Showing papers on "Capitalism published in 2011"

The third industrial revolution : how lateral power is transforming energy, the economy, and the world

Abstract: Introduction PART I: THE THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION The Real Economic Crisis Everyone Missed A New Narrative Turning Theory to Practice PART II: LATERAL POWER Distributed Capitalism Beyond Right and Left From Globalization to Continentalization PART III: THE COLLABORATIVE AGE Retiring Adam Smith A Classroom Makeover Morphing from the Industrial to the Collaborative Era

Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa

Abstract: As nation-states in the Northern Hemisphere experience economic crisis, political corruption and racial tension, it seems as though they might be 'evolving' into the kind of societies normally associated with the 'Global South'. Anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff draw on their long experience of living in Africa to address a range of familiar themes - democracy, national borders, labour and capital and multiculturalism. They consider how we might understand these issues by using theory developed in the Global South. Challenging our ideas about 'developed' and 'developing' nations, Theory from the South provides new insights into key problems of our time.

The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City

Abstract: The book, the result of six years of activism and research into school and urban reform in Chicago, begins with a brief overview of neoliberalism. Following this, the first chapter presents Lipman’s central argument: neoliberal urban and education policies, supported and informed by White supremacist ideologies, displace African American and Latino/a working class communities as part of a project to attract urban investment. The second chapter expands upon this claim, linking post-Fordist global capitalism and White supremacy to school reform and urban policies in Chicago. The third chapter presents an analysis of the Chicago Public School Board’s Renaissance 2010 policy document and exposition of how policy actors use it together with federal education policies to further the marketization and disinvestment of public education in Chicago. In the fourth chapter, Lipman critiques mixed income housing and schooling policies and the discourses that underpin both while building further support for her claim that urban reform and school reform are part of the same neoliberal urban initiative. She finds that while framed in egalitarian rhetoric, mixed-income urban development and education policies are implicitly supported by racist discourses that disavow the structural problems facing African American and Latino/a working class communities. Moreover, the recodification of poverty as a cultural problem devalues these communities as spaces of intellectual and cultural production

Critical Perspectives on Consumers' Role as 'Producers': Broadening the Debate on Value Co-Creation in Marketing Processes

Abstract: This special issue continues the critical engagement with the popular discourses of Prahalad’s value co-creation paradigm and Vargo and Lusch’s service-dominant logic of marketing. The intensity of the debate among marketing scholars over these two marketing and management concepts demonstrates how much is at stake – conceptually and politically – when the roles of consumer and producer become blurred. Economic concepts of value, ownership, consumption, and production need to be redefined, and political ideas of the relationship between the social and the economic require addressing in the age of cognitive, or as we call it, collaborative capitalism. In addition to these broad theoretical challenges, the contributions in this issue zoom in on what arguably constitutes the central question for our specific field: What are the implications of a collaborative capitalism for understanding the place of marketing techniques in value creation? As with all good scholarship, the essays in this issue do not provide definitive answers but instead lead to a more elaborate set of questions. By doing so, they broaden the critical engagement with value co-creation in marketing.

A Common Neoliberal Trajectory The Transformation of Industrial Relations in Advanced Capitalism

Abstract: Based on quantitative indicators for fifteen advanced countries between 1974 and 2005, and case studies of France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Ireland, this article analyzes the trajectory of institutional change in the industrial relations systems of advanced capitalist societies, with a focus on Western Europe. In contrast to current comparative political economy scholarship, which emphasizes the resilience of national institutions to common challenges and trends, it argues that despite a surface resilience of distinct national sets, all countries have been transformed in a neoliberal direction. Neoliberal transformation manifests itself not just as institutional deregulation but also as institutional conversion, as the functions associated with existing institutional forms change in a convergent direction. A key example is the institution of centralized bargaining, once the linchpin of an alternative, redistributive and egalitarian, model of negotiated capitalism, which has been res...

Critical perspectives on consumers' role as 'producers': Broadening the debate on value co-creation in marketing processes.

