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A Financial Times Best Book of the Year "A must-read, with key lessons for the future."—Thomas Piketty A groundbreaking examination of austerity’s dark intellectual origins. For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity—cuts to wages, fiscal spending, and public benefits—as a path to solvency. While these policies have been successful in appeasing creditors, they’ve had devastating effects on social and economic welfare in countries all over the world. Today, as austerity remains a favored policy among troubled states, an important question remains: What if solvency was never really the goal? In The Capital Order, p...
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"When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, he was surrounded by advisors with radical ideas about everything from economic management to health care reform to labor relations to social policy. With the White House and Congress under full Democratic control, a new, more equitable vision of American capitalism seemed possible-even likely. And indeed, over the course of the 1990s, the economy performed remarkably well, real wages rose, and unemployment was at a 25-year low. In a 2001 book, Alan Blinder and Janet Yellen would term it "The Fabulous Decade." And yet today, Clinton's 8 years in office are seen by those on the left as a monumental failure, with these short-term gains achieved...
In this landmark book, Alexander Zevin looks at the development of modern liberalism by examining the long history of the Economist newspaper, which, since 1843, has been the most tireless - and internationally influential - champion of the liberal cause anywhere in the world. But what exactly is liberalism, and how has its message evolved? Liberalism at Large examines a political ideology on the move as it confronts the challenges that classical doctrine left unresolved: the rise of democracy, the expansion of empire, the ascendancy of high finance. Contact with such momentous forces was never going to leave the proponents of liberal values unchanged. Zevin holds a mirror to the politics - ...
Karl Marx has fascinated and inspired generations of radicals in the past 200 years. In this new, definitive biography, Sven-Eric Liebman makes his work live once more for a new generation. Despite 200 years having passed since his birth, his burning condemnation of capitalism remains of immediate interest. Now, more than ever before, Marx's texts can be read for what they truly are. In addition to providing a living picture of Marx the man, his life, and his family and friends - as well as his lifelong collaboration with Friedrich Engels - Sweden's leading intellectual historian Sven-Eric Liedman, in this major new biography, shows what Karl Marx the thinker and researcher really wrote, demonstrating that this giant of the nineteenth century can still exert a powerful attraction for the inhabitants of the twenty-first.
Devastating hurricanes, deteriorating infrastructure, massive public debt, and a global pandemic make up the continuous crises that plague Puerto Rico. In the last several years, this disastrous escalation has placed the archipelago more centrally on the radar of residents and politicians in the United States, as the US Congress established an oversight board with emergency powers to ensure Puerto Rico's economic survival—and its ability to repay its debt. These events should not be understood as a random string of compounding misfortune. Rather, as demonstrated by Jose Atiles in Crisis by Design, they result from the social, legal, and political structure of colonialism. Moreover, Atiles shows how administrations, through emergency powers and laws paired with the dynamics of wealth extraction, have served to sustain and exacerbate crises. He explores the role of the local government, corporations, and grassroots mobilizations. More broadly, the Puerto Rican case provides insight into the role of law and emergency powers in other global south, Caribbean, and racialized and colonized countries. In these settings, Atiles contends, colonialism is the ongoing catastrophe.
The first international history of the emergence of economic sanctions during the interwar period and the legacy of this development A Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2022 “Valuable . . . offers many lessons for Western policy makers today.”—Paul Kennedy, Wall Street Journal “The lessons are sobering.”—The Economist Economic sanctions dominate the landscape of world politics today. First developed in the early twentieth century as a way of exploiting the flows of globalization to defend liberal internationalism, their appeal is that they function as an alternative to war. This view, however, ignores the dark paradox at their core: designed to prevent war, economic sanctions are mode...
In 2020, a veteran culture critic took on a social media experiment he called "Supersize Me Twitter" (he refuses to call it "X"). For one full year (which turned into four), he would post about politics every day on "leftist Twitter," but without "choosing a side" between Democrats, socialists, communists or progressives. This is the story of that bad idea and what he learned during that time. Informed by such thinkers as Alvin Toffler, Barbara Ehrenreich, Chalmers Johnson, Mark Blyth, Michael Hudson, Clara Mattei, Robert Ovetz, Steve Keen and dozens of others, this book is intended as a "travel guide" for activists, organizers and curiosity seekers alike. It demystifies such recent developm...
"A transnational history of corporatism-a "third path" between capitalism and communism-centered on mid-twentieth century Brazil. Following the First World War, there was a widespread feeling that the unchecked free-market competition had given rise to financial crisis, social unrest, and chronic underdevelopment. With people and governments across the world looking for an alternative to laissez-faire capitalism, Brazil took a central role in experimenting with a "third path" between capitalism and communism: corporatism. Remaking Capitalism: A Global History of Corporatism in Brazil, 1920s-1960s argues that corporatism transformed the Brazilian state into an agent of economic development, a...
What worlds take root in war? In this book, anthropologist Munira Khayyat describes life along the southern border of Lebanon, where resistant ecologies thrive amid a terrain of perennial war. A Landscape of War takes us to frontline villages where armed invasions, indiscriminate bombings, and scattered land mines have become the environment where everyday life is waged. This book dwells with multispecies partnerships such as tobacco farming and goatherding that carry life through seasons of destruction. Neither green-tinged utopia nor total devastation, these ecologies make life possible in an insistently deadly region. Sourcing an anthropology of war from where it is lived, this book decolonizes distant theories of war and brings to light creative practices forged in the midst of ongoing devastation. In lyrical prose that resonates with imperiled conditions across the Global South, Khayyat paints a portrait of war as a place where life must go on.