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Beach better have my money!

Our Verso Economics Summer Reading!

Verso Books13 July 2023

Why do asset managers own the world? How do banks create money for the few? And how do we bring about a new era of democratic ownership? These books attempt to answer these questions and more!

See ALL our Summer Reading here.

Don't forget: Verso Book Club members get 50% all book purchases year round, plus other great benefits. Sign up today and get your first month free!

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Owning the Future

by Adrienne Buller and Mathew Lawrence

The question of ownership is the critical fault line of our times. During the pandemic this issue has only become more divisive. Since March 2020 we have witnessed the extraordinary growth of asset...

Our Lives in Their Portfolios

by Brett Christophers

Banks have taken a backseat since the global financial crisis over a decade ago. Today, our new financial masters are asset managers, like Blackstone and BlackRock. And they don't just own financia...

The Origin of Capitalism

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

In The Origin of Capitalism, a now-classic work of history, Ellen Meiksins Wood offers readers a clear and accessible introduction to the theories and debates concerning the birth of capitalism, im...

Democratizing Finance

Contributions by Selen Güler, Mark Igra, Michael A. McCarthy, Mary Mellor, Lenore Palladino, Sarah Quinn, William H. Simon and David M. Woodruff

Edited by Fred Block and Robert Hockett

What if our financial system were organized to the benefit of the many rather than simply empowering the few? Robert Hockett and Fred Block argue that an entirely different financial system is both...

Keystroke Capitalism

by Aaron Sahr

Translated by Sharon Howe

Contemporary capitalism produces more and more money, debt, and inequality. These three trends have a common cause: the privilege of private banks to create money by means of accounting - by the st...

The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems

by Nancy Folbre

Why do patriarchal systems survive? In this groundbreaking work of feminist theory, Nancy Folbre examines the contradictory effects of capitalist development. She explains why the work of caring fo...

Capitalism

by Nancy Fraser

Capitalism, by the twenty-first century, has brought us an era of escalating, overlapping crisis - ecological, political, social - which we may not survive. In this brilliant, wide-ranging conversa...

Economics for the Many

Edited by John McDonnell

Economics for the Many, edited and with an introduction by Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer John McDonnell, features contributions from the participants in his New Economics conferences, includin...

Confronting Capitalism

by Vivek Chibber

Why is our society so unequal? Why, despite their small numbers, do the rich dominate policy and politics even in democratic countries? Why is it often difficult for working people to organize arou...

A Companion to Marx's Grundrisse

by David Harvey

When leading scholar of Marx, Roman Rosdolsky, first encountered the virtually unknown text of Marx's Grundrisse - his preparatory work for his masterpiece Das Capital - in the 1950s in New York Pu...

A Companion To Marx's Capital

by David Harvey

In recent years, we have witnessed a surge of interest in Marx’s work in the effort to understand the origins of our current predicament. For nearly forty years, David Harvey has written and lectur...

Capital Is Dead

by McKenzie Wark

In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that the all-pervasive presence of data in our networked society has given rise to a new mode of production, one not ruled over by capit...

Rentier Capitalism

by Brett Christophers

In this landmark book, the author of The New Enclosure provides a forensic examination and sweeping critique of early-twenty-first-century capitalism. Brett Christophers styles this as ‘rentier cap...

The Production of Money

by Ann Pettifor

According to leading economist Ann Pettifor, one of the few people to predict the 2008 financial crisis, money is not a commodity but a promise. This radical reconsideration of the power of money m...

Fictitious Capital

by Cédric Durand

Translated by David Broder

The 2007–08 credit crisis and the long recession that followed brutally exposed the economic and social costs of financialization. Understanding what lay behind these events, the rise of “fictitiou...

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