Abstract: This special issue continues the critical engagement with the popular discourses of Prahalad’s value co-creation paradigm and Vargo and Lusch’s service-dominant logic of marketing. The intensity of the debate among marketing scholars over these two marketing and management concepts demonstrates how much is at stake — conceptually and politically — when the roles of consumer and producer become blurred. Economic concepts of value, ownership, consumption, and production need to be redefined, and political ideas of the relationship between the social and the economic require addressing in the age of cognitive, or as we call it, collaborative capitalism. In addition to these broad theoretical challenges, the contributions in this issue zoom in on what arguably constitutes the central question for our specific field: What are the implications of a collaborative capitalism for understanding the place of marketing techniques in value creation? As with all good scholarship, the essays in this issue do not provide...

Cognitive Capitalism The Effect of Cognitive Ability on Wealth, as Mediated Through Scientific Achievement and Economic Freedom

Abstract: Traditional economic theories stress the relevance of political, institutional, geographic, and historical factors for economic growth. In contrast, human-capital theories suggest that peoples’ competences, mediated by technological progress, are the deciding factor in a nation’s wealth. Using three large-scale assessments, we calculated cognitive-competence sums for the mean and for upper- and lower-level groups for 90 countries and compared the influence of each group’s intellectual ability on gross domestic product. In our cross-national analyses, we applied different statistical methods (path analyses, bootstrapping) and measures developed by different research groups to various country samples and historical periods. Our results underscore the decisive relevance of cognitive ability—particularly of an intellectual class with high cognitive ability and accomplishments in science, technology, engineering, and math—for national wealth. Furthermore, this group’s cognitive ability predicts the quality of economic and political institutions, which further determines the economic affluence of the nation. Cognitive resources enable the evolution of capitalism and the rise of wealth.

Why Marx Was Right

Abstract: One of the foremost Marxist critics of his generation forcefully argues against Marx's irrelevancy In this combative, controversial book, Terry Eagleton takes issue with the prejudice that Marxism is dead and done with. Taking ten of the most common objections to Marxism-that it leads to political tyranny, that it reduces everything to the economic, that it is a form of historical determinism, and so on-he demonstrates in each case what a woeful travesty of Marx's own thought these assumptions are. In a world in which capitalism has been shaken to its roots by some major crises, Why Marx Was Right is as urgent and timely as it is brave and candid. Written with Eagleton's familiar wit, humor, and clarity, it will attract an audience far beyond the confines of academia.

Commodity Chains and the Uneven Geographies of Global Capitalism: A Disarticulations Perspective

Abstract: perspective Over the course of the last decade, the commodity chain construct has informed many studies of international trade and production networks in sociology, geography, history, and, more recently, anthropology. The interdisciplinary appeal of the chain heuristic lies in its ability to ground abstract-prone analysis of economic globalization in the everyday practices of firms, workers, households, states, and consumers. The commodity chain concept was developed by Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein in the late 1970s to differentiate their understanding of capitalism's territorial scope from methodologically nationalist approaches to economic change. Instead of understanding economic development as a sequential process whereby national markets evolve in the direction of expanded foreign trade, the authors suggested `̀ [starting] with a radically different presumption. Let us conceive of something we shall call, for want of a better conventional term, c̀ommodity chains.' What we mean by such chains is the following: take an ultimate consumable item and trace back the set of inputs that culminated in this item, including prior transformations, the raw materials, the transportation mechanisms, the labor input into each of the material processes, the food inputs into the labor. This linked set of processes we call a commodity chain. If the ultimate consumable were, say, clothing, the chain would include the manufacture of the cloth, the yarn, etc, the cultivation of the cotton, as well as the reproduction of the labor forces involved in these productive activities'' (1977, page 128). For Hopkins and Wallerstein a final commodity is the outcome of linked processes connecting actors and activities across space; by studying the processes constituting a particular commodity chain, it is possible to get analytical purchase on the complex and concrete determinations of the global economy. World-systems theorists mobilized the chain construct to reveal the emergence of an international division of labor incorporating core and peripheral countries alike into a global capitalist economy. Later iterations, including Gereffi's global commodity chains (GCC) framework (Gereffi and Korzeniewicz, 1994) and the global value chains (GVC) approach (Gereffi et al, 2005; Gibbon and Ponte, 2005), have shifted from the long-range, macrohistorical perspective of world-systems theory to a more industry-centred and firm-centered model of organizational analysis.(1) In reaction to this recent turn, several scholars sympathetic to the overall thrust of the commodity chain project have called for the need to `embed', `territorialize', or `spatialize' studies of transnational commodity production (Bair, 2005; Dicken et al, 2001; Dussel Peters, 2008). As evident from these disparate terms, these critiques do not represent a coherent theoretical agenda; rather they indicate a shared skepticism about the influence of microsocial network analysis and transaction cost economics on the study of commodity cum value chains (see Bair, 2005). Just as the original commodity chain framework burst disciplinary bounds, so too has the ambit of its critique. Economic geographers argue that the empirical focus on Guest editorial Environment and Planning A 2011, volume 43, pages 988 ^ 997

