ABSTRACT

For decades, Charles Lemert has been the leading voice in social theory. In Capitalism and its Uncertain Future he teams up with one of the most creative emerging social theorists, Kristin Plys, to examine how social theory imagines capitalism. This engaging and innovative book provides new perspectives on well known theorists from Adam Smith, and Frantz Fanon, to Gilles Deleuze, while also introducing readers to lesser known theorists such as Lucia Sanchez Saornil, Mohammad Ali El Hammi, and many more. The book examines theories of capitalism from four perspectives: macro-historical theories of the origins of capitalism; postcolonial theories of capitalism that situate capitalism as seen from the Global South; theories of capitalism from the perspective of labor; and prospective theories of capitalism’s uncertain future. This provocative and ambitious, yet accessible, perspective on theories of capitalism will be of interest to anyone who wants to explore where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

part I|38 pages

The Confusion of Capitalist Structures

chapter 1|20 pages

Foundations of a Critique of Capitalist Theories

Karl Marx, Capital I (1867)

chapter 2|16 pages

Capitalism's Deadly Labor Process

Karl Marx, Estranged Labor (1844)

part II|57 pages

Macro-Historical Theories of Capitalism

chapter 3|11 pages

The Modern World and Capitalism 1500–1991

Frantz Fanon/Immanuel Wallerstein

chapter 4|9 pages

The Modern World-System: Europe or Asia?

Fernand Braudel/Andre Gunder Frank

chapter 5|6 pages

Long-Distance Trade and the Transition to Capitalism

David Ricardo/Janet Abu-Lughod

chapter 6|7 pages

Women's Unpaid Labor and Primitive Accumulation

Friedrich Engels/Silvia Federici

chapter 7|6 pages

The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism

Robert Brenner/Ellen Meiksins Wood

chapter 8|6 pages

Finance and Capitalism

Antonio Gramsci/Giovanni Arrighi

chapter 9|5 pages

The City and the Foundations of Capitalism

Henri Pirenne/Oliver C. Cox

chapter 10|5 pages

A Cyclical Theory of Empire

Nikolai Kondratieff/Ibn Khaldun

part III|82 pages

Postcolonial Theories of Capitalism

chapter 11|5 pages

Postcolonial Class Analysis

Barrington Moore/Claudia Jones

chapter 12|8 pages

Capitalism's Soft Imperialism and Global Racism

C.L.R. James/Walter Rodney

chapter 13|7 pages

The Role of Working Class Violence in National Liberation

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi/Bhagat Singh

chapter 14|6 pages

Workers, Peasants, Anti-Colonialism

Vladimir Lenin/Nestor Makhno

chapter 15|7 pages

A Situationist Theory of Underdevelopment

Albert Camus/Mustapha Khayati

chapter 16|14 pages

Against the Colonization of Consciousness of Political Economy

Kwame Ture/W.E.B. Du Bois/Amílcar Cabral

chapter 17|5 pages

Existential Unfolding as Revolutionary Praxis

Mao Zedong/Charu Mazumdar

chapter 18|7 pages

A Critique of Western Imperialism from Within

Muhammad Ali/Ulrike Meinhof

chapter 19|7 pages

Rethinking the World Revolution of 1968

Martin Luther King Jr./Ho Chi Minh

chapter 20|4 pages

Capitalism as Seen from Its Peripheries

Dipesh Chakrabarty/Eric Wolf

chapter 21|10 pages

Orientalism, Postmodernity, and the Problem with Capitalist Culture

Edward Said/Fredrick Jameson/Aijaz Ahmad

part IV|36 pages

Theories of Labor and Capitalism

chapter 22|4 pages

The Labor Process and Work under Capitalism

Frederick Winslow Taylor/Harry Braverman

chapter 23|4 pages

A Trade Unionist Theory of Patriarchy

Edna Bonacich/Lucía Sánchez Saornil

chapter 24|5 pages

Worker Self-Management and Black Working Class Consciousness

Mikhail Bakunin/Joseph Edwards

chapter 25|7 pages

Theorizing the Global Division of Labor

Adam Smith/Folker Fröbel, Otto Kreye, and Jürgen Heinrichs

chapter 26|7 pages

Radicalization through Difference

Jacques Rancière/Mohammed Ali El Hammi

chapter 27|3 pages

Resistance against the Market and Struggles of Newly Emerging Working Classes

Karl Polanyi/Beverly Silver

chapter 28|4 pages

Culture, Labor, and the Global South

E.P. Thompson/Rajnarayan Chandavarkar

part V|106 pages

Capitalism's Uncertain Future

chapter 29|9 pages

The Disciplinary Empire and the Resisting Multitude

Michel Foucault/Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

chapter 30|14 pages

Mass Media and Cultural Violence

C.L.R. James/Herbert Marcuse

chapter 31|8 pages

The Poverty of Development Economics

Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo/Samir Amin

chapter 32|14 pages

Neo-Liberalism and the Madness of Economic Reason

Nancy Fraser/David Harvey

chapter 33|6 pages

The Great Economic Divide and Globalization

Joseph Stiglitz/Jürgen Osterhammel

chapter 34|10 pages

The Structural Nature of Capitalism

Joseph Schumpeter/Thomas Piketty

chapter 35|8 pages

Capitalism and the Environmental Crisis

Henry David Thoreau/William Nordhaus

chapter 36|10 pages

Silenced and Wasted Lives in the Capitalism Order

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak/Zygmunt Bauman

chapter 37|7 pages

Left Extremes: Authoritarians v. Libertines

Slavoj Žižek/Noam Chomsky

chapter 38|18 pages

Assemblage Theory: The New Necessary Analytics of Capitalism

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari/Manuel Delanda

part VI|33 pages

Exploitation and Exclusion

chapter 39|20 pages

Exploitative Capitalism in the Global South

The Dar es Salaam School

chapter 40|11 pages

Capitalism's Zones of Exclusion and Necropolitics

Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe