The Contradictions of Pension Fund Capitalism


Book Description

It is often hoped and assumed that union stewardship of pension investments will produce tangible and enduring benefits for workers and their communities while minimizing the negative effects of what are now global and intensely competitive capital markets. At the core of this book is a desire to question the proposition that workers and their organizations can exert meaningful control over pension funds in the context of current financial markets. The Contradictions of Pension Fund Capitalism is an engaging and readable text that will be of specific interest to members of the labor movement, pension activists, pension trustees, fund administrators, environmental activists, and employers/managers, as well as academics involved in pension or labor research. The contents and arguments of the book are applicable across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland, because these countries experience a similar macroeconomic context and face a similar pension landscape.




Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism


Book Description

David Harvey examines the foundational contradictions of capital, and reveals the fatal contradictions that are now inexorably leading to its end




Cognitive Capitalism


Book Description

This book argues that we are undergoing a transition from industrial capitalism to a new form of capitalism - what the author calls & lsquo; cognitive capitalism & rsquo;




Schooling in Capitalist America


Book Description

"This seminal work . . . establishes a persuasive new paradigm."--Contemporary Sociology No book since Schooling in Capitalist America has taken on the systemic forces hard at work undermining our education system. This classic reprint is an invaluable resource for radical educators. Samuel Bowles is research professor and director of the behavioral sciences program at the Santa Fe Institute, and professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts. Herbert Gintis is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and emeritus professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts.




Having and Being Had


Book Description

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME , NPR, INSTYLE, AND GOOD HOUSEKEEPING “A sensational new book [that] tries to figure out whether it’s possible to live an ethical life in a capitalist society. . . . The results are enthralling.” —Associated Press A timely and arresting new look at affluence by the New York Times bestselling author, “one of the leading lights of the modern American essay.” —Financial Times “My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts,” Eula Biss writes, “the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after.” Having just purchased her first home, the poet and essayist now embarks on a provocative exploration of the value system she has bought into. Through a series of engaging exchanges—in libraries and laundromats, over barstools and backyard fences—she examines our assumptions about class and property and the ways we internalize the demands of capitalism. Described by the New York Times as a writer who “advances from all sides, like a chess player,” Biss offers an uncommonly immersive and deeply revealing new portrait of work and luxury, of accumulation and consumption, of the value of time and how we spend it. Ranging from IKEA to Beyoncé to Pokemon, Biss asks, of both herself and her class, “In what have we invested?”




Planetary Improvement


Book Description

An examination of clean technology entrepreneurship finds that “green capitalism” is more capitalist than green. Entrepreneurs and investors in the green economy have encouraged a vision of addressing climate change with new technologies. In Planetary Improvement, Jesse Goldstein examines the cleantech entrepreneurial community in order to understand the limitations of environmental transformation within a capitalist system. Reporting on a series of investment pitches by cleantech entrepreneurs in New York City, Goldstein describes investor-friendly visions of incremental improvements to the industrial status quo that are hardly transformational. He explores a new “green spirit of capitalism,” a discourse of planetary improvement, that aims to “save the planet” by looking for “non-disruptive disruptions,” technologies that deliver “solutions” without changing much of what causes the underlying problems in the first place. Goldstein charts the rise of business environmentalism over the last half of the twentieth century and examines cleantech's unspoken assumptions of continuing cheap and abundant energy. Recounting the sometimes conflicting motivations of cleantech entrepreneurs and investors, he argues that the cleantech innovation ecosystem and its Schumpetarian dynamic of creative destruction are built around attempts to control creativity by demanding that transformational aspirations give way to short-term financial concerns. As a result, capitalist imperatives capture and stifle visions of sociotechnical possibility and transformation. Finally, he calls for a green spirit that goes beyond capitalism, in which sociotechnical experimentation is able to break free from the narrow bonds and relative privilege of cleantech entrepreneurs and the investors that control their fate.




The Cultural Contradictions Of Capitalism


Book Description

With a new afterword by the author, this classic analysis of Western liberal capitalist society contends that capitalism—and the culture it creates—harbors the seeds of its own downfall by creating a need among successful people for personal gratification—a need that corrodes the work ethic that led to their success in the first place. With the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a new world order, this provocative manifesto is more relevant than ever.




The Ways of the World


Book Description

David Harvey is one of most famous Marxist intellectuals in the past half century, as well as one of the world's most cited social scientists. Beginning in the early 1970s with his trenchant and still-relevant book Social Justice and the City and through this day, Harvey has written numerous books and dozens of influential essays and articles on topics across issues in politics, culture, economics, and social justice. In The Ways of the World, Harvey has gathered his most important essays from the past four decades. They form a career-spanning collection that tracks not only the development of Harvey over time as an intellectual, but also a dialectical vision that gradually expanded its reach from the slums of Baltimore to global environmental degradation to the American imperium. While Harvey's coverage is wide-ranging, all of the pieces tackle the core concerns that have always animated his work: capitalism past and present, social change, freedom, class, imperialism, the city, nature, social justice, postmodernity, globalization, and the crises that inhere in capitalism. A career-defining volume, The Ways of the World will stand as a comprehensive work that presents the trajectory of Harvey's lifelong project in full.




Capitalism's Contradictions


Book Description

Henryk Grossman's substantial essays highlight vital but still neglected aspects of Marx's economic theory




The Anti-capitalist Chronicles


Book Description

A new book from one of the most cited authors in the humanities and social sciences