This book analyses contemporary capitalism from Brazil and from the Marxian critique of political economy, particularly; the co-dependency of wealth and poverty and of civilization and barbarism; the current tendency towards capital over-accumulation and the specific form assumed by the capitalist crisis in recent decades; the financialisation process of capital accumulation, its effects on the world of labour; and the place that the state assumes in this broad process. Current trends toward increasing social inequality, impoverishment of large sections of the population, precariousness of labour and rising unemployment, environmental destruction, the spread of austerity policies and the suppression of social policies, the rise of the far right (together with the strengthening of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, political and religious fanaticism and all manner of intolerance, etc.), low economic growth, the primacy of the financial dimension of capital accumulation, all need to be understood in their multiple and complex articulations, as fundamental and inherent elements of contemporary capitalism, associating empirical analysis with conceptual construction. Because they are strictly contradictory processes, a dialectical approach is required that reclaims the Marxian legacy, and aims to contribute to updating it, seeking to bring new and relevant elements to the Marxist debate, based on a specific interpretation of Marx's work, and as an immediate empirical basis the Brazilian reality.

Connecting fundamental, theoretical, and empirical subjects with the most current scholarship on value, money, profit and capital today, this book makes sense of our increasingly interconnected global economy, highlighting key issues and proposing real-world solutions from the most knowledgeable researchers in the field.

This book advances an original conception of the relationship between state and corporate power in the United States. Using what he terms an Institutional Marxist framework, Maher argues that, far from passively responding to interest group pressures, the state has been a key agent in politically mobilizing business, and has played an active role in the organization of lobbying groups. Such business associations do not merely express the pre-existing interests of their corporate members, but are also mechanisms through which the state organizes the political power of the capitalist class. They form part of what the author refers to as an integral state—a wider network of state power which traverses and interpenetrates the state bureaucracy, the legislature, the industrial policy apparatus, and corporate governance. Based on extensive archival research, this book tracks the role of the General Electric Company as a pillar of the integral state in the United States from the finance capital period (1880 to 1930), through the managerial period (1930-1979), to the restructuring leading up to the age of neoliberalism (1979-present).

This book provides a comprehensive overview of historical and international debates on the theory of “labor money” or “labor notes.” These debates exist in a triangular context of market socialism, communism (community-based socialism), and local currency, joining numerous socialists, anarchists, and Marx and Engels. Labor note theory encompasses theoretical, ideological, and practical doctrines aimed at designing a fair and desirable labor-based market or non-market economy by reforming the monetary and credit system. This theory was considered an unfeasible utopian idea in the context of orthodox Marxism, which is typically based on a historical study of surplus value doctrines. However, this book eschews Marx’s critique of “labor money” that limits the debate regarding a concrete alternative society, and instead proposes practical and gradual approaches to social reform by scrutinizing the primary sources of labor money theories and practical experiences and reconstructs their theoretical relationships.

This book explores how Marx envisaged society after capital(ism) by a close examination of the idea of socialism in the text(s) of Capital. Going beyond Marx’s critique of the Gotha Programme, Paresh Chattopadhyay challenges those who leave Capital aside in discussions of socialism in Marx’s works on the grounds that it is uniquely preoccupied with the critical analysis of capitalism. Instead, Chattopadhyay shows how Marx, in Capital, considered capitalism as a simple transitional society preparing the advent of socialism envisioned as an association of free and equal individuals.

In this book, translated into English for the first time, Lelio Demichelis takes on a modern perspective of the concept/process of alienation. This concept—much more profound and widespread today than first described and denounced by Marx—has largely been forgotten and erased. Using the characters of Narcissus, Pygmalion and Prometheus, the author reinterprets and updates Marx, Nietzsche, Anders, Foucault and, in particular, critical theory and the Frankfurt School views on an administered society (where everything is automated and engineered, manifest today in algorithms, AI, machine learning and social networking) showing that, in a world where old and new forms of alienation come together, man is increasingly led to delegate (i.e. alienate) sovereignty, freedom, responsibility and the awareness of being alive.

This book provides analytical arguments that demonstrate the necessity to go beyond not only mainstream economics but also, and especially, the capitalist economy itself. It provides a radical critique of mainstream economics, comparing it to an unscientific form of single thought, and applies this criticism to the specific fields of growth, development, the institutions, defense, or the environment. It targets both neoclassical economics and reformist “soft heterodox” currents, from neoinstitutionalists to neo-Keynesians—including Thomas Piketty or Amartya Sen, among others. In doing so, it rejects Keynes’ theories of money, the crisis, and the state. It then offers a Marxist interpretation of the current crisis of capitalism, considering it as a systemic crisis without solutions internal to its own logic and dynamics, and emphasizes the links between this capitalist crisis and imperialist wars, and the destruction of the environment and natural resources by capital. The book concludes by arguing that we must find the necessary theoretical and practical alternatives in a Marxist perspective, advocating for socialist transitions away from the capitalist economy to protect humanity and the environment.

This book provides the first coherent Marxist analysis of the central importance of housing in the social reproduction of capitalism as a whole. Rather than consigning housing to the sidelines, Berry argues that the circulation of capital and revenues though housing and the built environment helps explain how the capital-labour relation constrains housing outcomes while also being reproduced on an extended scale. He shows how housing is provided by the intervention of building, property and interest-bearing capital fractions; how the land question can be explained by a theory of urban land rent, drawing on Marx's categories of differential and monopoly rent; how housing is vital to the extended reproduction of labour power, while also creating a semi-separate sphere of 'home' in which gender and demographic factors overlay and accentuate social class position. The modes, impact and drivers of state intervention in housing provision are seen to modify the patterns and pace of capital circulation through housing and the urban built environment with implications for shifts in class fragmentation and power relations.

The book’s central theme is to develop a new theory of speculative capital related to other forms of capital, the world market, and the state. Unlike most Marxist and heterodox theories, the book distinguishes credit and fictitious capital from speculative capital to show its hegemony today in the capital markets. Speculative capital structures and also controls the so-called “real capital.” The method is Marxist while also incorporating material from contemporary Marxist and heterodox authors like John Milios, Robert Meister, Tony Norfeld, Li Puma, Harald Strauß, Michael Heinrich, Suhail Malik, Bichler/Nitzan and Ellie Ayache. Offering a comprehensive study of the logic and mode of existence of capital in the 21st century, the book will be of interest to academics and students of monetary and financial economics alongside political economy.

This book brings together Marxian philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that the hegemonic form of global capital is founded on the foreclosure of class and world of the third. The authors counterpose the world of the third to the mainstream notion of the third world, seen as a lacking other in desperate need of aid and development. Thus, for them, the hegemonic form of global capital is engendered through the foregrounding of the poor, victim third world and the foreclosure of the non-capitalist world of the third. Building on what they characterize as an ab-original reading of Marxian historical materialism and the Lacanian real, the authors seek to conceptualize a counter-hegemonic revolutionary subject as a basis for postcapitalist alternatives to the hegemonic form of global capital.