Author: Grace Blakeley Publisher: Verso Books ISBN: 1839762055 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 113
Book Description
Free market, competitive capitalism is dead. The separation between politics and economics can no longer be sustained. In The Corona Crash, leading economics commentator Grace Blakeley theorises about the epoch-making changes that the coronavirus brings in its wake. We are living through a unique moment in history. The pandemic has caused the deepest global recession since the Second World War. Meanwhile the human cost is reflected in a still-rising death toll, as many states find themselves unable—and some unwilling—to grapple with the effects of the virus. Whatever happens, we can never go back to business as usual. This crisis will tip us into a new era of monopoly capitalism, argues Blakeley, as the corporate economy collapses into the arms of the state, and the tech giants grow to unprecedented proportions. We need a radical response. The recovery could see the transformation of our political, economic, and social systems based on the principles of the Green New Deal. If not, the alternatives, as Blakeley warns, may be even worse than we feared.
Author: Eugene Nulman Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1000407659 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 152
Book Description
Using innovative interpretations of recent big budget films, Coronavirus Capitalism Goes to the Cinema interrogates the social, political and economic landscape during and prior to the COVID-19 crisis and provides lessons for advancing progressive politics in a post-pandemic age. By exploring numerous films including Avengers: Endgame, Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood, 1917, and Parasite, this short book provides a deep understanding about neoliberal society in a time of crisis. Facilitated by the ideas of Emma Goldman, Naomi Klein, Karl Marx, Noam Chomsky and many more, these movies are reinterpreted to point out our political blind spots, combat our non-COVID contagions and inoculate us into ideological herd immunity. From explorations of the supervillain-like decision-making of our political leaders to the inequalities in infection outcomes that sparked further Black Lives Matter protests, this book discusses the central social challenges we face today through the sights and sounds of some of the most beloved films of the very recent past. This entertaining and accessible book will reward readers who are interested in contemporary politics in the context of COVID-19, as well as cinephiles and movie-goers who want fresh interpretations of instant classics to help explain the world around them. More than just informative and amusing, this book is a call to action to those activists who want social change in the face of coronavirus capitalism.
Author: Sean Creaven Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1003818188 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 194
Book Description
Contagion Capitalism situates the COVID-19 pandemic within the systems of global political economy and their attendant cultural modes and theorizes that these systems act as facilitators and drivers of global pandemic risk. Contagion Capitalism therefore critiques the institutionalized corporate-capitalist control of the economy, the state, and science, and the grave consequences this has on global public health policy, the ecological crisis of sustainability, and zoonotic pandemic events such as COVID-19. In doing so, this book addresses the failings of what may be termed as “state science” or “establishment science” in managing the pandemic, as personified especially by those elements of the scientific elite placed in the service of the neoliberal state. This book also explores the limitations of corporate pharmacological technoscience in safeguarding public health, arguing that “Big Pharma” offers only partial remedies for problems of human illness and well-being, poses its own dangers to public health, and obfuscates the social bases of public ill-health and of pandemic risk. Contagion Capitalism further argues that COVID-19 will not be the last or even the most dangerous such epidemiological event. This is because the social production and global dissemination of zoonotic diseases is integral to contemporary capitalism, by virtue of its instrumental mode of science, its central dynamic of production for the sake of accumulation, and the consumer mode this sustains as its own condition of existence. These are the drivers of what may be termed as zoonotic accelerationism. Contagion Capitalism will appeal to scholars in the humanities and social sciences with interests in neoliberal ideology and global political economy, and their impact upon social, political and cultural life.
Author: Efe Can Gürcan Publisher: ISBN: 9781773632575 Category : Languages : en Pages : 140
Book Description
COVID-19 may be an historical turning point for global capitalism. It has revealed the crisis of neoliberal globalization; however, this does not automatically lead to the ultimate defeat of capitalism or its neoliberal incarnation. The authors in this collection posit that a new framework cannot be built on the values and beliefs of current-day consumer capitalist society; resistance in the pandemic age should be based on the values and beliefs that could be the foundation of a new, postcapitalist society. This book formulates a tentative revolutionary program that could take advantage of the COVID-19 environment to defeat and transcend capitalism.
Author: Ian McKay Publisher: Between the Lines ISBN: 1771136405 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 191
Book Description
Crisis and Contagion is a selection of fourteen interviews conducted by Ian McKay of the Wilson Institute at McMaster University. Interviews with Nancy Fraser, Mike Davis, Mack Penner, Andreas Malm, and Merrill Singer explore capitalism’s organic crisis and the ways it has made this and future pandemics inevitable. Nora Loreto, Tithi Bhattacharya, Chandrima Chakraborty, Merlin Chowkwanyun, and Sanjay Nepal discuss the experiences of ordinary people in the pandemic. J. Michael Ryan, Laura Spinney, Naomi Klein, and Noam Chomsky explore the long-term effects and likely historical legacy of a pandemic that has changed millions of lives–and, maybe, the trajectory of human civilization. These scholars propose that to understand the impact of Covid-19, we have to understand the conflictual history of capitalism–and to ward off future pandemics, we need to start building a post-capitalist alternative to the disease-generating and highly unequal global neoliberal order. As capitalist forces work to shove what we have learned from the Covid-19 pandemic down the memory hole, Crisis and Contagion offers a must-read for those wanting to seize this moment of change and revolution.
