For nearly 300 years, capitalism propelled the world's most successful economies to new heights of development. But a spate of global environmental disasters and severe economic crises compels thinkers to question whether the system continues to function. Leveraging historical perspective, extensive research, and case studies, The Crises of Capitalism builds a compelling argument that challenges the most fundamental assumptions of prevailing economic theory. Saral Sarkar exposes capitalism's flaws through the lens of ecosocialism, a philosophy that asserts that natural resources drive production and development. Keynes, Schumpeter, Marx, and Engles had no reason to believe that there would ever be a shortage of oil, minerals, water, or food—and that technological innovation could surmount any obstacle. But oil extraction has peaked, food is harder to come by, and the cost to maintain what natural resources remain has increased exponentially. Capitalism requires constant innovation to create growth—but as Sarkar establishes, even computers wouldn't exist without copper, gold, and zinc. The Crises of Capitalism exists at the intersection of environmental awareness and economic theory. Sarkar challenges predominant explanations for catastrophic events like the 2008 global economic crisis, revises the classic paradigm of growth, and points to evidence of systemic economic failure. In this provocative, revolutionary criticism, Sarkar suggests that like other long–abandoned economic theories, capitalism has reached its limits. "This is an important book, and it is on the front edge of the thinking that has to come to bear on the real crisis the world is facing, of the impossible idea of growth forever and the economic model that is driving the planet into irreversible crises." —Doug Tompkins

This volume reassesses the nature of the current global economic crisis and its implication for the 21st century, through the unique lens of Marx's theory of the value-form as the unconscious matrix of modern society. Going beyond orthodox Marxist and postmodernist accounts, the author offers fresh new readings of Marx, Benjamin, Foucault, and Žižek. Here he argues that capitalism has not only entered its greatest crisis since WWII, but has in fact reached its historical limit and is in terminal decline. In this light, the book seeks to answer how a rerun of Keynesian regulations could possibly resolve the crisis. It also inquires as to whether a Green New Deal might succeed when the gap between work to be had and work to be done widens, and what alternatives neo-Marxian approaches offer considering the failure of Marxism in the 20th century. This far-reaching, critical examination of the crisis not only builds on critical theory, but also offers new readings of key theorists that will appeal to anyone interested in political theory, critical theory, and political economy.

Despite the reversal of America’s fortune from the triumphalism of the Roaring Nineties to the gloom of the lost decade and the Great Depression, theoretical conceptions of US capitalism have remained surprisingly unchanged. In fact, if the crisis questioned the sustainability of the US capitalist paradigm, it did not fundamentally challenge academic theorization of American political economy. This book departs from the American political economy literature to identify three common myths that have shaped our conceptualization of US capitalism: its reduction to a state-market dyad dis-embedded from societal factors; the illusion of a weak state and the synchronic conception of the US variety of capitalism. To remedy these pitfalls, the authors propose a civilizational approach to American political economy at the crossroads between cultural studies, history, sociology and political science. Drawing together contributions from a rich variety of fields (from geography to cultural studies, political science and sociology) this work sheds a new light on America’s "cultural political economy" combining theoretical reflection with empirical data and offering innovative perspectives on the crisis and renewal of American capitalism.

Money and Finance After the Crisis provides a critical multi-disciplinary perspective on the post-crisis financial world in all its complexity, dynamism and unpredictability. Contributions illuminate the diversity of ways in which money and finance continue to shape global political economy and society. A multidisciplinary collection of essays that study the geographies of money and finance that have unfolded in the wake of the financial crisis Contributions discuss a wide range of contemporary social formations, including the complexities of modern debt-driven financial markets Chapters critically explore proliferating forms and spaces of financial power, from the realms of orthodox finance capital to biodiversity conservation Contributions demonstrate the centrality of money and finance to contemporary capitalism and its political and cultural economies

Education, Capitalism and the Global Crisis focuses on Andrew Gamble’s book The Spectre at the Feast and its analysis of the background to, conduct of, and possible consequences and opportunities brought about by, the current global economic crisis. The views expressed represent a range of responses to Gamble’s analysis and examination of the crisis, both in different locations and from different perspectives. They reflect upon the broader social, political and even emotional dimensions of what is taking place as well as trying to understand the true nature of the crisis. What is key is how the state sets about ‘managing’ this crisis. The authors seek to answer a wide range of pertinent questions, such as: to what degree will the state continue to balance between economic and fiscal management as against the needs of the weak and vulnerable? What should be and what is the role of state welfarism in a time of recession? How will different nation states respond to this crisis? What is the role of education policy in these complicated times? What is the role of the education state? This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Education Policy.

This forcefully argued book offers a provocative picture of the political, intellectual, and economic forces that have shaped the history of the United States, offering an extensive and in-depth critique of laissez-faire doctrine and a novel reformulation of the work of American System writers, Gibson traces America's rise to global supremacy.

Discussing crises through diverse examples, including the UK's National Theatre, public art installations, Occupy LSX, repatriation ceremonies and performances of the everyday, this book asks how performance captures and resists what is considered (politically, ideologically, culturally or socially) 'inside' or 'outside' Europe.

Contemporary Capitalism, Crisis, and the Politics of Fiction: Literature Beyond Fordism proposes a fresh approach to contemporary fictional engagements with the idea of crisis in capitalism and its various social and economic manifestations. The book investigates how late-twentieth and twenty-first-century Anglophone fiction has imagined, interpreted, and in most cases resisted, the collapse of the socio-economic structures built after the Second World War and their replacement with a presumably immaterial order of finance-led economic development. Through a series of detailed readings of the words of authors Martin Amis, Hari Kunzru, Don DeLillo, Zia Haider Rahman, John Lanchester, Paul Murray and Zadie Smith among others, this study sheds light on the embattled and decidedly unstable nature of contemporary capitalism.

Despite the depth of the Greek crisis, the exorbitant burdens placed upon the working people and the massive popular resistance movement to capitalist policies, there is a definite lack of consistently Marxist analyses of the Greek problem. International debates regarding the Greek crisis have been dominated by orthodox (Neoclassical and neo-Keynesian) approaches. The heterodox side of these debates has been occupied by Radical Political Economy approaches (usually radical post-Keynesian or Marxo-Keynesian perspectives). Moreover, they are dominated by the ‘financialisation’ thesis which is quite alien to Marxism, neglects the sphere of production and professes that the global crisis is simply a financial crisis that has nothing to do with ‘real’ accumulation and the profit rate. This book argues that by emphasising the sphere of production and profitability, classical Marxist analysis better explains the Greek crisis than its orthodox and heterodox competitors. The contributors present critiques of the prevalent approaches and offer studies of the Greek crisis that use the methodology and the analytical and empirical tools of classical Marxist Political Economy. In particular, it is shown that the Greek crisis was caused by falling profitability and the ensuing overaccumulation crisis. The ‘broad unequal exchange’ existing between the euro-center and the euro-periphery contributed to Greek capital’s falling profitability. This book enriches the debate about the Greek economic crisis by demonstrating the insights that can be drawn by considering the Marxist alternative to the dominant mainstream and heterodox approaches.

On the effect of the U.S. dollar devaluations in 1971 and 1973; as reviewed by an Indian communist spokesman.