Morals and politics in the ideology of neo-liberalism

Abstract: The aim of this article is to analyse the links between the moral and political aspects of neo-liberal ideology and how appeals to certain ethics may legitimate the establishment of the institutions of neo-liberal capitalism through political action. It presents the original characteristics of neo-liberal ideology by emphasizing how it differs from classical liberalism. Although pressures and contradictions are inherent in neo-liberalism, it is possible to single out some of its most original characteristics which are far more vital to the analysis of capitalism than vague and commonplace notions such as "market fundamentalism". It also describes those moral aspects of neo-liberalism which differ from traditional morals and place the ethos of competitiveness at the centre of social life. It shows how the morals of neo-liberalism are linked to neo-liberal politics and policies. Freed in part from public sovereignty, neo-liberal politics must be guided by a moral imperative linked to competition. This paper reveals the consequences of these morals and politics for the definition of social policy. A contract based on reciprocity between the individual and society is substituted for collective rights to social protection and redistribution. This change in perspective is particularly important for the social policy advocated by the "modern" left.

Race, Charter Schools, and Conscious Capitalism: On the Spatial Politics of Whiteness as Property (and the Unconscionable Assault on Black New Orleans)

Abstract: In this article, Kristen L. Buras examines educational policy formation in New Orleans and the racial, economic, and spatial dynamics shaping the city's reconstruction since 2005. More specifically, Buras draws on the critical theories of whiteness as property, accumulation by dispossession, and urban space economy to describe the strategic assault on black communities by education entrepreneurs. Based on data collected from an array of stakeholders on the ground, she argues that policy actors at the federal, state, and local levels have contributed to a process of privatization and an inequitable racial-spatial redistribution of resources while acting under the banner of "conscious capitalism." She challenges the market-based reforms currently offered as a panacea for education in New Orleans, particularly charter schools, and instead offers principles of educational reform rooted in a more democratic and critically conscious tradition.

The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis

Abstract: This short theoretical paper elucidates a plausible theory about the Global Financial Crisis and the role of senior financial corporate directors in that crisis. The paper presents a theory of the Global Financial Crisis which argues that psychopaths working in corporations and in financial corporations, in particular, have had a major part in causing the crisis. This paper is thus a very short theoretical paper but is one that may be very important to the future of capitalism because it discusses significant ways in which Corporate Psychopaths may have acted recently, to the detriment of many. Further research into this theory is called for.

Capitalism in China: A Centrally Managed Capitalism (CMC) and Its Future

Abstract: While China continues to develop capitalistic capacities, the party-state has increasingly tightened control of the economy and synchronized political and economic stratification – a tendency towards a centrally managed capitalism Under centrally managed capitalism, the party-state commands the economy by controlling personnel, organizations, and capital in both political and economic arenas At the same time, it delegates fiscal and administrative authorities to multiple and diversely formed corporations to compete in the marketplace I further speculate on future ideological alternatives: a western-style democracy, a mature-stage socialism, or an enlightened authoritarianism – Xiaokang (小康 moderate prosperity or well-off society) After eliminating or casting doubt on the former two, I argue that a two-step transformation towards Xiaokang is under way In the first step, the party-state leadership gradually decouples its position from Marxist ideology of communism and socialism, and moves towards the maintenance of economic growth and social order The second step then allows the legitimacy of party rule to be based on indigenous Confucian ideology that emphasizes enlightened leaders, moral institutions, and social relations (ie, Xiaokang) Finally, I explore the feasibility and paths towards an indigenous ideology of democracy (Datong: 大同 – universal harmony)

‘Free Us Up So We Can Be Responsible!’ The Co-Evolution of Corporate Social Responsibility and Neo-Liberalism in the UK, 1977-2010

