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.
The City as the Southern Question: Alternative Histories of Urbanisation After Gramsci
1st Edition
Edited
By Ranabir Samaddar, Enrica Morlicchio, Sandro Mezzadra
December 31, 2025
This innovative edited volume places global urbanism in the context of the phenomenal growth of cities of the South, investigating their colonial contentiousness and asking how their history plays out in the twenty-first-century phenomenon of urbanisation. Inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s reflections ...
Life Imaginaries, Environmental Rationality, and Dialogue of Savoirs: The Sustainability of Life
1st Edition
By Enrique Leff
November 28, 2025
Shifting from the idea that our current ‘environmental question’ arises from the history of metaphysics and its focus on ‘Being’ over ‘Life’—and the attendant explorations of the thought of Heidegger and Heraclitus—this book unfolds a philosophical and sociological proposal for transitioning toward...
Renewing Urban Critical Theories: Rediscovering Thinkers, Reimagining Texts, and Reframing Questions
1st Edition
Edited
By Francesco Biagi
November 28, 2025
This book presents an interdisciplinary and international reevaluation of urban critical theories, bringing together key perspectives from around the world on contemporary urban studies. Engaging with a wide range of issues related to the urban question – including urban sprawl, housing, and the ...
The Making of Council Democracy: State Transformation and Radical Possibilities
1st Edition
By Babak Amini
November 28, 2025
“Council democracy” is a particular form of democratic socialism that strives towards democratic self-governance on the basis of active, free, and associated individuals working cooperatively within a federated council system. Both in political practice and in social theory, “council democracy” has...
Welfare Racism: The Discursive Dimension
1st Edition
Edited
By Fabio Perocco
October 16, 2025
Welfare racism is a combination of racial discrimination in the welfare system and racist discourses used in the name of the welfare state. Presenting a global overview of discourses of welfare racism across the world by institutional actors, public figures, political parties, and mass media, this ...
Capitalist Dispossessions: Redistribution and Capital Expansion in Contemporary Brazil
1st Edition
By Daniel Bin
September 29, 2025
This book analyzes contemporary dispossessions in Brazil, drawing on the Marxian concept of primitive accumulation to show how processes of proletarianization, capitalization, and commodification each relate in distinct ways to capitalist accumulation. With an emphasis on the processes by which ...
Beyond Liberalism and Communism: Socialist Theory and the Chinese Case
1st Edition
By Michael Brie
August 29, 2025
Beyond Liberalism and Communism: Socialist Theory and the Chinese Case presents a new conceptual framework of socialism and applies it to the study of socialist development in China, shedding new light on modern China and signposting novel directions in socialist thought. Based on a ...
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...
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 ...