Capitalism's Hidden Worlds

Capitalism's Hidden Worlds PDF Author: Kenneth Lipartito
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812251814
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
A dynamic social history of shadow capitalism spanning the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries Observers see free markets, the relentless pursuit of profit, and the unremitting drive to commodify everything as capitalism's defining characteristics. These most visible economic features, however, obscure a range of other less evident, often unmeasured activities that occur on the margins and in the concealed corners of the formal economy. The range of practices in this large and diverse hidden realm encompasses traders in recycled materials and the architects of junk bonds and shadow banking. It includes the black and semi-licit markets that allow wealthy elites to avoid taxes and the unmeasured domestic and emotional labor of homemakers and home care workers. By some estimates, the unmeasured economic activity that occurs within the household, informal market, and underground economy amounts to a substantial portion of all economic activity in the world, as much as 30 percent in some countries. Capitalism's Hidden Worlds sheds new light on this shadowy economic landscape by reexamining how we think about the market. In particular, it scrutinizes the missed connections between the official, visible realm of exchange and the uncounted and invisible sectors that border it. While some hidden markets emerged in opposition to the formal economy, much of the obscured economy described in this volume operates as the other side of the legitimate, state-sanctioned marketplace. A variety of historical actors—from fortune tellers and forgers to tax lawyers and black market consumers—have constructed this unseen world in tandem with the observable public world of transactions. Others, such as feminist development economists and government regulators, have worked to bring the darkened corners of the economy to light. The essays in Capitalism's Hidden Worlds explore how the capitalist marketplace sustains itself, how it acquires legitimacy and even prestige, and how the marginalized and the dispossessed find ways to make ends meet. Contributors: Bruce Baker, Eileen Boris, Eli Cook, Hannah Frydman, James Hollis, Owen Hyman, Anna Kushkova, Christopher McKenna, Kenneth Mouré, Philip Scranton, Bryan Turo.

Capitalism's Hidden Worlds

Capitalism's Hidden Worlds PDF Author: Kenneth Lipartito
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812251814
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book

Book Description
A dynamic social history of shadow capitalism spanning the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries Observers see free markets, the relentless pursuit of profit, and the unremitting drive to commodify everything as capitalism's defining characteristics. These most visible economic features, however, obscure a range of other less evident, often unmeasured activities that occur on the margins and in the concealed corners of the formal economy. The range of practices in this large and diverse hidden realm encompasses traders in recycled materials and the architects of junk bonds and shadow banking. It includes the black and semi-licit markets that allow wealthy elites to avoid taxes and the unmeasured domestic and emotional labor of homemakers and home care workers. By some estimates, the unmeasured economic activity that occurs within the household, informal market, and underground economy amounts to a substantial portion of all economic activity in the world, as much as 30 percent in some countries. Capitalism's Hidden Worlds sheds new light on this shadowy economic landscape by reexamining how we think about the market. In particular, it scrutinizes the missed connections between the official, visible realm of exchange and the uncounted and invisible sectors that border it. While some hidden markets emerged in opposition to the formal economy, much of the obscured economy described in this volume operates as the other side of the legitimate, state-sanctioned marketplace. A variety of historical actors—from fortune tellers and forgers to tax lawyers and black market consumers—have constructed this unseen world in tandem with the observable public world of transactions. Others, such as feminist development economists and government regulators, have worked to bring the darkened corners of the economy to light. The essays in Capitalism's Hidden Worlds explore how the capitalist marketplace sustains itself, how it acquires legitimacy and even prestige, and how the marginalized and the dispossessed find ways to make ends meet. Contributors: Bruce Baker, Eileen Boris, Eli Cook, Hannah Frydman, James Hollis, Owen Hyman, Anna Kushkova, Christopher McKenna, Kenneth Mouré, Philip Scranton, Bryan Turo.

USSR--the Corrupt Society

USSR--the Corrupt Society PDF Author: Konstantin M. Simis
Publisher: New York : Simon and Schuster
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Onthullende studie van een voormalige Russische advocaat over de corruptie in de Sovjet-maatschappij.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism PDF Author: Shoshana Zuboff
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610395700
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 658

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Book Description
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth. Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new "behavioral futures markets," where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new "means of behavioral modification." The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a "Big Other" operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff's comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled "hive" of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit -- at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future. With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future -- if we let it.

23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism

23 Things They Don't Tell You about Capitalism PDF Author: Ha-Joon Chang
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608193586
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER "For anyone who wants to understand capitalism not as economists or politicians have pictured it but as it actually operates, this book will be invaluable."-Observer (UK) If you've wondered how we did not see the economic collapse coming, Ha-Joon Chang knows the answer: We didn't ask what they didn't tell us about capitalism. This is a lighthearted book with a serious purpose: to question the assumptions behind the dogma and sheer hype that the dominant school of neoliberal economists-the apostles of the freemarket-have spun since the Age of Reagan. Chang, the author of the international bestseller Bad Samaritans, is one of the world's most respected economists, a voice of sanity-and wit-in the tradition of John Kenneth Galbraith and Joseph Stiglitz. 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism equips readers with an understanding of how global capitalism works-and doesn't. In his final chapter, "How to Rebuild the World," Chang offers a vision of how we can shape capitalism to humane ends, instead of becoming slaves of the market.

