Book Review Archive

Review of The Deficit Myth

Stephanie Kelton’s "The Deficit Myth" provides an enjoyable and accessible condensation of the emergence of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) over the last twenty years or so, and what it means for the Left’s version of economic populism.

By

Kolson Schlosser

Locating Value, Review by Lauren B Wagner

The chapter authors of Locating Value are wrestling with the disconnect between the abstract and sometimes arbitrary systems that enable exchangeable value and their material-world consequences.

By

Lauren B Wagner

Review of Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction Under Late Capitalism

Arboleda demonstrates an astounding grasp of parallel debates within Marxist theory in particular and great skill at being able to deftly weave them together into a structure that reads remarkably well given its theoretical scope.

By

Angus McNelly

Cloud Ethics, Review by Erin McElroy

For Amoore, an ethics of algorithms begins not simply by mapping their associated prohibitions and permissions, or by opening up black boxes, but rather by understanding algorithms as ethicopolitical entities themselves.

By

Erin McElroy

Sinews of War and Trade, Review by Jatin Dua

In her sweeping and magisterial new book, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula, Laleh Khalili highlights the centrality of shipping and maritime infrastructure to global capitalism.

By

Jatin Dua

Review of Empire’s Labor: The Global Army that Supports the U.S. Wars

"Empire’s Labor" builds an explicitly spatial theory of empire: it foregrounds how empire-building has been grounded in the geographical management of bodies, populations, and circulations in the intimate spaces of everyday life.

By

Wesley Attewell

The Capitalism Effect: A Review of “The Licit Life of Capitalism” by Hannah Appel

“The Licit Life of Capitalism” offers an intimate and eclectic portrait of the oil industry’s attempt to disentangle itself from a small country on - and off - Africa’s Atlantic coast. But beyond these empirics, how might Appel’s portrait push scholars to examine the effects of our centuries-old, critical concept of “Capitalism”?

By

James Christopher Mizes

Spaces of Capital/Spaces of Resistance, Review by Phil Roberts

Hesketh’s book describes the uneven and combined articulations of Gramsci’s concepts of “passive revolution” and “hegemony” in an analysis of the EZLN and APPO movements in Mexico. This is a must read for researchers who are trying to explore the potential for anti-capitalist resistance without simplifying it to a question of global capital versus global labor.

By

Phil Roberts

The Eye of War, Review by Oliver Belcher

In this extraordinary survey, Bousquet examines the promises, mysteries, and anxieties that undergird ‘perceptual technologies,’ and their strange pride of place in executing contemporary warfare.

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Oliver Belcher

Migration and the Built Environment

"The City in Transgression" transcends resistance, which is typically seen as organised mobilisations against capital in the form of uprisings. Behind the cameras and the curtain of publicity, along with the glitz of media razzmatazz, many migrants are involved in covert resistance, a silent revolution

By

Franklin Obeng-Odoom