitalism, with a comprehensive set of political and economic changes.

A renowned political philosopher updates his classic book on the American political tradition to address the perils democracy confronts today. The 1990s were a heady time. The Cold War had ended, and America’s version of liberal capitalism seemed triumphant. And yet, amid the peace and prosperity, anxieties about the project of self-government could be glimpsed beneath the surface. So argued Michael Sandel, in his influential and widely debated book Democracy’s Discontent, published in 1996. The market faith was eroding the common life. A rising sense of disempowerment was likely to provoke backlash, he wrote, from those who would “shore up borders, harden the distinction between insiders and outsiders, and promise a politics to ‘take back our culture and take back our country,’ to ‘restore our sovereignty’ with a vengeance.” Now, a quarter century later, Sandel updates his classic work for an age when democracy’s discontent has hardened into a country divided against itself. In this new edition, he extends his account of America’s civic struggles from the 1990s to the present. He shows how Democrats and Republicans alike embraced a version of finance-driven globalization that created a society of winners and losers and fueled the toxic politics of our time. In a work celebrated when first published as “a remarkable fusion of philosophical and historical scholarship” (Alan Brinkley), Sandel recalls moments in the American past when the country found ways to hold economic power to democratic account. To reinvigorate democracy, Sandel argues in a stirring new epilogue, we need to reconfigure the economy and empower citizens as participants in a shared public life.

In this groundbreaking study of the financial meltdown, renowned radical political economists lay bare the roots of the crisis in the inner logic of capitalism itself. Objective and detailed, this account provocatively challenges the call for a return to a largely mythical golden age of economic regulation as a check on finance capital. In addition, it deftly illuminates how the era of neoliberal free markets has been, in practice, under-girded by state intervention on a massive scale. Arguing for genuinely transformative alternatives to capitalism, and discussing how to build the collective capacity to realize these goals, this record is a critique of the crisis and an indispensable springboard for a renewed political left.

This title looks at what the author calls 'the cultural circuit of capitalism', the mechanism for generating new theories of capitalism. The book traces the rise of this circuit from the 1960s to the present day.