A recent wave of decentralization in Latin America has increased the prominence of politicians at the subnational level. Politics Beyond the Capital is the first book to place this trend in comparative historical perspective, examining past episodes of decentralization alongside contemporary ones to determine whether consistent causal factors are at play. At the center of the book is the rigorous testing of two key hypotheses that attribute decentralization to liberalizing changes in political regime type and economic development strategy. The book focuses on the four Latin American countries where politicians have most extensively engaged in the redesign of subnational institutions: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. By reframing the "politics of decentralization" as the "politics of designing subnational institutions," the book moves beyond the policy orientation of much of the current literature, and broadens the debate by analyzing not just decentralization but re-centralization as well.

Winner of The Deutscher Memorial Prize 2004. In a completely reworked edition of his classic (1991) volume, Michael A. Lebowitz explores the implications of the book on wage-labour that Marx originally intended to write. Focusing upon critical assumptions in Capital that were to be removed in Wage-Labour and upon Marx's methodology, Lebowitz stresses the one-sidedness of Marx's Capital and argues that the side of the workers, their goals and their struggles in capitalism have been ignored by a monolithic Marxism characterized by determinism, reductionism and a silence on human experience.

Political Landscapes of Capital Cities investigates the processes of transformation of the natural landscape into the culturally constructed and ideologically defined political environments of capital cities. In this spatially inclusive, socially dynamic interpretation, an interdisciplinary group of authors including archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians uses the methodology put forth in Adam T. Smith’s The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Polities to expose the intimate associations between human-made environments and the natural landscape that accommodate the sociopolitical needs of governmental authority. Political Landscapes of Capital Cities blends the historical, political, and cultural narratives of capital cities such as Bangkok, Cusco, Rome, and Tehran with a careful visual analysis, hinging on the methodological tools of not only architectural and urban design but also cultural, historiographical, and anthropological studies. The collection provides further ways to conceive of how processes of urbanization, monumentalization, ritualization, naturalization, and unification affected capitals differently without losing grasp of local distinctive architectural and spatial features. The essays also articulate the many complex political and ideological agendas of a diverse set of sovereign entities that planned, constructed, displayed, and performed their societal ideals in the spaces of their capitals, ultimately confirming that political authority is profoundly spatial. Contributors: Jelena Bogdanović, Jessica Joyce Christie, Talinn Grigor, Eulogio Guzmán, Gregor Kalas, Stephanie Pilat, Melody Rod-ari, Anne Toxey, Alexei Vranich

Everyone knows that Washington is completely out of touch with the rest of the country. Now Kevin Phillips, whose bestselling books have prophesied the major watersheds of American party politics, tells us why. Washington - mired in bureaucracy, captured by the money power of Wall Street, and dominated by 90,000 lobbyists, 60,000 lawyers, and the largest concentration of special interests the world has ever seen - has become the albatross that Thomas Jefferson and our other Founding Fathers feared: a swollen capital city feeding off the country it should be governing. Throughout most of our history, the genius of American politics was that ballot revolutions every generation swept out failed establishments and created new ones. Now that can no longer happen. Feared and even hated by a majority of the citizenry, "Permanent Washington" has dug in. Using history as a chilling warning, Kevin Phillips parallels the present atrophy to that of formerly mighty and arrogant capitals like Rome, Madrid, andAmsterdam.,Unchecked, Washington will - like other great powers before it - lead the country to its inevitable decline and fall. To work again, Washington must be purged and revitalized. In his unique blueprint for a political upheaval, Kevin Phillips puts Washington on notice by sounding a cry for immediate action, offering us a wide variety of remedies - some quasi-revolutionary, others more moderate, but all sure to be controversial.

