The bestselling author of No Logo shows how the global free market has exploited crises and shock for three decades, from Chile to Iraq

In her groundbreaking reporting, Naomi Klein introduced the term disaster capitalism. Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic shock treatment, losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers.

The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq.

At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.

Marx for the twenty-first century
The first new English translation in fifty years--and the only one based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself
Featuring extensive original commentary, including a foreword by acclaimed political theorist Wendy Brown
An astounding achievement.--China Miéville, author of October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was living in exile in England when he embarked on an ambitious, multivolume critique of the capitalist system of production. Though only the first volume saw publication in Marx's lifetime, it would become one of the most consequential books in history. This magnificent new edition of Capital is a translation of Marx for the twenty-first century. It is the first translation into English to be based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself, the only version that can be called authoritative, and it features extensive commentary and annotations by Paul North and Paul Reitter that draw on the latest scholarship and provide invaluable perspective on the book and its complicated legacy. At once precise and boldly readable, this translation captures the momentous scale and sweep of Marx's thought while recovering the elegance and humor of the original source.

For Marx, our global economic system is relentlessly driven by value--to produce it, capture it, trade it, and, most of all, to increase it. Lifespans are shortened under the demand for ever-greater value. Days are lengthened, work is intensified, and the division of labor deepens until it leaves two classes, owners and workers, in constant struggle for life and livelihood. In Capital, Marx reveals how value came to tyrannize our world, and how the history of capital is a chronicle of bloodshed, colonization, and enslavement.

With a foreword by Wendy Brown and an afterword by William Clare Roberts, this is a critical edition of Capital for our time, one that faithfully preserves the vitality and directness of Marx's German prose and renders his ideas newly relevant to modern readers.

A provocative exploration about the architecture of power, the forces that stifle us from getting things done, and how we can restore confidence in democratically elected government--the best book to date on the biggest political issue that nobody is talking about (Matthew Yglesias)

America was once a country that did big things--we built the world's greatest rail network, a vast electrical grid, interstate highways, abundant housing, the Social Security system, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and more. But today, even while facing a host of pressing challenges--a housing shortage, a climate crisis, a dilapidated infrastructure--we feel stuck, unable to move the needle. Why?

America is today the victim of a vetocracy that allows nearly anyone to stifle progress. While conservatives deserve some blame, progressives have overlooked an unlikely culprit: their own fears of The Establishment. A half-century ago, progressivism's designs on getting stuff done were eclipsed by a desire to box in government. Reformers put speaking truth to power ahead of exercising that power for good. The ensuing gridlock has pummeled faith in public institutions of all sorts, stifled the movement's ability to deliver on its promises, and, most perversely, opened the door for MAGA-style populism.

A century ago, Americans were similarly frustrated--and progressivism pointed the way out. The same can happen again. Marc J. Dunkelman vividly illustrates what progressives must do if they are going to break through today's paralysis and restore, once again, confidence in democratically elected government. To get there, reformers will need to acknowledge where they've gone wrong. Progressivism's success moving forward hinges on the movement's willingness to rediscover its roots.

Deftly written, Chokepoints is a compelling and dramatic narrative about the new shape of geopolitics.
-- Daniel Yergin, The Wall Street Journal

Remarkable...One of the most important books on economic warfare ever written.
-- Paul Kennedy, author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

The epic story of how America turned the world economy into a weapon, upending decades of globalization to take on a new authoritarian axis--Russia, China, and Iran.

It used to be that ravaging another country's economy required blockading its ports and laying siege to its cities. Now all it takes is a statement posted online by the U.S. government.

In Chokepoints, Edward Fishman, a former top State Department sanctions official, takes us deep into the back rooms of power to reveal the untold history of the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy, in which America renounced the gospel of globalization and waged a new kind of economic war. As Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Ayatollah Khamenei wreaked havoc on the world stage, mavericks within the U.S. government built a fearsome new arsenal of economic weapons, exploiting America's dominance in global finance and technology. Successive U.S. presidents have relied on these unconventional weapons to address the most pressing national-security threats, for good and for ill.

