Monsters Of The Market Zombies Vampires And Global Capitalism

Download or read book Monsters of the Market written by David McNally and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-07-12 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Monsters of the Market" investigates modern capitalism through the prism of the body panics it arouses. Examining "Frankenstein," Marx s "Capital" and zombie fables from sub-Saharan Africa, it offers a novel account of the cultural and corporeal economy of global capitalism.

Download or read book Monsters of the Market written by David McNally and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2011-07-12 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2012 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. Monsters of the Market investigates the rise of capitalism through the prism of the body-panics it arouses. Drawing on folklore, literature and popular culture, the book links tales of monstrosity from early-modern England, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to a spate of recent vampire- and zombie-fables from sub-Saharan Africa, and it connects these to Marx’s persistent use of monster-metaphors in his descriptions of capitalism. Reading across these tales of the grotesque, Monsters of the Market offers a novel account of the cultural and corporeal economy of a global market-system. The book thus makes original contributions to political economy, cultural theory, commodification-studies and ‘body-theory’.

Download or read book Global Slump written by David McNally and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2010-12-09 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global Slump analyzes the global financial meltdown as the first systemic crisis of the neoliberal stage of capitalism. It argues that—far from having ended—the crisis has ushered in a whole period of worldwide economic and political turbulence. In developing an account of the crisis as rooted in fundamental features of capitalism, Global Slump challenges the view that its source lies in financial deregulation. The book locates the recent meltdown in the intense economic restructuring that marked the recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s. Through this lens, it highlights the emergence of new patterns of world inequality and new centers of accumulation, particularly in East Asia, and the profound economic instabilities these produced. Global Slump offers an original account of the “financialization” of the world economy during this period, and explores the intricate connections between international financial markets and new forms of debt and dispossession, particularly in the Global South. Analyzing the massive intervention of the world’s central banks to stave off another Great Depression, Global Slump shows that, while averting a complete meltdown, this intervention also laid the basis for recurring crises for poor and working class people: job loss, increased poverty and inequality, and deep cuts to social programs. The book takes a global view of these processes, exposing the damage inflicted on countries in the Global South, as well as the intensification of racism and attacks on migrant workers. At the same time, Global Slump also traces new patterns of social and political resistance—from housing activism and education struggles, to mass strikes and protests in Martinique, Guadeloupe, France and Puerto Rico—as indicators of the potential for building anti-capitalist opposition to the damage that neoliberal capitalism is inflicting on the lives of millions.

Download or read book Zombie Capitalism written by Chris Harman and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We've been told for years that the capitalist free market is a self-correcting perpetual growth machine in which sellers always find buyers, precluding any major crisis in the system. Then the credit crunch of August 2007 turned into the great crash of September–October 2008, leading one apologist for the system, Willem Buiter, to write of "the end of capitalism as we knew it." As the crisis unfolded, the world witnessed the way in which the runaway speculation of the "shadow" banking system wreaked havoc on world markets, leaving real human devastation in its wake. Faced with the financial crisis, some economic commentators began to talk of "zombie banks"–financial institutions that were in an "undead state" and incapable of fulfilling any positive function but a threat to everything else. What they do not realize is that twenty-first century capitalism as a whole is a zombie system, seemingly dead when it comes to achieving human goals.

Download or read book Ethiopia in Theory: Revolution and Knowledge Production, 1964-2016 written by Elleni Centime Zeleke and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-10-14 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between the years 1964 and 1974, Ethiopian post-secondary students studying at home, in Europe, and in North America produced a number of journals. In these they explored the relationship between social theory and social change within the project of building a socialist Ethiopia. Ethiopia in Theory examines the literature of this student movement, together with the movement’s afterlife in Ethiopian politics and society, in order to ask: what does it mean to write today about the appropriation and indigenisation of Marxist and mainstream social science ideas in an Ethiopian and African context; and, importantly, what does the archive of revolutionary thought in Africa teach us about the practice of critical theory more generally?

Download or read book Economics of the Undead written by Glen Whitman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether preparing us for economic recovery after the zombie apocalypse, analyzing vampire investment strategies, or illuminating the market forces that affect vampire-human romances, Economics of the Undead: Zombies, Vampires, and the Dismal Science gives both seasoned economists and layman readers something to sink their teeth into. Undead characters have terrified popular audiences for centuries, but when analyzed closely, their behaviors and stories—however farfetched—mirror our own in surprising ways. The essays collected in this book are as humorous as they are thoughtful, as culturally relevant as they are economically sound, and provide an accessible link between a popular culture phenomenon and the key concepts necessary to building one’s understanding of economic systems big and small. It is the first book to apply and combine economics and our society’s fascination with the undead, and is an invaluable resource for those looking to learn economic fundamentals in a fun and innovative way. Contributions by: Kyle William Bishop, Eleanor Brown, Ian Chadd, Darwynn Deyo, Steven Horwitz, Daniel Farhat, Jean-Baptiste Fleury, Enrique Guerra-Pujol, Brian Hollar, Sebastien Lecou, Joseph Mandarino, Alain Marciano, Fabien Medvecky, David T. Mitchell, Michael O’Hara, M. Christine Phillips, A. Lynn Phillips, G. Michael Phillips, Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Robert Prga, Hollis Robbins, Sarah Skwire, Ilya Somin, David Tufte, Mary Jo Tufte, and Charlotte Weil

Download or read book Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism written by David McNally and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2024-06-21 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Introduction: This book challenges the conventional wisdom about classical political economy and the rise of capitalism. It is written in the conviction that modern interpretations of political economy have suffered terribly from acceptance of the prevailing liberal view of the origins and development of capitalist society. By the liberal account, capitalism emerged out of the centuries-old competitive activities of merchants and manufacturers in rational pursuit of their individual economic self-interest. Over time, this account claims, the persistent activity of these classes developed new forms of wealth and productive resources and new intellectual and cultural habits, which eroded the existing structure of society. The rise of capitalism is thus explained in terms of the rise to prominence of the most productive, rational, and progressive social groups—merchants and manufacturers. Not surprisingly, classical political economy came to be seen as an intellectual reflection of the ascendance of merchants and manufacturers and as a theoretical justification of their interests and activities. This book argues that capitalism was the product of an immense transformation in the social relationships of landed society and that this fact is crucial to understanding the development of classical political economy. Without a radical transformation of the agrarian economy, the activities of merchants and manufacturers would have remained strictly confined. By no inexorable logic of their own were mercantile and industrial activities capable of fundamentally transforming the essential relations of precapitalist society. Rather, the changes in agrarian economy, which drove rural producers from their land, forced them onto the labour market as wage labourers for their means of subsistence, and refashioned farming as an economic activity based upon the production of agricultural commodities for profit on the market, established the essential relations of modern capitalism. In what follows, these processes are described in terms of the emergence of agrarian capitalism. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.