Abstract: This article challenges the notion that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is incompatible with neo-liberalism It argues that CSR is not a countervailing force that follows neo-liberal market exposure Instead of re-embedding global liberalism, CSR complements liberalization and substitutes for institutionalized social solidarity Evidence from the UK, one of the world’s leading jurisdictions for responsible business, supports these claims In Britain during the past 30 years, neo-liberalism and CSR have co-evolved CSR has been a quid pro quo for lighter regulation; it has compensated for some of the social dislocations that result from unfettering markets, thereby legitimating business during the ‘unleashing’ of capitalism, and it appeals to moral sensibilities, justifying and legitimating business leaders in a way that instrumental rationality alone cannot The paper draws on original sources to shed light on the origins and growth of Business in the Community, one of the world’s leading business-led CSR coalitions, since the 1970s

What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism A Citizen's Guide to Capitalism and the Environment

Abstract: Praise for Foster and Magdoff s The Great Financial Crisis In this timely and thorough analysis of the current financial crisis, Foster and Magdoff explore its roots and the radical changes that might be undertaken in response. . . . This book makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing examination of our current debt crisis, one that deserves our full attention. Publishers WeeklyThere is a growing consensus that the planet is heading toward environmental catastrophe: climate change, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, global freshwater use, loss of biodiversity, and chemical pollution all threaten our future unless we act. What is less clear is how humanity should respond. The contemporary environmental movement is the site of many competing plans and prescriptions, and composed of a diverse set of actors, from militant activists to corporate chief executives.This short, readable book is a sharply argued manifesto for those environmentalists who reject schemes of green capitalism or piecemeal reform. Environmental and economic scholars Magdoff and Foster contend that the struggle to reverse ecological degradation requires a firm grasp of economic reality. Going further, they argue that efforts to reform capitalism along environmental lines or rely solely on new technology to avert catastrophe misses the point. The main cause of the looming environmental disaster is the driving logic of the system itself, and those in power no matter how green are incapable of making the changes that are necessary.What Every Environmentalist Needs To Know about Capitalism tackles the two largest issues of our time, the ecological crisis and the faltering capitalist economy, in a way that is thorough, accessible, and sure to provoke debate in the environmental movement."

The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East

Abstract: In the year 1000, the economy of the Middle East was at least as advanced as that of Europe But by 1800, the region had fallen dramatically behind--in living standards, technology, and economic institutions In short, the Middle East had failed to modernize economically as the West surged ahead What caused this long divergence? And why does the Middle East remain drastically underdeveloped compared to the West? In The Long Divergence, one of the world's leading experts on Islamic economic institutions and the economy of the Middle East provides a new answer to these long-debated questions Timur Kuran argues that what slowed the economic development of the Middle East was not colonialism or geography, still less Muslim attitudes or some incompatibility between Islam and capitalism Rather, starting around the tenth century, Islamic legal institutions, which had benefitted the Middle Eastern economy in the early centuries of Islam, began to act as a drag on development by slowing or blocking the emergence of central features of modern economic life--including private capital accumulation, corporations, large-scale production, and impersonal exchange By the nineteenth century, modern economic institutions began to be transplanted to the Middle East, but its economy has not caught up And there is no quick fix today Low trust, rampant corruption, and weak civil societies--all characteristic of the region's economies today and all legacies of its economic history--will take generations to overcome The Long Divergence opens up a frank and honest debate on a crucial issue that even some of the most ardent secularists in the Muslim world have hesitated to discuss

Red Capitalism: The Fragile Financial Foundation of China's Extraordinary Rise

Abstract: Chapter 1: "One short nap took me all the way back to before 1949". 1978-2008: 30 years of Opening. 1992-2005: 13 years of Reform. 2005: the end of Reform. China is a family business. Chapter 2: China's fortress banking system. Banks are China's financial system. Crisis and bank reform, 1994 and 1998. China's fortress banking system in 2009. The sudden thirst for capital and cash dividends, 2010. Chapter 3: The fragile fortress. The foundation of China's banking machine. Bad bank performance and its implications, 2009. The "perpetual put" option to PBOC. China's new post-Lehman Brothers banking model. Implications. Chapter 4: China's captive bond market. Why does China have a bond market? Yield curves in China. The base of the Pyramid: "protecting" household depositors. Chapter 5: The struggle over China's bond markets. China Development Bank, the Ministry of Finance and the Big 4 Banks. People's Bank of China, NDRC and CSRC: corporate bonds. Local governments unleashed. China Investment Corporation: the lynchpin of China's financial system. Cycles in China's financial markets. Chapter 6: Western finance, SOE reform and China's stock markets. Why does China have stock markets? What the stock markets gave China. Chapter 7: The National Team is China's government. The National Team, the Organization Department, Huijin and SASAC. Chinese stock markets: Who benefits? A casino or a success or both? Implications. Chapter 8: The Forbidden City. The Emperor of Finance. Behind the vermillion walls. Red capitalism means leverage. The Emperor's new financial playthings. Appendices.

