Here are 100 books that Hegemony Now fans have personally recommended if you like
Hegemony Now.
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I am the primary writer and podcaster behind The Blockchain Socialist, a platform for exploring the intersection of crypto and left politics. I’ve published over 35 blogs for my website and on the web3 native blogging platform Mirror as well as for outlets like FWB and Outland Magazine. I’ve also recorded over 150 podcasts which included incredible guests with a wide ranging spectrum of political views and expertises like Vitalik Buterin, Cory Doctorow, Douglas Rushkoff, Nick Srnicek, Lawrence Lessig, and many more. And I don’t just talk about but I do it as I am also a co-founder of Breadchain Cooperative where we make blockchain applications from a post-capitalist perspective.
When I first entered the crypto space, I found that one of the biggest issues was the dominance of free market fundamentalist ideology even when trying to learn about things completely technical. I desperately searched for writing that aligned more with my political leanings, and this book was the first one I found.
In the book, Mark argues that the significance of cryptocurrencies goes well beyond cryptoanarchism. In so far as they allow us "to appropriate, collectively, the means of monetary production," to paraphrase Marx, and to replace "the government of persons by the administration of things," as Engels advocated, they form the basis for a political regime that begins to look like a communism which has, at last, come to fruition–a cryptocommunism.
Cryptocurrencies are often associated with right-wing political movements, or even with the alt-right. They are the preserve of libertarians and fans of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek. With their promotion of anonymity and individualism, there's no doubt that they seamlessly slot into the prevailing anti-State ideology. But in this book Mark Alizart argues that the significance of cryptocurrencies goes well beyond cryptoanarchism. In so far as they allow us 'to appropriate collectively the means of monetary production', to paraphrase Marx, and to replace 'the government of persons by the administration of things', as Engels advocated, they form the basis for…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I am the primary writer and podcaster behind The Blockchain Socialist, a platform for exploring the intersection of crypto and left politics. I’ve published over 35 blogs for my website and on the web3 native blogging platform Mirror as well as for outlets like FWB and Outland Magazine. I’ve also recorded over 150 podcasts which included incredible guests with a wide ranging spectrum of political views and expertises like Vitalik Buterin, Cory Doctorow, Douglas Rushkoff, Nick Srnicek, Lawrence Lessig, and many more. And I don’t just talk about but I do it as I am also a co-founder of Breadchain Cooperative where we make blockchain applications from a post-capitalist perspective.
Being in the crypto space for as long as I have, I’ve heard the argument repeatedly that tokenization is a new thing that blockchains enable and that they are inherently good or bad, depending on where you stand on the issue. But that is an oversimplification.
Rachel O'Dwyer's book is an approachable exploration of the evolving landscape of tokens beyond the usual critique of financialization. Through a first-person exploration of history, O'Dwyer reveals the deeply political nature of tokens, shedding light on their enduring presence and demonstrating how today's digital tokens are simply a continuation of humanity's longstanding use of tokens to facilitate a wide range of social processes since antiquity.
Longlisted for the FT Schroders Business Book of the Year Award 2023 - A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: GQ, Los Angeles Times, Wired
Wherever you look, money is being re- placed by tokens. Digital platforms are issuing new kinds of money-like things: phone credit, shares, gift vouchers, game tokens, customer data-the list goes on. But what does it mean when online platforms become the new banks? What new types of control and discrimination emerge when money is tied to specific apps or actions, politics or identities?
Tokens opens up this new and expanding world. Exploring the history of extra-…
I am the primary writer and podcaster behind The Blockchain Socialist, a platform for exploring the intersection of crypto and left politics. I’ve published over 35 blogs for my website and on the web3 native blogging platform Mirror as well as for outlets like FWB and Outland Magazine. I’ve also recorded over 150 podcasts which included incredible guests with a wide ranging spectrum of political views and expertises like Vitalik Buterin, Cory Doctorow, Douglas Rushkoff, Nick Srnicek, Lawrence Lessig, and many more. And I don’t just talk about but I do it as I am also a co-founder of Breadchain Cooperative where we make blockchain applications from a post-capitalist perspective.
I have to say I absolutely loved this book because it was so thought provoking and relevant for understanding our current economic system because it is true, the capitalism written about in the 1800s and even 1900s is completely different than what we have today.
Even before web3, it’s plainly obvious that the role of information has increased in importance against the commodity and it’s vital to understand its implications.