Chokepoints provides a thrilling account of one of the most critical geopolitical developments of our time, demystifying the complex strategies the U.S. government uses to harness the power of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil against America's enemies. At the center of the narrative is an eclectic group of policy innovators: the diplomats, lawyers, and financial whizzes who've masterminded America's escalating economic wars against Russia, China, and Iran.

Economic warfare has become the primary way the United States confronts international crises and counters rivals. Sometimes it has achieved spectacular success; other times, bitter failure. The result we live with today is a new world order: an economic arms race among great powers and a fracturing global economy. Chokepoints is the definitive account of how America pioneered this new, hard-hitting style of economic war--and how it's changing the world.

Awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economics, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson overturn conventional wisdom about how economies work--revealing the untold story of who wins and who loses the rewards of prosperity--in a work that fundamentally transforms how we look at and understand the world.

Throughout history, technological change -- whether it takes the form of agricultural improvements in the Middle Ages, the Industrial Revolution, or today's artificial intelligence -- has been viewed as a main driver of prosperity, working in the public interest. The reality, though, is that technology is shaped by what powerful people want and believe, generating riches, social respect, cultural prominence, and further political voice for those already powerful. For most of the rest of us, there is the illusion of progress.

Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson debunk modern techno-optimism through a dazzling, original account of how technological choices have changed the course of history. From vivid stories of how the economic surplus of the Middle Ages was appropriated by an ecclesiastical elite to build cathedrals while the peasants starved, to the making of vast fortunes from digital technologies today as millions are pushed towards poverty, we see how the path of technology is determined and who influences its trajectory.

To achieve the true potential of innovation, we need to ensure technology is creating new jobs and opportunities rather than marginalizing most people, through automated work and political passivity. We need to use the tremendous digital advances of the last half century to create useful and empowering tools, and seize back control from a small elite of hubristic, messianic tech leaders pursuing
their own interests.

With their breakthrough economic theory and manifesto for building a better society, Acemoglu and Johnson provide the understanding and vision to reimagine and reshape the path of technology and create true shared prosperity.

This maverick thinker is the Karl Marx of our time...In recent decades, Mr. Streeck has described the complaints of populist movements with unequaled power. That is because he has a convincing theory of what has gone wrong in the complex gearworks of American-driven globalization, and he has been able to lay it out with clarity.
--Christopher Caldwell, New York Times

Taking Back Control? examines the ongoing tug of war between the forces of globalism and those of democracy, between centralisation and decentralisation, and between the unifica­tion and the differentiation of states and state systems. On this territory are fought the defining geopolitical struggles of our era, which will determine the advance of global capitalism and shape the prospects for its social and democratic regulation.

The neoliberal revolution of the 1990s gave rise to a politics of scale aimed at the centralisation and unification of states and state systems. This was the New World Order proclaimed by the United States in the wake of the Soviet collapse. But it proved to be ungovernable by democratic means. Instead, it was ruled through a combina­tion of technocracy and mercatocracy, failing spectacularly to provide for political stability, social legitimacy, and international peace. Marked by a series of economic and institutional crises, hyperglobalisation called forward various kinds of political countermovements that rebelled against and ultimately stopped the upward trans­fer of state authority in its tracks.

Exploring the possibility for states and the societies they govern to take back control over their collective fate, Wolfgang Streeck formulates a renewed theory of the state in political economy. Drawing on the work of Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes, he discusses the potential outlines of a state system that allows for democratic governance within and peaceful cooperation between sovereign nation­states.

'Compelling' Guardian

'Eloquent and comprehensive' Financial Times

'Excellent' The Telegraph

'Astonishing' The Times

'An eye-opener' Gavin Esler

Until recently, Germany appeared to be a paragon of economic and political success. Angela Merkel was widely seen as the true 'leader of the free world', and Germany's export-driven economic model seemed to deliver prosperity. But recent events - from Germany's dependence on Russian gas to its car industry's delays in the race to electric - have undermined this view.

In Kaput, Wolfgang Münchau argues that the weaknesses of Germany's economy have, in fact, been brewing for decades. The neo-mercantilist policies of the German state, driven by close connections between the country's industrial and political elite, have left Germany technologically behind over-reliant on authoritarian Russia and China - and with little sign of being able to adapt to the digital realities of the 21st century. It is an essential read for anyone interested in the future of Europe's biggest economy.

