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Towns without nationally advertised fast-food restaurants often eagerly await the day when the golden arches sprout next door to the local car dealership. But what really happens to a community with the arrival of the uni-burger? Christopher Gunn and Hazel Dayton Gunn demonstrate that perhaps three-quarters of the money a community spends at its burger emporium will leave the area. Poor communities remain poor, they assert, because local capital tends to be drained off to financial centers, corporate accounts, and stockholders' portfolios. In keeping with ecologists' injunction to "think globally and act locally," this imaginative book documents ways in which communities have counteracted constraints of the capitalist economic system and succeeded in promoting democratic control of their resources. Taking as one example the local impact of a new McDonald's restaurant, Gunn and Gunn first illustrate how capital potentially available for community development may be identified. They then explore a variety of alternative institutions—credit unions, nonprofit corporations, and consumers' and workers' cooperatives, among others—that serve to attract and retain resources, foster growth, and extend public control over the development process. The authors also consider how grassroots activism for social change may be integrated with more conventional political practice. Reclaiming Capital will be a vital resource for activists, elected officials, and others concerned with urban and regional planning.
Attempts to reclaim Marx's Capital from the myth of inconsistency. This book is intended for non-specialist readers, and shows that the inconsistencies are actually caused by misinterpretation; the temporal single-system interpretation eliminates all of the alleged inconsistencies.
Social surplus -- Alternative institutions of accumulation: gaining financial resources -- Alternative institutions of accumulation: building assets in the community -- Constraining capital -- Creating public assets -- Collective action, communities and social change.
“This superbly succinct and incisive book couldn’t be more timely or urgent.” —Michael Sorkin, author of All Over the Map Our cities are changing. Around the world, more and more money is being invested in buildings and land. Real estate is now a $217 trillion dollar industry, worth thirty-six times the value of all the gold ever mined. It forms sixty percent of global assets, and one of the most powerful people in the world—the president of the United States—made his name as a landlord and developer. Samuel Stein shows that this explosive transformation of urban life and politics has been driven not only by the tastes of wealthy newcomers, but by the state-driven process of urban planning. Planning agencies provide a unique window into the ways the state uses and is used by capital, and the means by which urban renovations are translated into rising real estate values and rising rents. Capital City explains the role of planners in the real estate state, as well as the remarkable power of planning to reclaim urban life.
The authors of this book challenge prevailing ideas about free markets and globalization. They question whether globalization is a technological reality that cannot be stopped and ask if the US economy really outperformed its competitors in the 1990s. They show how in each key area--trade and industrial policy, privatization, intellectual property rights, investment and financial policies, exchange rate and currency policy, labour and social welfare --there are alternatives to neoliberal policies that the historical experience of particular countries prove really works.
Representing Capital, Fredric Jameson’s first book-length engagement with Marx’s magnum opus, is a unique work of scholarship that records the progression of Marx’s thought as if it were a musical score. The textual landscape that emerges is the setting for paradoxes and contradictions that struggle toward resolution, giving rise to new antinomies and a new forward movement. These immense segments overlap each other to combine and develop on new levels in the same way that capital itself does, stumbling against obstacles that it overcomes by progressive expansions, which are in themselves so many leaps into the unknown.
Lawrence Vale explores the rise, fall, and redevelopment of three public housing projects in Boston. Vale looks at these projects from the perspectives of their low-income residents and assesses the contributions of the design professionals who helped to transform these once devastated places during the 1980s and 1990s.
Social capital is a principal concept across the social sciences and has readily entered into mainstream discourse. In short, it is popular. However, this popularity has taken its toll. Social capital suffers from a lack of consensus because of the varied ways it is measured, defined, and deployed by different researchers. It has been put to work in ways that stretch and confuse its conceptual value, blurring the lines between networks, trust, civic engagement, and any type of collaborative action. This clear and concise volume presents the diverse theoretical approaches of scholars from Marx, Coleman, and Bourdieu to Putnam, Fukuyama, and Lin, carefully analyzing their commonalities and differences. Joonmo Son categorizes this wealth of work according to whether its focus is on the necessary preconditions for social capital, its structural basis, or its production. He distinguishes between individual and collective social capital (from shared resources of a personal network to pooled assets of a whole society), and interrogates the practical impact social capital has had in various policy areas (from health to economic development). Social Capital will be of immense value to readers across the social sciences and practitioners in relevant fields seeking to understand this mercurial concept.
This is a story of hope, but also of peril. It began when our nation’s polarized political class started conscripting everyday citizens into its culture war. From their commanding heights in political parties, media, academia, and government, these partisans have attacked one another for years, but increasingly they’ve convinced everyday Americans to join the fray. Why should we feel such animosity toward our fellow citizens, our neighbors, even our own kin? Because we’ve fallen for the false narrative, eagerly promoted by pundits on the Left and the Right, that citizens who happen to vote Democrat or Republican are enthusiastic supporters of Team Blue or Team Red. Aside from a minority of party activists and partisans, however, most voters are simply trying to choose the lesser of two evils. The real threat to our union isn’t Red vs. Blue America, it’s the quiet collusion within our nation’s political class to take away that most American of freedoms: our right to self-governance. Even as partisans work overtime to divide Americans against one another, they’ve erected a system under which we ordinary citizens don’t have a voice in the decisions that affect our lives. From foreign wars to how local libraries are run, authority no longer resides with We the People, but amongst unaccountable officials. The political class has stolen our birthright and set us at one another’s throats. This is the story of how that happened and what we can do about it. America stands at a precipice, but there’s still time to reclaim authority over our lives and communities.
With a highly accessible and lucid text this book reviews the political shift toward neo-liberal ideology and explores its tremendous impact on education. It maps out in careful detail the theoretical foundations of democratic citizenship by asking the question: What does it mean to learn and live in a democracy and what responsibilities, capacities and knowledge does a citizen need to fulfill these requirements?