Author: Naomi Klein Publisher: Metropolitan Books ISBN: 1429919485 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 721
Book Description
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.
Author: Li Zhang Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 1503630188 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 153
Book Description
A new strain of coronavirus emerged sometime in November 2019, and within weeks a cluster of patients began to be admitted to hospitals in Wuhan with severe pneumonia, most of them linked to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. China's seemingly effective containment of the first stage of the epidemic, in glaring contrast with the uncontrolled spread in Europe and the United States, was heralded as a testament to the Chinese Communist Party's unparalleled command over the biomedical sciences, population, and economy. Conversely, much academic and public debate about the origins of the virus focuses on the supposedly "backwards" cultural practice of consuming wild animals and the perceived problem of authoritarianism suppressing information about the outbreak until it was too late. The Origins of COVID-19, by Li Zhang, shifts debate away from narrow cultural, political, or biomedical frameworks, emphasizing that we must understand the origins of emerging diseases with pandemic potential (such as SARS and COVID-19) in the more complex and structural entanglements of state-making, science and technology, and global capitalism. She argues that both narratives, that of China's victory and the racist depictions of its culpability, do not address—and even aggravate—these larger forces that degrade the environment and increase the human-wildlife interface through which novel pathogens spill over into humans and may rapidly expand into global pandemics.
Author: Noel Chellan Publisher: ISBN: Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
If there's one thing that we should have learned from the early years of the global pandemic, it's that the current system isn't working. Capitalism and COVID-19: Time to Make a Democratic New World Order proposes a way forward: the deepening of democracy in a post-capitalist world. It suggests that humans should be placed back in nature and nature back in humans and argues for a global environmental movement. The book maintains that the free market should serve people and the planet - instead of people and the planet serving the free market. It argues that the state must take the lead in the transition to a post-capitalist world. A post-capitalist society should ensure planetary and peoples' well-being together with economic well-being. Economic science in its current ideological form should be revisited. Exiting capitalism requires the unity of workers of all countries. Capitalism and COVID-19: Time to Make a Democratic New World Order calls for reimagining and recreating the best of all possible worlds for present and future generations. In the final analysis Noel Chellan predicts and maintains that capitalism too shall pass!
Author: Andreas Nölke Publisher: Policy Press ISBN: 1529219450 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 268
Book Description
The COVID-19 pandemic is a Rorschach test for society: everyone sees something different in it, and the range of political and economic responses to the crisis can leave us feeling overwhelmed. This book cuts through the confusion, dissecting the new post-coronavirus capitalism into several policy areas and spheres of action to inform academic, policy and public discourse. Covering all the major aspects of contemporary capitalism that have been affected by the pandemic, Andreas Nölke deftly analyses the impacts of the crisis on our socio-economic and political systems. Signposting a new era for global capitalism, he offers alternatives for future economic development in the wake of COVID-19.
Author: Adam Tooze Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0593297563 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 369
Book Description
"This book’s great service is that it challenges us to consider the ways in which our institutions and systems, and the assumptions, positions and divisions that undergird them, leave us ill prepared for the next crisis."—Robert Rubin, The New York Times Book Review "Full of valuable insight and telling details, this may well be the best thing to read if you want to know what happened in 2020." --Paul Krugman, New York Review of Books Deftly weaving finance, politics, business, and the global human experience into one tight narrative, a tour-de-force account of 2020, the year that changed everything--from the acclaimed author of Crashed. The shocks of 2020 have been great and small, disrupting the world economy, international relations and the daily lives of virtually everyone on the planet. Never before has the entire world economy contracted by 20 percent in a matter of weeks nor in the historic record of modern capitalism has there been a moment in which 95 percent of the world's economies were suffering all at the same time. Across the world hundreds of millions have lost their jobs. And over it all looms the specter of pandemic, and death. Adam Tooze, whose last book was universally lauded for guiding us coherently through the chaos of the 2008 crash, now brings his bravura analytical and narrative skills to a panoramic and synthetic overview of our current crisis. By focusing on finance and business, he sets the pandemic story in a frame that casts a sobering new light on how unprepared the world was to fight the crisis, and how deep the ruptures in our way of living and doing business are. The virus has attacked the economy with as much ferocity as it has our health, and there is no vaccine arriving to address that. Tooze's special gift is to show how social organization, political interests, and economic policy interact with devastating human consequences, from your local hospital to the World Bank. He moves fluidly from the impact of currency fluctuations to the decimation of institutions--such as health-care systems, schools, and social services--in the name of efficiency. He starkly analyzes what happened when the pandemic collided with domestic politics (China's party conferences; the American elections), what the unintended consequences of the vaccine race might be, and the role climate change played in the pandemic. Finally, he proves how no unilateral declaration of 'independence" or isolation can extricate any modern country from the global web of travel, goods, services, and finance.
Author: Grace Blakeley
Author: Eugene Nulman
Author: Sean Creaven
Author: Efe Can Gürcan
Author: Ian McKay
Author: Naomi Klein
Author: Li Zhang
Author: Noel Chellan
Author: Andreas Nölke
Author: Adam Tooze