Reading list

Finance and Economics: Verso Student Reading

Our selected reading on Finance and Economics for the academic year ahead!

Verso Books22 August 2023

Finance and Economics: Verso Student Reading

The power of money and finance dominates our world, but mainstream economics' only offer is defenses of capitalism. What about an economics that shows how the market lets capitalists exploit the working class? Here we present a list of books that challenge the mainstream neoliberal consensus and offer powerful alternative models in contemporary economics.

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See all our recommended Student Reading here.

Mute Compulsion

by Søren Mau

Despite insoluble contradictions, intense volatility and fierce resistance, the crisis-ridden capitalism of the 21st century lingers on. To understand capital’s paradoxical expansion and entrenchme...

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...

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...

Reading Capital

by Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancière

Translated by Ben Brewster and David Fernbach

Originally published in 1965, Reading Capital is a landmark of French thought and radical theory, reconstructing Western Marxism from its foundations. Louis Althusser, the French Marxist philosophe...

Revolutionary Mathematics

by Justin Joque

Our finances, politics, media, opportunities, information, shopping and knowledge production are mediated through algorithms and their statistical approaches to knowledge; increasingly, these metho...

Democratizing Finance

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...

Levers of Power

by Tarun Banerjee, Michael Schwartz and Kevin A. Young

It’s no secret that the 1%—the business elite that commands the largest corporations and the connected network of public and private institutions—exercise enormous control over the US government. W...

The Imperial Mode of Living

by Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen

With the concept of the Imperial Mode of Living, Brand and Wissen highlight the fact that capitalism implies uneven development as well as a constant and accelerating universalisation of a Western ...

Money

by Michel Aglietta

Translated by David Broder

As the financial crisis reached its climax in September 2008, the most important figure on the planet was Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. The whole financial system was collapsing, without a...

Critical Encounters

by Wolfgang Streeck

From the acclaimed author of How Will Capitalism End? comes an omnibus of long-form critical essays engaging with leading economists and thinkers. Critical Encounters draws on Wolfgang Streeck’s in...

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...

Buying Time

by Wolfgang Streeck

The financial and economic crisis that began in 2008 still has the world on tenterhooks. The gravity of the situation is matched by a general paucity of understanding about what is happening and ho...

How Will Capitalism End?

by Wolfgang Streeck

After years of ill health, capitalism is now in a critical condition. Growth has given way to stagnation; inequality is leading to instability; and confidence in the money economy has all but evapo...

Post-Growth Living

by Kate Soper

The reality of runaway climate change is inextricably linked with the mass consumerist, capitalist society in which we live. And the cult of endless growth, and endless consumption of cheap disposa...

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...

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...

Nine Lives of Neoliberalism

Edited by Philip Mirowski, Dieter Plehwe and Quinn Slobodian

Neoliberalism is dead. Again. After the election of Trump and the victory of Brexit in 2016, many diagnosed the demise of the ideology of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Augusto Pinochet, and the...

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste

by Philip Mirowski

At the onset of the Great Recession, as house prices sank and joblessness soared, many commentators thought that neoliberalism itself was in its death throes. And yet it seems that—post-apocalypse—...

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 Limits to Capital

by David Harvey

Now a classic of Marxian economics, The Limits to Capital provides one of the best theoretical guides to the history and geography of capitalist development. In this edition, Harvey updates his cla...

Spaces of Global Capitalism

by David Harvey

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 economic fortunes se...

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...

The New Spirit of Capitalism

by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello

Translated by Gregory Elliott

In this major work, sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello go to the heart of the changes in contemporary capitalism. Via an unprecedented analysis of the latest management texts that have fo...

The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born

by Nancy Fraser

Across the globe politics as usual are being rejected and faith in neoliberalism is fracturing beyond repair. Leading political theorist Nancy Fraser, in conversation with Jacobin publisher Bhaskar...

Historical Capitalism

by Immanuel Wallerstein

In this short, highly readable book, the master of world-systems theory provides a succinct anatomy of capitalism over the past five hundred years. Considering the way capitalism has changed and ev...

Never Ending Nightmare

by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval

How do we explain the strange survival of the forcesresponsible for the 2008 economic crisis, one of the worst since 1929? How do we explain the fact that neoliberalism has emerged from the crisis...

The Morals of the Market

by Jessica Whyte

Drawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, Jessica Whyte uncovers the place of human rights in neoliberal attempts to develop a moral framewo...

The Making of Global Capitalism

by Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch

The all-encompassing embrace of world capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century was generally attributed to the superiority of competitive markets. Globalization had appeared to be ...

The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume I

by Rosa Luxemburg

Edited by Peter Hudis

Translated by David Fernbach, Joseph Fracchia and George Shriver

This first volume in Rosa Luxemburg’s Complete Works, entitled Economic Writings 1, contains some of Luxemburg’s most important statements on the globalization of capital, wage labor, imperialism, ...

