This book describes the deep contradictions plague market economies. It shows how the influence of these contradictions sometimes subsides, allowing the economy to perform relatively well. But in time, these contradictions accumulate and economy declines as if it suffers from some degenerative disease. The policies designed to rise above these contradictions often spawn even more severe contradictions. This book describes how these contradictions have affected the economy of the United States in the past and the dangers that the future poses. For example, policies to stimulate the economy eventually lead to stagnation. Policies to make hold down wages make business even more uncompetitive. It also analyzes the destructive consequences of the military, finance, and the Federal Reserve. Finally, it debunks the mythological promise of a New Economy.

This book describes the deep contradictions plague market economies. It shows how the influence of these contradictions sometimes subsides, allowing the economy to perform relatively well. But in time, these contradictions accumulate and economy declines as if it suffers from some degenerative disease. The policies designed to rise above these contradictions often spawn even more severe contradictions. This book describes how these contradictions have affected the economy of the United States in the past and the dangers that the future poses. For example, policies to stimulate the economy eventually lead to stagnation. Policies to make hold down wages make business even more uncompetitive. It also analyzes the destructive consequences of the military, finance, and the Federal Reserve. Finally, it debunks the mythological promise of a New Economy.

Rebellion was in the air. Workers were on strike, students were demonstrating on campuses, discipline was breaking down. No relation of domination was left untouched – the relation between the sexes, the racial order, the hierarchies of class, relationships in families, workplaces and colleges. The upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s quickly spread through all sectors of social and economic life, threatening to make society ungovernable. This crisis was also the birthplace of the authoritarian liberalism which continues to cast its shadow across the world in which we now live. To ward off the threat, new arts of government were devised by elites in business-related circles, which included a war against the trade unions, the primacy of shareholder value and a dethroning of politics. The neoliberalism that thus began its triumphal march was not, however, determined by a simple ‘state phobia’ and a desire to free up the economy from government interference. On the contrary, the strategy for overcoming the crisis of governability consisted in an authoritarian liberalism in which the liberalization of society went hand-in-hand with new forms of power imposed from above: a ‘strong state’ for a ‘free economy’ became the new magic formula of our capitalist societies. The new arts of government devised by ruling elites are still with us today and we can understand their nature and lasting influence only by re-examining the history of the conflicts that brought them into being.

This book argues that the right-wing revolution in the United States has created deepening inequality and will lead to economic catastrophe. The author makes the case that over the past three decades the rich have confiscated wealth and income from the poor and middle class to a far greater extent than many realize, and he explores in detail important but commonly unmeasured dimensions of inequality. He also takes aim at the economics profession, criticising the analytical blinders that leave economists incapable of seeing the coming crisis.

The purpose of this book is to call for a wholesale rethinking of the way that markets treat both the labour and natural resources on which we all depend. It reveals how economic analysis justifies self-defeating policies that encourage wanton use of the environment and callous abuse of the least advantaged labourers. From Adam Smith to the present day, economic theory has short-changed the workers most crucial to the functioning of human life and offered skewed views of scarcity and extraction. Perelman will show how this approach has produced a discipline in which its followers' models and representations of the world around them are so removed from reality that continuing to abide by them would jeopardize both human capabilities and nature itself.

In this significant Marxist critique of contemporary American imperialism, the cultural theorist Randy Martin argues that a finance-based logic of risk control has come to dominate Americans’ everyday lives as well as U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Risk management—the ability to adjust for risk and to leverage it for financial gain—is the key to personal finance as well as the defining element of the massive global market in financial derivatives. The United States wages its amorphous war on terror by leveraging particular interventions (such as Iraq) to much larger ends (winning the war on terror) and by deploying small numbers of troops and targeted weaponry to achieve broad effects. Both in global financial markets and on far-flung battlegrounds, the multiplier effects are difficult to foresee or control. Drawing on theorists including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Achille Mbembe, Martin illuminates a frightening financial logic that must be understood in order to be countered. Martin maintains that finance divides the world between those able to avail themselves of wealth opportunities through risk taking (investors) and those who cannot do so, who are considered “at risk.” He contends that modern-day American imperialism differs from previous models of imperialism, in which the occupiers engaged with the occupied to “civilize” them, siphon off wealth, or both. American imperialism, by contrast, is an empire of indifference: a massive flight from engagement. The United States urges an embrace of risk and self-management on the occupied and then ignores or dispossesses those who cannot make the grade.

How do peak oil, climate change, and the limits of growth affect abortion rights, income equality, and civil liberty? In this impassioned treatise, author and activist Alexis Zeigler reveals the hidden connections between ecology, economics, politics, and social justice—and shows us how to use these connections to effect real, long-lasting change. Most activist movements, says Zeigler, suffer from a kind of tunnel vision in which the true causes and resulting side effects of the desired change are left unexamined—rendering the movements shortsighted and unaware of their own long-term fallout. We cannot effectively address our problems in isolation or with ecological blinders on. Instead we must integrate our activism and ensure that all strategies and actions take into account the historically demonstrated fact that a society’s environmental resources ultimately define its level of freedom, fairness, and financial equity. Packed with surprising facts and eye-opening arguments, Integrated Activism is a must-read not only for every serious activist, but also for anyone looking for a solid, creditable philosophy and approach to building a fairer, freer, more sustainable future.