Sustaining Tourism, Sustaining Capitalism? The Tourism Industry's Role in Global Capitalist Expansion

Abstract: This article contends that international tourism may be one important means by which the capitalist world-economy seeks to sustain itself in the face of inherent contradictions that threaten its long-term survival. Marxist critics have long identified an inevitable tendency towards crises of overproduction (over-accumulation) within the capitalist system, provoked by what Marx termed the central contradiction between imperatives of production and consumption. Subsequent analysts have highlighted a variety of so-called ‘fixes’ by which overproduction crises can be forestalled through spatial and/or temporal displacement of excess accumulated capital. Building upon this analysis, I outline a number of such fixes intrinsic to the development of the international tourism industry. In addition, I suggest that ecotourism development in particular provides additional fixes for capitalism's so-called ‘second contradiction’ between the imperative of continual growth and finite natural resources. In sum, I...

Geographical political economy

Abstract: The line of scholarship dominating Anglophone geographers’ approaches to studying economic geography since 1980 can be characterized as geographical political economy; an approach prioritizing commodity production over market exchange. Here the spatialities of capitalism co-evolve with its economic processes and economic, political, cultural and biophysical processes are co-implicated with one another. Disequilibrium is normal and space/time an emergent feature. This approach is very different from geographical economics. Mutual engagement is desirable and most easily approached via the geographical sub-field of regional political economy. Regional political economy demonstrates that capitalism’s spatialities increase agents’ uncertainty and the likelihood of unintended consequences, that microfoundations are inadequate, and that capitalism is generative of economic inequality and uneven geographical development. The scope of geographical political economy is illustrated by the geography of commodity production.

Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Dissecting the Labouring Body: Frankenstein, Political Anatomy and the Rise of Capitalism 'Save my body from the surgeons' The culture of dissection: anatomy, colonisation and social order Political anatomy, wage-labour and destruction of the English commons Anatomy and the corpse-economy Monsters of rebellion Jacobins, Irishmen and Luddites: rebel-monsters in the age of Frankenstein The rights of monsters: horror and the split society 2. Marx's Monsters: Vampire-Capital and the Nightmare-World of Late Capitalism Dialectics and the doubled life of the commodity The spectre of value and the fetishism of commodities 'As if by love possessed': vampire capital and the labouring body Zombie-labour and the 'monstrous outrages' of capital Money: capitalism's second nature 'Self-birthing' capital and the alchemy of money Wild money: the occult economies of late-capitalist globalisation Enron: case-study in the occult economy of late capitalism 'Capital comes into the world dripping in blood from every pore' 3. African Vampires in the Age of Globalisation Kinship and accumulation: from the old witchcraft to the new Zombies, vampires, and spectres of capital: the new occult economies of globalising capitalism African fetishes and the fetishism of commodities The living dead: zombie-labourers in the age of globalisation Vampire-capitalism in Sub-Saharan Africa Bewitched accumulation, famished roads, and the endless toilers of the Earth Conclusion: Ugly Beauty: Monstrous Dreams of Utopia References Index

The biopolitics of food provisioning

Abstract: Beginning with Foucault’s writing on food provisioning in the mercantile period, this paper explores how a moral economy of hunger is gradually replaced by a political economy of food security that promotes market mechanisms as a better protection against scarcity. In Western Europe the emergence of political liberalism and laissez-faire economics substantially shaped how hunger and scarcity were conceptualised and socially managed. Beyond Europe these social forces were manifest in the development of colonial plantations. Here the transformation of non-capitalist social formations into market economies – what Harvey (2003) terms ‘accumulation by dispossession’– was a foundational moment in the development of a global provisioning system that undermined the anti-scarcity strategies of some populations, while ensuring food security for others. The subsequent discovery of the ‘Global South’ hunger, together with the desire to encourage better habits and purer morals among ‘backward’ peoples, created the context in which further curative interventions, designed to consolidate a capitalist food economy, were valorised and maintained. These reflections set up the final part of the paper, where I contextualise recent efforts to present agro-biotechnologies as a pro-welfare and anti-scarcity response. Moving beyond the causes of hunger to explore its strategic function, this analysis highlights how corporate agribusiness – in partnership with the life sciences – is attempting to recondition human, animal and bacterial life in order to quicken the reproduction of capital. I term this new moment in the commercialisation of food systems accumulation by molecularisation. The paper concludes by examining how the corporate management of food folds into biopolitical strategies for managing life, including the lives of the hungry poor who are ‘let die’ as commercial interests supplant human needs.