In the Long Run We Are All Dead

by Geoff Mann

In the ruins of the 2007–2008 financial crisis, progressives the world over clamoured to resurrect the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes. The crisis seemed to expose the disaster of small-stat...

Thomas Piketty's 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century'

by Stephan Kauffmann and Ingo Stützle

Translated by Alexander Locascio

US Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman described Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century as “perhaps the most important book of the last decade”. It has sparked major international debates...

The Knowledge Economy

by Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Adam Smith and Karl Marx recognized that the best way to understand the economy is to study the most advanced practice of production. Today that practice is no longer conventional manufacturing: it...

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

by Walter Rodney

Foreword by Angela Davis

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism. In this classic book, R...

Sinews of War and Trade

by Laleh Khalili

On the map of global trade, China is now the factory of the world. A parade of ships full of raw commodities—iron ore, coal, oil—arrive in its ports, and fleets of container ships leave with manufa...

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...

Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology

by André Gorz

Translated by Chris Turner

In this major new book, Andre Gorz expands on the political implications of his prescient and influential Paths to Paradise and Critique of Economic Reason. Against the background of technological ...

Fossil Capital

by Andreas Malm

The more we know about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we burn. How did we end up in this mess?In this masterful new history, Andreas Malm claims it all began...

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...

The Last Neoliberal

by Bruno Amable and Stefano Palombarini

This book analyses the French political crisis, which has entered its most acute phase in more than thirty years with the break-up of traditional left and right social blocs. Governing parties have...

The Cost of Living Crisis

by Costas Lapavitsas, James Meadway and Doug Nicholls

We are living through a cost of living crisis, with interest rate hikes and the prices of everyday consumables and energy bills sky-rocketing. Why is this happening? Sometimes we are told that wage...

Alternatives to Capitalism

by Robin Hahnel and Erik Olin Wright

What would a viable free and democratic society look like? Poverty, exploitation, instability, hierarchy, subordination, environmental exhaustion, radical inequalities of wealth and power—it is not...

Value

Edited by Diane Elson

This influential collection of essays focuses on the elusive concept of “value,” and aims to answer the question “Why is Marx’s theory of value so important?” Aboo Aumeeruddy and Ramon Tortajada ...

The State of Capitalism

by The EReNSEP Writing Collective and Costas Lapavitsas

The health emergency that broke out in 2020 is a landmark event in the development of capitalism, confirming the underlying change signalled by the Great Crisis of 2007-9. The Pandemic Crisis has c...

Marx on Money

by Suzanne de Brunhoff

The republication of Suzanne de Brunhoff’s classic investigation into Karl Marx’s conception of “the money commodity” shines light on commodities and their fetishism. The investigation of money a...

A Theory of Capitalist Regulation

by Michel Aglietta

Translated by David Fernbach

Aglietta's path-breaking book is the first attempt at a rigorous historical theory of the whole development of US capitalism, from the Civil War to the Carter presidency. A major document of the "R...

The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems

by Nancy Folbre

Nine Lives of Neoliberalism

Edited by Philip Mirowski, Dieter Plehwe and Quinn Slobodian

Rentier Capitalism

by Brett Christophers

The Limits to Capital

by David Harvey

Spaces of Global Capitalism

by David Harvey

Equal Shares

by John E. Roemer

Contributions by Richard Arneson, Fred Block, Harry Brighouse, Michael Burawoy, Joshua Cohen, Nancy Folbre, Andrew Levine, Mieke Meurs, Louis Putterman, Joel Rogers, Debra Satz, Julius Sensat, William Simon, Frank Thompson and Thomas E. Weisskopf

Edited by Erik Olin Wright

“Nice idea, but it doesn’t work in practice.” How often have socialists had this claim thrown back at them? And now, after the events of 1989, many of the Left are openly wondering what a defensibl...

The Origin of Capitalism

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

The Production of Money

by Ann Pettifor

The New Spirit of Capitalism

by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello

Translated by Gregory Elliott

The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born

by Nancy Fraser

Prisoners of the American Dream

by Mike Davis

Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis’s brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world’s most industriall...

Historical Capitalism

by Immanuel Wallerstein

How Will Capitalism End?

by Wolfgang Streeck

Never Ending Nightmare

by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval

How do we explain the strange survival of the forcesresponsible for the 2008 economic crisis, one of the worst since 1929? How do we explain the fact that neoliberalism has emerged from the crisis...

Money

by Michel Aglietta

Translated by David Broder

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste

by Philip Mirowski

The Morals of the Market

by Jessica Whyte

The Making of Global Capitalism

by Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch

The all-encompassing embrace of world capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century was generally attributed to the superiority of competitive markets. Globalization had appeared to be ...

The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg, Volume I

by Rosa Luxemburg

Edited by Peter Hudis

Translated by David Fernbach, Joseph Fracchia and George Shriver