What is the relation between the economy, or the mode of production, and culture, beliefs, and desires? How is it possible to think of these relations without reducing one to the other, or effacing one for the sake of the other? To answer these questions, The Micro-Politics of Capital re-reads Marx in light of the contemporary critical interrogations of subjectivity in the works of Althusser, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, and Negri. Jason Read suggests that what characterizes contemporary capitalism is the intimate intersection of the production of commodities with the production of desire, beliefs, and knowledge.

Inside the hidden lives of the global “1%”, this book examines the networks, social practices, marriages, and machinations of Pakistan’s elite. Benefitting from rare access and keen analytical insight, Rosita Armytage’s rich study reveals the daily, even mundane, ways in which elites contribute to and shape the inequality that characterizes the modern world. Operating in a rapidly developing economic environment, the experience of Pakistan’s wealthiest and most powerful members contradicts widely held assumptions that economic growth is leading to increasingly impersonalized and globally standardized economic and political structures.

Conventional theories of capitalism are mired in a deep crisis: after centuries of debate, they are still unable to tell us what capital is. Liberals and Marxists both think of capital as an ‘economic’ entity that they count in universal units of ‘utils’ or ‘abstract labour’, respectively. But these units are totally fictitious. Nobody has ever been able to observe or measure them, and for a good reason: they don’t exist. Since liberalism and Marxism depend on these non-existing units, their theories hang in suspension. They cannot explain the process that matters most – the accumulation of capital. This book offers a radical alternative. According to the authors, capital is not a narrow economic entity, but a symbolic quantification of power. It has little to do with utility or abstract labour, and it extends far beyond machines and production lines. Capital, the authors claim, represents the organized power of dominant capital groups to reshape – or creorder – their society. Written in simple language, accessible to lay readers and experts alike, the book develops a novel political economy. It takes the reader through the history, assumptions and limitations of mainstream economics and its associated theories of politics. It examines the evolution of Marxist thinking on accumulation and the state. And it articulates an innovative theory of ‘capital as power’ and a new history of the ‘capitalist mode of power’.

Microcredit has been seen in recent decades as having great potential for aiding development in poor developing countries, with Bangladesh being one of the countries which has pioneered microcredit and implemented it most widely. This book, based on extensive original research, explores how microcredit works in practice, and assesses its effectiveness. It discusses how microcredit, usually channelled through women, is often passed to the men of the family, a practice disapproved of by some, but regarded as acceptable by borrowers who have a communal approach to debt, rather than viewing debt as something held by single individuals. The book demonstrates how the rules around microcredit are often seem as irksome by the borrowers, how lenders often charge high rates of interest and work primarily to preserve their institutions, thereby going against the spirit of the microcredit movement, and how borrowers often end up on a downward spiral, deeper and deeper in debt. Overall, the book argues that although microcredit does much good, it also has many drawbacks.

Christian Gilliam argues that a philosophy of 'pure' immanence is integral to the development of an alternative understanding of 'the political'; one that re-orients our understanding of the self toward the concept of an unconscious or 'micropolitical' life of desire. He argues that here, in this 'life', is where the power relations integral to the continuation of post-industrial capitalism are most present and most at stake. Through proving its philosophical context, lineage and political import, Gilliam ultimately comes to outline and justify the conceptual importance and necessity of immanence in understanding politics and resistance, thereby challenging the claim that ontologies of 'pure' immanence are either apolitical and/or politically incoherent.

Michel Foucault's death in 1984 coincided with the fading away of the hopes for social transformation that characterized the postwar period. In the decades following his death, neoliberalism has triumphed and attacks on social rights have become increasingly bold. If Foucault was not a direct witness of these years, his work on neoliberalism is nonetheless prescient: the question of liberalism occupies an important place in his last works. Since his death, Foucault's conceptual apparatus has acquired a central, even dominant position for a substantial segment of the world's intellectual left. However, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, Foucault's attitude towards neoliberalism was at least equivocal. Far from leading an intellectual struggle against free market orthodoxy, Foucault seems in many ways to endorse it. How is one to understand his radical critique of the welfare state, understood as an instrument of biopower? Or his support for the pandering anti-Marxism of the so-called new philosophers? Is it possible that Foucault was seduced by neoliberalism? This question is not merely of biographical interest: it forces us to confront more generally the mutations of the left since May 1968, the disillusionment of the years that followed and the profound transformations in the French intellectual field over the past thirty years. To understand the 1980s and the neoliberal triumph is to explore the most ambiguous corners of the intellectual left through one of its most important figures.

This book focuses on the micro-political implications of the work of Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari). General philosophical articles are coupled to more specific analyses of films (such as Fight Club and Schindler's List) and other expressions of contemporary culture. The choice of giving specific attention to the analyses of images and sounds is not only related to the fact that audiovisual products are increasingly dominant in contemporary life, but also to the fact that film culture in itself is changing ("in transition") in capitalist culture. From a marginal place at the periphery of economy and culture at large, audiovisual products (ranging from art to ads) seem to have moved to the centre of the network society, as Manuel Castells calls contemporary society. Typical Deleuzian concepts such as micro-politics, the Body without Organs, becoming-minoritarian, pragmatics and immanence are explored in their philosophical implications and political force, whether utopian or dystopian. What can we do with Deleuze in contemporary media culture? A recurring issue throughout the book is the relationship between theory and practice, to which several solutions and problems are given.

This book offers the first comprehensive discussion of the foundations, applications and new directions of politics perspectives in MNCs.

Stephen Ball’s micro-political theory of school organization is a radical departure from traditional theories. He rejects a prescriptive ‘top down’ approach and directly addresses the interest and concerns of teachers and current problems facing schools. In doing so he raises question about the adequacy and appropriateness of the existing forms of organizational control in schools. Through case studies and interviews with teachers, the book captures the flavour of real conflicts in schools – particularly in times of falling rolls, change of leadership or amalgamations – when teachers’ autonomy seems to be at stake.

Inside the hidden lives of the global “1%”, this book examines the networks, social practices, marriages, and machinations of Pakistan’s elite. Benefitting from rare access and keen analytical insight, Rosita Armytage’s rich study reveals the daily, even mundane, ways in which elites contribute to and shape the inequality that characterizes the modern world. Operating in a rapidly developing economic environment, the experience of Pakistan’s wealthiest and most powerful members contradicts widely held assumptions that economic growth is leading to increasingly impersonalized and globally standardized economic and political structures.