Space Capitalism

This book compares and contrasts the motivations, morality, and effectiveness of space exploration when pursued by private entrepreneurs as opposed to government. The authors advocate market-driven, private initiatives take the lead through enhanced competition and significant resources that can be allocated to the exploration and exploitation of outer space. Space travel and colonisation is analysed through the prism of economic freedom and laissez faire capitalism, in a unique and accessible book.

This book compares and contrasts the motivations, morality, and effectiveness of space exploration when pursued by private entrepreneurs as opposed to government. The authors advocate market-driven, private initiatives take the lead through enhanced competition and significant resources that can be allocated to the exploration and exploitation of outer space. Space travel and colonisation is analysed through the prism of economic freedom and laissez faire capitalism, in a unique and accessible book.

Fiscal crises have cascaded across much of the developing world with devastating results, from Mexico to Indonesia, Russia and Argentina. The extreme volatility in contemporary political economic fortunes seems to mock our best efforts to understand the forces that drive development in the world economy. David Harvey is the single most important geographer writing today and a leading social theorist of our age, offering a comprehensive critique of contemporary capitalism. In this fascinating book, he shows the way forward for just such an understanding, enlarging upon the key themes in his recent work: the development of neoliberalism, the spread of inequalities across the globe, and ‘space’ as a key theoretical concept. Both a major declaration of a new research programme and a concise introduction to David Harvey’s central concerns, this book will be essential reading for scholars and students across the humanities and social sciences.

The last several decades have witnessed major restructurings--economic, political, and cultural--in the international arena. The depth and scope of these changes have prompted anthropologists to rethink many of their most basic assumptions, to problematize issues that have long gone unexamined, and to grapple with new and unique problems. Doing so has left the discipline profoundly unsettled. Existing standards of scholarship and research methodologies have come under attack, key conceptual categories have been called into question, and truths once considered secure have been subjected to severe scrutiny and even ridicule. Seizing upon the opportunity afforded by the contemporary conjuncture of disciplinary crisis and redefinition, this book raises questions about two interrelated aspects of historical process and academic production. The volume contributes to ongoing debates about the degree to which the developments of recent decades represent the advent of a new historical era, a rupture with the past that requires new conceptualizations and logics in order to be understood. In confronting this question, the contributors to this volume have assembled a range of materials that place the present period of reconstruction in the context of a broader history and geography of other, related restructurings. Locating Capitalism in Time and Space also raises questions about the degree to which the scholarship of recent decades represents a qualitative break with that of the past. At issue here is whether one understands the history of academic production as a linear process of intellectual growth punctuated by major breakthroughs in understanding, or as a political process structured by the same kinds of inequalities and struggles that characterize the social worlds that are the object of anthropological analysis.

Anyone interested in the rise of American corporate capitalism should look to the streets of Baltimore. There, in 1827, citizens launched a bold new venture: a “rail-road” that would link their city with the fertile Ohio River Valley. They dubbed this company the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O), and they conceived of it as a public undertaking—an urban improvement, albeit one that would stretch hundreds of miles beyond the city limits. Steam City tells the story of corporate capitalism starting from the street and moving outward, looking at how the rise of the railroad altered the fabric of everyday life in the United States. The B&O’s founders believed that their new line would remap American economic geography, but no one imagined that the railroad would also dramatically reshape the spaces of its terminal city. As railroad executives wrangled with city officials over their use of urban space, they formulated new ideas about the boundaries between public good and private profit. Ultimately, they reinvented the B&O as a private enterprise, unmoored to its home city. This bold reconception had implications not only for the people of Baltimore, but for the railroad industry as a whole. As David Schley shows here, privatizing the B&O helped set the stage for the rise of the corporation as a major force in the post-Civil War economy. ?Steam City examines how the birth and spread of the American railroad—which brought rapid communications, fossil fuels, and new modes of corporate organization to the city—changed how people worked, where they lived, even how they crossed the street. As Schley makes clear, we still live with the consequences of this spatial and economic order today.

Representing an innovative approach to the analysis of the economic geography of capitalism, this stimulating book develops an analytical political economic framework. Part 1 provides an introductory overvi9ew fo some of the fundamental debates about price, profits and value in economics which underlie the analytical political economy approach. Part 2 analyzes the special role of space and transportation in commodity production and the spatial organization of the economy that this implies. Parts 3 and 4 examine the conflicting goals and actions of different social clases and individuals and how these are complicated by space, concluding with a detailed analysis of capitalists’ strategiesas they cope with uncertainty and disequilibrium.

Since the earliest development of states, groups of people escaped or were exiled. As capitalism developed, people tried to escape capitalist constraints connected with state control. This powerful book gives voice to three communities living at the edges of capitalism: Cossacks on the Don River in Russia; Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico; and prisoners in long-term isolation since the 1970s. Inspired by their experiences visiting Cossacks, living with the Zapatistas, and developing connections and relationships with prisoners and ex-prisoners, Andrej Grubacic and Denis O’Hearn present a uniquely sweeping, historical, and systematic study of exilic communities engaged in mutual aid. Following the tradition of Peter Kropotkin, Pierre Clastres, James Scott, Fernand Braudel and Imanuel Wallerstein, this study examines the full historical and contemporary possibilities for establishing self-governing communities at the edges of the capitalist world-system, considering the historical forces that often militate against those who try to practice mutual aid in the face of state power and capitalist incursion.

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.

This book is an original contribution to literary geography and commentaries on the work of David Ireland. It plots the relationship between the spaces and places of 1970s Australian capitalism as it evolves through Ireland’s 1971 Miles Franklin prize-winning novel The Unknown Industrial Prisoner. In particular, the book theorises the relationship between space and place in literature through two highly innovative arguments: a focus on the spatial unconscious as a means to assess and track the spatiality of capitalism in the novel form; and the articulation of a regime of space through the perceived, conceived and lived constitution of space. Drawing together concepts from radical geography and structural Marxist literary theory, it explores the dominance of the regime of abstract space in the Australian context. The text also examines the nature and possibilities of place-based strategies of resistance, and concludes by suggesting opportunities for future research and plotting the ways in which The Unknown Industrial Prisoner continues to speak to contemporary Australia.

For the first time in history, the globe is dominated by one economic system. Capitalism prevails because it delivers prosperity and meets desires for autonomy. But it also is unstable and morally defective. Surveying the varieties and futures of capitalism, Branko Milanovic offers creative solutions to improve a system that isn’t going anywhere.