Capitalism in the Web of Life

Capitalism in the Web of Life PDF Author: Jason W. Moore
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781689024
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Integrating both social and historical factors, this radical analysis of the development of capitalism reveals the ever-deepening relationship between capital and ecology Finance. Climate. Food. Work. How are the crises of the twenty-first century connected? In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore argues that the sources of today’s global turbulence have a common cause: capitalism as a way of organizing nature, including human nature. Drawing on environmentalist, feminist, and Marxist thought, Moore offers a groundbreaking new synthesis: capitalism as a “world-ecology” of wealth, power, and nature. Capitalism’s greatest strength—and the source of its problems—is its capacity to create Cheap Natures: labor, food, energy, and raw materials. That capacity is now in question. Rethinking capitalism through the pulsing and renewing dialectic of humanity-in-nature, Moore takes readers on a journey from the rise of capitalism to the modern mosaic of crisis. Capitalism in the Web of Life shows how the critique of capitalism-in-nature—rather than capitalism and nature—is key to understanding our predicament, and to pursuing the politics of liberation in the century ahead.

The Making of Global Capitalism

The Making of Global Capitalism PDF Author: Leo Panitch
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1844677427
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
No Marketing Blurb

Confronting Capitalism

Confronting Capitalism PDF Author: Vivek Chibber
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1839762705
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
A strategic guide to building a more democratic and egalitarian future Why is our society so unequal? Why, despite their small numbers, do the rich dominate policy and politics even in democratic countries? Why is it so difficult for working people to organize around common interests? How do we begin to build a more equal and democratic society? Vivek Chibber provides a clear and accessible map of how capitalism works, how it limits the power of working and oppressed people, and how to overcome those limits. The capitalist economy generates incredible wealth but also injustice. Those who own the factories, hotels, and farms always have an advantage over the people who rely on that ownership class for their livelihoods. This inequality in power and income is reflected in the operation of the state, where capitalists are able to exert their will even under relatively democratic conditions. The most important reason is that states depend on the employment and profits from capitalist enterprise for both finances and legitimacy. Every meaningful victory for working people has been won through collective struggle but collective action is very difficult to coordinate. In the final section of the book, Chibber walks the reader through some of the historical attempts to build socialism and presents a vision of how we might, perhaps against the odds, build a socialist future.

Disaster Capitalism

Disaster Capitalism PDF Author: Antony Loewenstein
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784781177
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 435

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Book Description
Disaster has become big business. Best-selling journalist Antony Loewenstein travels across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Britain, Greece, and Australia to witness the reality of disaster capitalism. He discovers how companies cash in on organized misery in a hidden world of privatized detention centers, militarized private security, aid profiteering, and destructive mining. What emerges through Loewenstein's reporting is a dark history of multinational corporations that, with the aid of media and political elites, have grown more powerful than national governments. In the twenty-first century, the vulnerable have become the world's most valuable commodity.

Gotcha Capitalism

Gotcha Capitalism PDF Author: Bob Sullivan
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345504887
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
What is Gotcha Capitalism? Coughing up $4 fees for ATM transactions. Iron-clad cell phone contracts you can’t get out of with a crowbar. Paying big bucks for insurance you don’t need on a rental car or forking over $20 a day for supposedly “free” wireless internet. Every day we use banks, cell phones, and credit cards. Every day we book hotels and airline tickets. And every day we get ripped off. How? Here are just a few examples of how big business can get you: • You didn’t fill up the rental car with gas? Gotcha! Gas costs $7 a gallon here. • Your bank balance fell to $999.99 for one day? Gotcha! That’ll be $12. • You miss one payment on that 18-month same-as-cash loan? Gotcha! That’ll be $512 extra. • You’re one day late on that electric bill? Gotcha! All your credit cards now have a 29.99% interest rate. But not for much longer. In Gotcha Capitalism, MSNBC.com’s “Red Tape Chronicles” columnist Bob Sullivan exposes the ways we’re all cheated by big business, and teaches us how to get our money back–proven strategies that can help you save more than $1,000 a year. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Hidden Technocrats

Hidden Technocrats PDF Author: Hansfried Kellner
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412825092
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
In the early 1970s many social scientists and critics noted the emergence of a new elite based on the "Knowledge Industry" and pitted against the old business-based middle class both politically and culturally. This work attempts to delineate the features of the New Class phenomenon and map its structural location in contemporary American and Western European societies.