Political Economy

Beyond the Real of Capitalism

By Derrick King

Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge, eds. Reading Capitalist Realism. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014. 260 pp.

Reading Capitalist Realism is an important and timely intervention into the nature of contemporary realism and the ongoing crisis of capitalism. The editors have assembled a powerful collection of essays that interrogate the critical capacity of the term “capitalist realism” to explain both contemporary ideological formations as well as current literary and cultural forms.
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Literature and Labor under Neoliberalism

By Walter Oliver Baker

Sarah Brouillette. Literature and the Creative Economy. Stanford University Press, 2014. 238 pp.

What is the difference between the worker and the artist under capitalism? Historically, the two can be distinguished by object of their labor: the artist works for the sake of work itself, a disinterested labor whose autonomy gives rise to creativity and self-expression, whereas the worker, compelled by the necessity, works for a wage whose function is merely to sustain and thus reproduce the worker’s life.
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“A Second Innocence”: Deactivating the Debt Machine

By Bruno GullÌ

Maurizio Lazzarato. The Making of the Indebted Man. Trans. Joshua David Jordan. Semiotext(e), 2012. 199 pp.

At the outset of The Making of the Indebted Man, in its foreword, Maurizio Lazzarato points out the necessity to “construct the theoretical weapons for the struggles to come” (2012: 11).
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A Call to Theoretical Indiscipline

By Carolyn Elerding

Jonathan Sterne. MP3: The Meaning of a Format. Duke University Press, 2012. 341 pp.

The last decade has been a truly exciting one in cultural studies of sound, largely due to the generous and catalytic contributions of Jonathan Sterne. These include several significant articles, a strong intellectual and activist web presence, and a provocative genealogy of early sound reproduction and transmission entitled The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction.
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Entry and Exit Points in Global Capitalism

By Pablo Castagno

Ahmed Kanna. Dubai: The City as Corporation. University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 262 pp.

No doubt Dubai’s image is one of its principal Siren-like allures, calling us to leap to a prelapsarian imagination, simply to swoon immediately at the site of architectural fantasies of the future.
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Fantastic Materialism

By Sarah Hamblin

Andy Merrifield. Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination. London: Pluto, 2011. 220 pp.

Andy Merrifield’s Magical Marxism arises from what he describes as “a double dissatisfaction”: an obvious dissatisfaction with the state of contemporary society and a more delicate frustration with the revolutionary potential of actually existing Marxism (xii).
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Short-Circuiting the Virtuous Circle

By ERIC VÁZQUEZ

Fernando Ignacio Leiva. Latin American Neostructuralism: The Contradictions of Post-Neoliberal Development. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 312pp.

Denouncing neoliberalism’s manifestations has become a boom industry for left-wing academics. It has become a practice so prevalent that even fusty establishmentarians like Stanley Fish have deigned to comment on the uses and abuses of “neoliberalism” as a moniker for the predominance of the market over politics, society, and culture in the present moment.
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A Long Chinese Century?

By Peter Hitchcock

Giovanni Arrighi. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. Verso, 2007. 420 pp.

This is a brave and provocative book by a writer who gave us some of the most brilliant critiques of geopolitics and geoeconomics of recent years. Arrighi described his projects as comparative historical-sociology which in terms of the works themselves is another way of thinking the world system as such (in contradistinction to the methodologies and conclusions of Wallerstein and Brenner).
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