Thomas Frank: The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (1998)

While the youth counterculture remains the most evocative and best-remembered symbol of the cultural ferment of the 1960s, the revolution that shook American business during those boom years has gone largely unremarked. In this fascinating and revealing study, Thomas Frank shows how the youthful revolutionaries were joined—and even anticipated — by such unlikely allies as the advertising industry and the men’s clothing business.

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1998
ISBN 0226260127, 9780226260129
322 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-6-13)

Andrew Kliman: The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession (2011)

“The recent financial crisis and Great Recession have been analysed endlessly in the mainstream and academia, but this is the first book to conclude, on the basis of in-depth analyses of official US data, that Marx’s crisis theory can explain these events.

Marx believed that the rate of profit has a tendency to fall, leading to economic crises and recessions. Many economists, Marxists among them, have dismissed this theory out of hand, but Andrew Kliman’s careful data analysis shows that the rate of profit did indeed decline after the post-World War II boom and that free-market policies failed to reverse the decline. The fall in profitability led to sluggish investment and economic growth, mounting debt problems, desperate attempts of governments to fight these problems by piling up even more debt – and ultimately to the Great Recession.

Kliman’s conclusion is simple but shocking: short of socialist transformation, the only way to escape the ‘new normal’ of a stagnant, crisis-prone economy is to restore profitability through full-scale destruction of existing wealth, something not seen since the Depression of the 1930s.”

Publisher Pluto Press, 2011
ISBN 0745332390, 9780745332390
256 pages

Reviews: Matthew Wood (Marx & Philosophy, 2013), David J. Bailey (Political Studies Review, 2013), Michael Roberts (2011), Tibor Rutar (n.d.).

Author
Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2020-1-30)

Walter J. Ong: Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982–)

This classic work explores the vast differences between oral and literate cultures offering a very clear account of the intellectual, literary and social effects of writing, print and electronic technology.

In the course of his study, Walter J. Ong offers fascinating insights into oral genres across the globe and through time, and examines the rise of abstract philosophical and scientific thinking. He considers the impact of orality-literacy studies not only on literary criticism and theory but on our very understanding of what it is to be a human being, conscious of self and other.

First published in 1982 by Methuen & Co. Ltd
Publisher Routledge, 2002
New Accents series
ISBN 0415281296, 9780415281294
204 pages

Publisher
Google books

PDF (1982/2002, updated on 2014-11-23)