Standard theories of the causes of climate breakdown will not survive this book. Readers will be all the wiser.
--Andreas Malm, author of How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Why the market will never solve the climate crisis

What if our understanding of capitalism and climate is back to front? What if the problem is not that transitioning to renewables is too expensive, but that saving the planet is not sufficiently profitable?

This is Brett Christophers' claim. The global economy is moving too slowly toward sustainability because the return on green investment is too low.

Today's consensus is that the key to curbing climate change is to produce green electricity and electrify everything possible. The main economic barrier in that project has seemingly been removed. But while prices of solar and wind power have tumbled, the golden era of renewables has yet to materialize.

The problem is that investment is driven by profit, not price, and operating solar and wind farms remains a marginal business, dependent everywhere on the state's financial support.

We cannot expect markets and the private sector to solve the climate crisis while the profits that are their lifeblood remain unappetizing. But there is an alternative to providing surrogate green profits through subsidies: to take energy out of the private sector's hands.

An essential intervention, The Price Is Wrong is as politically far-reaching as it is factually illuminating.

Now featuring a new preface by Peter Thiel

Two renowned investment advisors and authors of the bestseller The Great Reckoning bring to light both currents of disaster and the potential for prosperity and renewal in the face of radical changes in human history as we move into the next century.

The Sovereign Individual details strategies necessary for adapting financially to the next phase of Western civilization.

Few observers of the late twentieth century have their fingers so presciently on the pulse of the global political and economic realignment ushering in the new millennium as do James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. Their bold prediction of disaster on Wall Street in Blood in the Streets was borne out by Black Tuesday. In their ensuing bestseller, The Great Reckoning, published just weeks before the coup attempt against Gorbachev, they analyzed the pending collapse of the Soviet Union and foretold the civil war in Yugoslavia and other events that have proved to be among the most searing developments of the past few years.

In The Sovereign Individual, Davidson and Rees-Mogg explore the greatest economic and political transition in centuries--the shift from an industrial to an information-based society. This transition, which they have termed the fourth stage of human society, will liberate individuals as never before, irrevocably altering the power of government. This outstanding book will replace false hopes and fictions with new understanding and clarified values.

For decades we have known about the dangers of global warming. Nevertheless, greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase. How can we explain our failure to take the necessary measures to stop climate change? Why are societies, despite the mounting threat to ourselves and our children, so reluctant to take action?

In this important new book, Jens Beckert provides an answer to these questions. Our apparent inability to implement basic measures to combat climate change is due to the nature of power and incentive structures affecting companies, politicians, voters, and consumers. Drawing on social science research, he argues that climate change is an inevitable product of the structures of capitalist modernity which have been developing for the past 500 years. Our institutional and cultural arrangements are operating at the cost of destroying the natural environment and attempts to address global warming are almost inevitably bound to fail. Temperatures will continue to rise and social and political conflicts will intensify. The tragic truth is: we are selling our future for the next quarterly figures, the upcoming election results, and today's pleasure. Any realistic climate policy needs to focus on preparing societies for the consequences of escalating climate change and aim at strengthening social resilience to cope with the increasingly unstable natural world. Civil society is the only source of pressure that could build the necessary strength and support for climate protection.

How We Sold Our Future is a crucial intervention into the most pressing issue of our time.

A fascinating examination of the rapid concentration of global capital, with chapters that focus on China and Russia.

Explores how fewer and larger investment companies now manage the excess financial wealth of the world's 40 million richest people, to the detriment of everyone else and the global environment.

In Titans of Capital, Peter Phillips, a political sociologist, poses three key research questions: To what extent do the wealthy influence--or even dominate--decision making that affects all of us in society? Who are the most powerful people? And how does the accumulation of capital work?

Networks of wealthy individuals have evolved since the COVID-19 pandemic, and Titans of Capital shows how the financial investments of transnational elites threaten human rights and the future of the planet.