Christian Marazzi's first book: a post-Fordist classic on the roots to economic crises in the contemporary age. Communication as work: we have recently experienced a profound transformation in the processes of production. While the assembly line (invented by Henry Ford at the beginning of the last century) excluded any form of linguistic productivity, today, there is no production without communication. The new technologies are linguistic machines. This revolution has produced a new kind of worker who is not a specialist but is versatile and infinitely adaptable. If standardized mass production was dominant in the past, today we produce an array of different goods corresponding to specific consumer niches. This is the post-Fordist model described by Christian Marazzi in Capital and Affects (first published in 1994 as Il posto dei calzini [The place for the socks]). Tracing the development of this new model of labor from Toyota plants in Japan to the most recent innovations, Marazzi's critique goes beyond political economy to encompass issues related to social life, political engagement, democratic institutions, interpersonal relations, and the role of language in liberal democracies. This translation at long last makes Marazzi's first book available to English readers. Capital and Affects stands not only as the foundation to Marazzi's subsequent work, but as foundational work in post-Fordist literature, with an analysis startlingly relevant to today's troubled economic times. This Semiotext(e) edition includes the afterword Marazzi wrote for the 1999 Italian edition.

The politics of international debt have received increasing attention in recent years. However, discussion of the politics of money has focused on Latin American and 'third' world countries. So far there has been little treatment of the politics of scarce money and of money as a political category in relation to 'advanced' countries. The central theme of the book is the limitations and constraints on state action which arise from the relation between the (nation) state and the global flow of money.

Global Capital and National Governments suggests that international financial integration does not mean the end of social democratic welfare policies. Capital market openness allows participants to react swiftly and severely to government policy; but in the developed world, capital market participants consider only a few government policies when making decisions. Governments that conform to capital market pressures in macroeconomic areas remain relatively unconstrained in supply-side and micro-economic policy areas. Therefore, despite financial globalization, cross-national policy divergence among advanced democracies remains likely. Still, in the developing world, the influence of financial markets on government policy autonomy is more pronounced. The risk of default renders market participants willing to consider a range of government policies in investment decisions. This inference, however, must be tempered with awareness that governments retain choice. As evidence for its conclusions, Global Capital and National Governments draws on interviews with fund managers, quantitative analyses, and archival investment banking materials.

For the better part of a century, the Left has been waging a slow, methodical battle for control of the institutions of Western civilization. During most of that time, “business”— and American Big Business, in particular — remained the last redoubt for those who believe in free people, free markets, and the criticality of private property. Over the past two decades, however, that has changed, and the Left has taken its long march to the last remaining non-Leftist institution. Over the course of the past two years or so, a small handful of politicians on the Right — Senators Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley, to name three — have begun to sense that something is wrong with American business and have sought to identify the problem and offer solutions to rectify it. While the attention of high-profile politicians to the issue is welcome, to date the solutions they have proposed are inadequate, for a variety of reasons, including a failure to grasp the scope of the problem, failure to understand the mechanisms of corporate governance, and an overreliance on state-imposed, top-down solutions. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the problem and the players involved, both on the aggressive, hardcharging Left and in the nascent conservative resistance. It explains what the Left is doing and how and why the Right must be prepared and willing to fight back to save this critical aspect of American culture from becoming another, more economically powerful version of the “woke” college campus.

Although climate change has become the dominant concern of the twenty-first century, global powers refuse to implement the changes necessary to reverse these trends. Instead, they have neoliberalized nature and climate change politics and discourse, and there are indications of a more virulent strain of capital accumulation on the horizon. Adrian Parr calls attention to the problematic socioeconomic conditions of neoliberal capitalism underpinning the worldÕs environmental challenges, and she argues that, until we grasp the implications of neoliberalismÕs interference in climate change talks and policy, humanity is on track to an irreversible crisis. Parr not only exposes the global failure to produce equitable political options for environmental regulation, but she also breaks down the dominant political paradigms hindering the discovery of viable alternatives. She highlights the neoliberalization of nature in the development of green technologies, land use, dietary habits, reproductive practices, consumption patterns, design strategies, and media. She dismisses the notion that the free market can solve debilitating environmental degradation and climate change as nothing more than a political ghost emptied of its collective aspirations. Decrying what she perceives as a failure of the human imagination and an impoverishment of political institutions, Parr ruminates on the nature of change and existence in the absence of a future. The sustainability movement, she contends, must engage more aggressively with the logic and cultural manifestations of consumer economics to take hold of a more transformative politics. If the economically powerful continue to monopolize the meaning of environmental change, she warns, new and more promising collective solutions will fail to take root.

"The essays collected here explore how global, regional, national, and local structures of power produce angry politics. They go beyond conventional academic debates about populism to explore the different kinds of anger that shape politics today, and to make legible the multiplicity of forces, antagonisms, conflicts, and emergent political forms that mark the present"--