Ecology, capital, and the nature of our times: accumulation & crisis in the capitalist world-ecology

Abstract: In this essay, I elaborate the possibilities for a unified theory of historical capitalism – one that views the accumulation of capital and the production of nature (humans included!) as dialectically constituted. In this view, the modern world-system is a capitalist world-ecology, a world-historical matrix of human- and extra-human nature premised on endless commodification. The essay is organized in three movements. I begin by arguing for a reading of modernity’s “interdependent master processes” (Tilly) as irreducibly socio-ecological. Capitalism does not develop upon global nature so much as it emerges through the messy and contingent relations of humans with the rest of nature. Second, the paper engages Giovanni Arrighi’s handling of time, space, and accumulation in The Long Twentieth Century. I highlight Arrighi’s arguments for a “structurally variant” capitalism, and the theory of organizational revolutions, as fruitful ways to construct a theory of capitalism as world-ecology. I conclude with a theory of accumulation and its crises as world-ecological process, building out from Marx’s “general law” of underproduction. Historically, capitalism has been shaped by a dialectic of underproduction (too few inputs) and overproduction (too many commodities). Today, capitalism is poised for a re-emergence of underproduction crises, characterized by the insufficient flow of cheap food, fuel, labor, and energy to the productive circuit of capital. Far from the straightforward expression of “overshoot” and “peak everything,” the likely resurgence of underproduction crises is an expression of capitalism’s longue duree tendency to undermine its conditions of reproduction. The world-ecological limit of capital, in other words, is capital itself.

Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States

Abstract: This book analyzes the recent development of Gulf capitalism through to the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis. Situating the Gulf within the evolution of capitalism at a global scale, it presents a novel theoretical interpretation of this important region of the Middle East political economy.

Roepke Lecture in Economic Geography—Crises, Geographic Disruptions and the Uneven Development of Political Responses

Abstract: The current financial crisis may be deeper and more far reaching than earlier ones except the Great Depression, but it fits into an all-too-common pattern of capitalist development experienced over the past 40 years. What can Marxian theory, with its focus on crisis formation and the internal contradictions of capital accumulation, teach us about the nature of capitalist crises, and what can the actual experience of the crisis teach us about Marxian theory? In what ways has the distinctive geographic unfolding of the crisis-all the way from subprime lending in specific locations to disruptions and spatial fixes in patterns of financial, commodity, capital, and labor flows-contributed either to the deepening of the crisis or to its partial resolution? How, finally, can adequate responses to the crisis tendencies of capitalism and the stresses of endless compound growth be articulated in these times? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Great Complacence: Financial Crisis and the Politics of Reform

Abstract: What is the relationship between the financial system and politics? In a democratic system, what kind of control should elected governments have over the financial markets? What policies should be implemented to regulate them? What is the role played by different elites - financial, technocratic, and political - in the operation and regulation of the financial system? And what role should citizens, investors, and savers play? These are some of the questions addressed in this challenging analysis of the particular features of the contemporary capitalist economy in Britain, the USA, and Western Europe. The authors argue that the causes of the financial crisis lay in the bricolage and innovation in financial markets, resulting in long chains and circuits of transactions and instruments that enabled bankers to earn fees, but which did not sufficiently take into account system risk, uncertainty, and unintended consequences. In the wake of the crisis, the authors argue that social scientists, governments, and citizens need to re-engage with the political dimensions of financial markets. This book offers a controversial and accessible exploration of the disorders of our financial capitalism and its justifications. With an innovative emphasis on the economically 'undisclosed' and the political 'mystifying', it combines technical understanding of finance, cultural analysis, and al political account of interests and institutions.