• Private capital investments serve as the primary operating funds for international arms sales, private prisons, and other socially negative activities. These investments fuel the continued use of carbon-based energy leading to amplified global warming and climate change.
• Military spending is a critical component of continued wealth concentration and political power in the world. Spending on arms and intelligence is a required aspect of maintaining global power and control. Dealing with Russia, China, Iran and other rogue states is a continuing agenda for agents of the world power elites.
• Propaganda machines in Western capitalist governments serve to protect elite wealth by promoting military conflicts to open new regions for economic investment.

Phillips warns that while continued concentration of global capital increases the profits enjoyed by the global economy's Titans,, it also increases global inequality, starvation, and civil unrest, threatening the lives of the hundreds of millions of people living in extreme poverty. It is imperative to ask how we can reverse the concentration of Titan wealth and revitalize grassroots democracy unbridled by extreme wealth. Identifying 117 global Titans by name and exposing the networks and interests that unite them provides readers opposed to militarism and committed to economic equality with crucial tools to directly engage the power elite who endanger life on earth.

Expanded and updated, Charles Eisenstein's classic treatise on capitalism, currency, and the gift economy.

This revised version traces the history of money, from ancient gift economies to modern capitalism, and includes new material on cryptocurrencies and emerging research that has come out since the book's original publication. Charles
Eisenstein shows how capitalism contributes to alienation, competition, and scarcity; destroys community; and necessitates endless growth at the cost of social and environmental devastation. Today, these trends have reached their extreme--and their collapse presents a golden opportunity to transition to a more connected, ecological, and sustainable way of being.

Eisenstein describes the deeper narratives beneath our economic system, and how we can reimagine it to align with a new story. Applying a broadly integrated synthesis of theory, policy, and practice, he explores avant-garde concepts of the New Economics, including negative-interest currencies, local economies, gift economics, cryptocurrencies, and the restoration of the commons. Tapping into a rich lineage of conventional and unconventional economic thought, Eisenstein presents a vision that is original yet commonsense, radical yet gentle, and increasingly relevant as the crises of our civilization deepen.

A lot of people in the North are angry. Their ability to be wealthy-ish in their own community is gone, and they're finding it hard to make sense of that. People in the South are also finding it hard to make sense of why they're paid so little for the coffee, the wheat, and the maize that they grow. Yet somewhere in the middle, somebody is making an awful lot of money. Peter Mertens brings together the two ends in solidarity and points out that the real issue is the profits that have been made by faceless, distant global corporations, that have their headquarters in tax havens. And at the end of it, he does the most important thing. Two very important things, two words: hope and inspiration, as to how we empower ourselves to go forward. Jeremy Corbyn, lifelong activist, London Mutiny is a rollicking ride through world politics. Peter Mertens is able to clearly and convincingly show how opulence and poverty, domination and exploitation are intertwined on both a large and small scale. The book presents a compelling case for a joint mutiny of people in the North and the South. Sevim Dagdelen, left MP in the Bundestag, Germany Compelling, pugnacious, and endlessly engaging. The world is turning, and Peter Mertens does a wonderful job of showing which way the wind is blowing. It's a book brimming with vivid anecdotes, topical analysis and fascinating historical detail. Jerome Roos, London School of Economics Workers in the North and South, from US autoworkers and British nurses to South African metalworkers, need to read Mutiny. It interrupts our navel-gazing and captures the seeds of social change germinating all over the planet. That's where hope lies: if we organise ourselves, locally and internationally, and if we link social movements in the North and South, we can win. Luc Triangle, General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation

What is wrong with capitalism, and how can we change it?

Capitalism has transformed the world and increased our productivity, but at the cost of enormous human suffering. Our shared values--equality and fairness, democracy and freedom, community and solidarity--can provide both the basis for a critique of capitalism and help to guide us toward a socialist and democratic society.

Erik Olin Wright has distilled decades of work into this concise and tightly argued manifesto: analyzing the varieties of anticapitalism, assessing different strategic approaches, and laying the foundations for a society dedicated to human flourishing. How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century is an urgent and powerful argument for socialism, and an unparalleled guide to help us get there. Another world is possible. Included is an afterword by the author's close friend and collaborator Michael Burawoy.

In Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, Thomas Sowell, one of the foremost conservative public intellectuals in this country, argues that political and ideological struggles have led to dangerous confusion about income inequality in America. Pundits and politically motivated economists trumpet ambiguous statistics and sensational theories while ignoring the true determinant of income inequality: the production of wealth. We cannot properly understand inequality if we focus exclusively on the distribution of wealth and ignore wealth production factors such as geography, demography, and culture.

