Critiques and Alternatives to Capitalism
About the Book Series
The peer-reviewed series Critiques and Alternatives to Capitalism (edited by Marcello Musto) publishes scholarly works works on critiques and alternatives to capitalism, spanning a number of subject matters, political perspectives and geographical areas. It welcomes monographs and edited volumes in the fields of sociology, social and political theory and heterodox political economy, whose main areas of focus are the problems of capitalist society and its mode of production; alternatives to capitalism that address contemporary social issues; and 19th and 20th centuries anti-capitalist ideas and practical experiments.
Welcoming new perspectives on a wide range of themes, it seeks to explore alternative social-economic systems, critical theories of capitalism, social classes and inequality, public/private ownership and new contours of ‘the commons’, economic and financial crises, ecology, globalization, migration and citizenship, gender oppression, alienation, and cultural critique. The result is an eclectic, but focused and informative, series that provides original investigations, inspires significant conversations for today, and appeals to a diverse international audience.
Physis, Biopower, and Biothermodynamics: The Fire of Life
1st Edition
By Enrique Leff
August 29, 2025
Building upon the idea that our current "environmental question" arises from the history of metaphysics—which privileged thought about Being (or ontology) over the conditions of life—this book reinterprets Heraclitus’s notion of physis as the fundamental, emergent potency of life, as the category ...
The Politics of Curiosity: Alternatives to the Attention Economy
1st Edition
Edited
By Enrico Campo, Yves Citton
August 29, 2025
Through a variety of studies in the emerging field of attentional studies, this book examines and seeks alternatives to the current attention economy. Bringing together the work of leading scholars of ‘critical attention studies’ to reflect on issues such as techno-politics, socio-politics, and the...
The Ruins of Capitalism and Possibilism: Beyond Homo Faber
1st Edition
By Vando Borghi
August 27, 2025
This book explores two themes in connection with contemporary capitalism: infrastructural capitalism as the most advanced phase of a modernity, of which the “workman” or homo faber is the embodiment, who exists within an infrastructure whose logic of connectivity is aimed at value extraction; and a...
Reimagining Urban Marxisms: Rethinking Thinkers, Texts, and Challenges
1st Edition
Edited
By Francesco Biagi
June 24, 2025
This volume presents an interdisciplinary and international revaluation of urban Marxisms. Bringing together the main critical Marxist perspectives from around the world on contemporary urban studies, it engages with a range of issues connected to the “urban question,” such as urban sprawl, housing...
Secularist, Religious and Scientistic Socialism: Red Faith I
1st Edition
By Stefan Arvidsson
May 30, 2025
This book explores the various ways in which socialists have understood the relationship between their political beliefs and different religious and philosophical traditions. Considering the rise of secularism and the view that politics and life stances are two very different spheres, it moves to ...
Heidegger in the Face of the Environmental Question: The Immanence of Life
1st Edition
By Enrique Leff
May 06, 2025
This volume engages with the work of Heidegger to argue that the modern environmental crisis is fundamentally a crisis of understanding Life, resulting from the symbolic codification of the world from the Logos of Greek philosophy to the rationality of the modern world and resulting in a ...
Overcoming Exploitation and Externalisation: An Intersectional Theory of Hegemony and Transformation
1st Edition
By Friederike Habermann
May 06, 2025
Advancing an intersectional theory of hegemony, this book shows how various power relations interact through capitalist structures of othering. Going beyond the usual critiques of capitalism, it analyses the market itself as a principal cause of various forms of externalisation and domination. The ...
Towards a New Concept of the Political: A Defence of Universalism and Difference
1st Edition
By Giacomo Marramao
May 06, 2025
This book addresses the current crisis of democratic politics and its phase of ‘interregnum’ – in which the past finds it hard to die and the future finds it difficult to be born – by proposing a radical redefinition of the concept of the Political. Drawing on the thoughts of Antonio Gramsci and ...
Within and Beyond Capitalism: A Twofold Transformation
1st Edition
By Dieter Klein
May 06, 2025
This book argues for a twofold transformation to mitigate environmental catastrophe, avert war and overcome poverty and authoritarianism: a struggle for democratic, peace-oriented, social and ecological changes within the framework of a post-neoliberal, but still bourgeois-capitalist society, and a...
Power and Secularization: The Categories of Time
1st Edition
By Giacomo Marramao
March 04, 2025
This book offers a geneaological understanding of the condition of our time by reconstructing the complex story of the transition from the "cyclical time" of the classic era to the "linear and infuturant time" of the modern world. Time is therefore understood not as a simple vector, but as a ...
A Political Ecology of Common People
1st Edition
By Jacques Bidet
January 30, 2025
This book advances a counter-intuitive thesis: modern attacks on the global ecological balance are exclusively the result of processes of social domination, whether they are based on class, gender or nation. If this is the case, then it follows that ecological struggle and social struggle are one ...
Associative Democracy and the Crises of Representative Democracies
1st Edition
By Veit Bader, Marcel Maussen
December 18, 2024
The familiar problems of democratic capitalism have given way to a deep crisis challenging the basic forms of governance introduced around the late 18th century and then gradually expanded and developed until the late 20th century. Associative Democracy and the Crises of Representative Democracies ...