In _The Immaterial_,_ _French social philosopher André Gorz argues, in his finely-tuned and polemical style, that the economic boom that accelerated in the 1990s and crashed so spectacularly in 2008 was based largely on an immaterial consumption of symbols and ideas, as capitalism tried to overcome the crisis of the formally industrial regime by throwing itself into a new, so-called knowledge economy. In this, the last full-length theoretical work Gorz completed before his death, he argues instead for the creation of (...) a true knowledge economy. This economy would be based on zero-cost exchange and pooled resources, and knowledge would be treated as humanity’s common property. Currently, in order to exploit knowledge and turn it into capital, the capitalist enterprise privatizes specialized knowledge and claims ownership through private licenses and copyright. But as Gorz shows, the traditional foundations of such capitalist economics have begun to crumble because of the immaterial nature of this new form of product, which makes it almost impossible to measure in monetary terms. The knowledge economy, Gorz declares, _is_ the crisis of capitalism. Thought-provoking and divisive, _The Immaterial _is the perfect book for our time, as we begin to reimagine the structures of our economic system in order to rebuild and move forward. “It is to Gorz... that readers should turn for a compelling combination of sharp analysis, well-wrought polemic, and suggestions for the future.”—_Red Pepper_ “A great figure of the intellectual Left.”—Nicolas Sarkozy “Gorz’s intelligence strikes you at the very first glance: it is one of the nimblest, acutest intelligences I know.”—Jean-Paul Sartre. (shrink)

This paperback edition contains a new greatly expanded bibliography of Habermas's work.

Writing for a wide audience, Harvey here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. He constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for more socially just alternatives.

Book synopsis: There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. Slavoj Žižek has identified the four horsemen of this coming apocalypse: the worldwide ecological crisis; imbalances within the economic system; the biogenetic revolution; and exploding social divisions and ruptures. But, he asks, if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it possible for Western society to face up to the end times? In a major new (...) analysis of our global situation, Žižek argues that our collective responses to economic Armageddon correspond to the stages of grief: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and withdrawal. For this edition, Žižek has written a long afterword that leaves almost no subject untouched, from WikiLeaks to the nature of the Chinese Communist Party. (shrink)

In this way progressive bourgeois philosophy, which seemed to offer the promise of a unified and peaceful world, in fact produced just the opposite.The book ...

Über Jahrzehnte beanspruchten die komplementären Diskurse des östlichen partei-, später staatsoffiziellen Marxismus sowie des westlichen Antikommunismus die nahezu uneingeschränkte Definitionsmacht über das, was gemeinhin als 'Marxsche Theorie' oder 'wissenschaftlicher Sozialismus' galt. Dagegen machte sich ab Mitte der 1960er Jahre eine neue Lektüre-Bewegung vor allem in der Bundesrepublik daran, die originellen wissenschaftlichen Gehalte des Marxschen Denkens zu entdecken. Der Rezeptionsschutt der vorangegangenen 100 Jahre sollte weggeräumt werden, um für die Rekonstruktion einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie mit einem innovativen Methoden- und Gegenstandsverständnis Platz zu (...) schaffen. Das Buch vergegenwärtigt die Quellen, Geschichte und Resultate dieses neuen Diskussionskontexts. Drei Stränge der Debatte werden näher beleuchtet: die methodologische und werttheoretische Grundlagenforschung, die Staatsableitung sowie die Untersuchung der revolutionstheoretischen Implikationen der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Dabei wird gezeigt, dass in einem noch keineswegs abgeschlossenen Forschungsprozess die Umrisse einer bei Marx angelegten Theorie erkennbar werden, die wichtige Impulse zum Verständnis der modernen Reichtums- und Herrschaftsformen geben kann und in vielem geradezu das Gegenteil von dem zeigt, was man von Marx in marxistischen wie nicht-marxistischen Kreisen zu wissen glaubte. (shrink)