Sowell contends that liberals have a particular interest in misreading the data and chastises them for using income inequality as an argument for the welfare state. Refuting Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman, and others on the left, Sowell draws on accurate empirical data to show that the inequality is not nearly as extreme or sensational as we have been led to believe.

Transcending partisanship through a careful examination of data, Wealth, Poverty, and Politics reveals the truth about the most explosive political issue of our time.

We need to break free from the capitalist economy. Degrowth gives us the tools to bend its bars.

Economic growth isn't working, and it cannot be made to work. Offering a counter-history of how economic growth emerged in the context of colonialism, fossil-fueled industrialization, and capitalist modernity, The Future Is Degrowth argues that the ideology of growth conceals the rising inequalities and ecological destructions associated with capitalism, and points to desirable alternatives to it.

Not only in society at large, but also on the left, we are held captive by the hegemony of growth. Even proposals for emancipatory Green New Deals or postcapitalism base their utopian hopes on the development of productive forces, on redistributing the fruits of economic growth and technological progress. Yet growing evidence shows that continued economic growth cannot be made compatible with sustaining life and is not necessary for a good life for all.

This book provides a vision for postcapitalism beyond growth. Building on a vibrant field of research, it discusses the political economy and the politics of a non-growing economy. It charts a path forward through policies that democratise the economy, now-topias that create free spaces for experimentation, and counter-hegemonic movements that make it possible to break with the logic of growth. Degrowth perspectives offer a way to step off the treadmill of an alienating, expansionist, and hierarchical system.

A handbook and a manifesto, The Future Is Degrowth is a must-read for all interested in charting a way beyond the current crises.

Capital: Volume One by Karl Marx is a classic of political economics and was described by Friedrich Engels, the author's friend and collaborator, as the bible of the working class. Thirty years in the making, this 1867 publication was the first in the three-part Das Kapital series and the only volume published during Marx's lifetime. The polemic asserts that society is advancing from primitive economic systems toward the utopian state of communism.
It remains a work of tremendous importance and influence and offers an astute critique of capitalism, exploring commodities, value, money, and other factors related to the system's historic origins and contemporary functions. The examination of these elements forms the basis of Marxist doctrine: the system is irredeemable, a revolution is imperative, and a socialist system is the only viable alternative, providing a structure in which production serves the needs of all rather than the enrichment of the elite.

Neoliberal rationality -- ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture -- remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo oeconomicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In vivid detail, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperiled.

The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice cede to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to the imperative of human capital appreciation; equality dissolves into market competition; and popular sovereignty grows incoherent. Liberal democratic practices may not survive these transformations. Radical democratic dreams may not either.

In an original and compelling theoretical argument, Brown explains how and why neoliberal reason undoes the political form and political imaginary it falsely promises to secure and reinvigorate. Through meticulous analyses of neoliberalized law, political practices, governance, and education, she charts the new common sense.

Undoing the Demos makes clear that, far from being the lodestar of the twenty-first century, a future for democracy depends upon it becoming an object of struggle and rethinking.

This book offers an accessible framework for macroeconomic modelling rooted in the capital theory of Austrian Economics. By distinguishing between the goods and monetary sides of the economy and exploring their interaction, the book provides a comprehensive macroeconomic model that integrates time preference and interest rates. It examines how monetary and fiscal policies can produce business cycles and how these cycles are influenced by central bank liquidity and financial market behaviour. Additionally, the book discusses the ways in which monetary and fiscal policies can prolong and intensify economic stagnation.

Through its clear exposition, this book deepens the understanding of the conditions that determine the unsustainability of credit-driven economic expansions. It is essential reading for students and researchers in political economy, macroeconomics, monetary economics, and those interested in advancing Austrian Economics.

This global environmental and political history will redefine the way we think about the European colonial project (Observer).

. . . sets the triumph of the late 19th-century Western imperialism in the context of catastrophic El Niño weather patterns at that time . . . groundbreaking, mind-stretching. --The Independent

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history.

Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites.

Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.