The Capital: A Novel

Author: Robert Menasse
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631495720
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
“A dark comedy of manners packed with urgency” (H. W. Vail, Vanity Fair), The Capital is an instant classic of world literature. A highly inventive novel of ideas written in the rich European tradition, The Capital transports readers to the cobblestoned streets of twenty-first-century Brussels. Chosen as the European Union’s symbolic capital in 1958, this elusive setting has never been examined so intricately in literature. Translated with "zest, pace and wit" (Spectator) by Jamie Bulloch, Robert Menasse's The Capital plays out the effects of a fiercely nationalistic “union.” Recalling the Balzacian conceit of assembling a vast parade of characters whose lives conspire to form a driving central plot, Menasse adapts this technique with modern sensibility to reveal the hastily assembled capital in all of its eccentricities. We meet, among others, Fenia Xenopoulou, a Greek Cypriot recently “promoted” to the Directorate-General for Culture. When tasked with revamping the boring image of the European Commission with the Big Jubilee Project, she endorses her Austrian assistant Martin Sussman’s idea to proclaim Auschwitz as its birthplace—of course, to the horror of the other nation states. Meanwhile, Inspector Émile Brunfaut attempts to solve a gritty murder being suppressed at the highest level; Matek, a Polish hitman who regrets having never become a priest, scrambles after taking out the wrong man; and outraged pig farmers protest trade restrictions as a brave escapee squeals through the streets. These narratives and more are masterfully woven, revealing the absurdities—and real dangers—of a fracturing Europe. A tour de force from one of Austria’s most esteemed novelists, The Capital is a mordantly funny and piercingly urgent saga of the European Union, and an aerial feat of sublime world literature.

The World After Capital

Author: Albert Wenger
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578317458
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
Technological progress has shifted scarcity for humanity. When we were foragers, food was scarce. During the agrarian age, it was land. Following the industrial revolution, capital became scarce. With digital technologies, scarcity is shifting once more. We need to figure out how to live in The World After Capital in which the only scarcity is our attention.

Capital Flows and Crises

Author: Barry J. Eichengreen
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262550598
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Book Description
An analysis of the connections between capital flows and financial crises as well as between capital flows and economic growth.

Between Labor and Capital

Author: Pat Walker
Publisher: South End Press
ISBN: 9780896080379
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 374

Book Description
The lead essay by Barbara and John Ehrenreich opens the debate about the nature of the "middle class." Do those who work between labor and capital constitute a third class, or will different sectors tend to ally with either the working class or the capitalist class, or is a whole new conception of the dynamics of social change necessary?

Leave the Capital

Author: Paul Hanley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781901927719
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
During the British Invasion in the mid-sixties, the world turned and looked at London. That's how it remained, until four Mancunian musicians opted to plough their hard-earned cash back into the city they loved in the form of proper recording facilities. Eric Stewart of The Mindbenders and songwriter extraordinaire Graham Gouldman created Strawberry Studios; Keith Hopwood and Derek Leckenby of Herman's Hermits crafted Pluto. Between them, they facilitated a musical revolution that would be defined by its rejection of the capital. This book tells the story of Manchester music through the prism of the two studio's key recordings. Of course, that story inevitably takes in The Smiths, Joy Division, The Fall, and The Stone Roses. But it's equally the story of `Bus Stop' and `East West' and `I'm Not in Love'. Above all, it's the story of music that couldn't have been made anywhere else but Manchester.

The Purpose of Capital

Author: Jed Emerson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781732453104
Category : Capital
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Book Description
An exploration of our understanding of the purpose of capital and the cultural, historic and environmental aspects of how we have come to understand the relation between economic, social and environmental components of capital. Offers a vision of capital as a fuel to promote individual freedom in the context of community and Earth.

Capital Punishment, Second Edition

Author: Alan Marzilli
Publisher: Infobase Publishing
ISBN: 1438105940
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description

Capital Rules

Author: Rawi Abdelal
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674034554
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Book Description
"The rise of global financial markets in the last decades of the twentieth century was premised on one fundamental idea: that capital ought to flow across country borders with minimal restriction and regulation. Freedom for capital movements became the new orthodoxy. In an intellectual, legal, and political history of financial globalization, Rawi Abdelal shows that this was not always the case. Transactions routinely executed by bankers, managers, and investors during the 1990s—trading foreign stocks and bonds, borrowing in foreign currencies—had been illegal in many countries only decades, and sometimes just a year or two, earlier. How and why did the world shift from an orthodoxy of free capital movements in 1914 to an orthodoxy of capital controls in 1944 and then back again by 1994? How have such standards of appropriate behavior been codified and transmitted internationally? Contrary to conventional accounts, Abdelal argues that neither the U.S. Treasury nor Wall Street bankers have preferred or promoted multilateral, liberal rules for global finance. Instead, European policy makers conceived and promoted the liberal rules that compose the international financial architecture. Whereas U.S. policy makers have tended to embrace unilateral, ad hoc globalization, French and European policy makers have promoted a rule-based, “managed” globalization. This contest over the character of globalization continues today."

Capital Is Dead

Author: McKenzie Wark
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788735331
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
It's not capitalism, it's not neoliberalism - what if it's something worse? In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that information has empowered a new kind of ruling class. Through the ownership and control of information, this emergent class dominates not only labour but capital as traditionally understood as well. And it’s not just tech companies like Amazon and Google. Even Walmart and Nike can now dominate the entire production chain through the ownership of not much more than brands, patents, copyrights, and logistical systems. While techno-utopian apologists still celebrate these innovations as an improvement on capitalism, for workers—and the planet—it’s worse. The new ruling class uses the powers of information to route around any obstacle labor and social movements put up. So how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the theoretical tools to analyze this new world, but ways to change it. Drawing on the writings of a surprising range of classic and contemporary theorists, Wark offers an illuminating overview of the contemporary condition and the emerging class forces that control—and contest—it.

Capital

Author: Rana Dasgupta
Publisher: Fourth Estate
ISBN: 9789350297933
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
It is said of Indian cities that Calcutta, the former British capital, owned the nineteenth century, Bombay, centre of films and corporations, possessed the twentieth, while Delhi, seat of politics, has the twenty-first. The boom following the opening up of India's economy in the early 1990s plunged its capital city into a tumult of destruction and creation: slums and markets were bulldozed or burnt down, and shopping malls and apartment blocks erupted from the ruins - or upon agricultural land taken over in the interests of business and modernization. Immense fortunes were made, and in the glassy stores lining the new highways, customers paid for global luxury with bags of cash. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people from the rural hinterland streamed into the newly formed 'National Capital Region' looking for work, which they often found constructing, cleaning or guarding the homes of the increasingly affluent middle class. The transformation of the city was stern, abrupt and unequal, and it gave rise to new and bewildering feelings. Delhi brimmed with ambition and rage. Bizarre crimes stole the headlines. In his first work of non-fiction, Rana Dasgupta shows us this new Delhi through the eyes of its people. With the lyricism and empathy of a novelist, he takes us through a series of encounters - with billionaires and bureaucrats, drug dealers and metal traders, slum dwellers and psychoanalysts - which plunge us into the city's intoxicating, and sometimes terrifying, story of capitalist transformation.