In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that the all-pervasive presence of data in our networked society has given rise to a new mode of production, one not ruled over by capitalists and their factories but by those who own and control the flow of information. Yet, if this is not capitalism anymore, could it be something worse? What if the world we're living in is more dystopian than the techno utopias of the Silicon Valley imagination? And, if this is the case, how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the…
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
I am the primary writer and podcaster behind The Blockchain Socialist, a platform for exploring the intersection of crypto and left politics. I’ve published over 35 blogs for my website and on the web3 native blogging platform Mirror as well as for outlets like FWB and Outland Magazine. I’ve also recorded over 150 podcasts which included incredible guests with a wide ranging spectrum of political views and expertises like Vitalik Buterin, Cory Doctorow, Douglas Rushkoff, Nick Srnicek, Lawrence Lessig, and many more. And I don’t just talk about but I do it as I am also a co-founder of Breadchain Cooperative where we make blockchain applications from a post-capitalist perspective.
The Ethereum blockchain ecosystem is arguably the largest and likely to keep that position for the time being therefore making it an important technology to have a firm grasp and understanding of. This includes not just the hard technical aspects of it, but also its history and culture.
Dr. Dylan-Ellis has been involved in the Ethereum ecosystem and teaching cryptocurrency courses at the University College Dublin, and as someone who has similarly been involved in the Ethereum space for so long and watching its political and cultural evolution, this textbook offers a good intro for anyone wanting to get up to speed on Ethereum.
Absolute Essentials of Ethereum is a concise textbook which guides the reader through the fascinating world of the emerging Ethereum ecosystem, from the basics of how its blockchain works to cutting-edge applications.
Written by an experienced educator, each chapter is designed to progress potential students from class to class. Technical concepts are clearly explained for those new to the topic and readers are supported with definitions and summaries in each chapter. Real-life case studies situate the overviews in a contemporary context. Topics covered include the Ethereum Execution and Consensus layers, Ethereum governance and community, Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs), Decentralised Finance…
Inequality and fairness are basic issues in human conflict and cooperation that have long fascinated me. Growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, I was confronted with the extreme racial segregation of schools and neighborhoods. My Catholic upbringing taught me to cherish the cardinal virtues of justice, wisdom, courage, and temperance, and my education in political economy taught me that markets can fairly and efficiently allocate resources, when legal power is evenly shared. My formal education culminated in a Ph.D. in Public Affairs from Princeton University, which led me to my current roles: Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Principal Economist at Gallup. I care deeply about the social conditions that create cooperation and conflict.
Can ideas change the world? How does belief in political equality—the idea that everyone deserves basic unbridgeable liberties—affect innovation and economic development?
Dierdre McCloskey—one of the most creative and interesting economists alive—takes on these topics and much more in her characteristically witty, fast-paced style. She loves describing and refuting bad ideas—or even ideas widely regarded as brilliant—in an effort to go deeper into the forces that lifted humans out of poverty and sustain innovation to this day.
There's little doubt that most humans today are better off than their forebears. Stunningly so, the economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey argues in the concluding volume of her trilogy celebrating the oft-derided virtues of the bourgeoisie. The poorest of humanity, McCloskey shows, will soon be joining the comparative riches of Japan and Sweden and Botswana. Why? Most economists from Adam Smith and Karl Marx to Thomas Piketty say the Great Enrichment since 1800 came from accumulated capital. McCloskey disagrees, fiercely. "Our riches," she argues, "were made not by piling brick on brick, bank balance on bank balance, but by piling…
Neoliberalism and I have grown up in opposition to one another over the past four decades. As a professor of economics, union, and political activist I have observed, wrote about, and resisted its effects on the life chances of the great majority of its citizens with particular focus on the United States as its primary protagonist and gatekeeper. The opposition to this transformative epoch included writing about the significant contributions of my profession to Neoliberal economics in two previous books; The Profit Doctrine: The Economists of the Neoliberal Era and Economics in the 21st Century: A Critical Perspective.
In addition to its excellent coverage of the economics of this transformation, its historical account of the shift in class partnerships makes a unique contribution to our understanding of the period. In the Golden Age of the previous period Big Business maintained a fraught alliance with its unions willing to pay growing wages closely aligned with labor productivity growth with the grudging acceptance of higher taxes and regulations of the Keynesian era leaving small business to fend for itself. Once Japan and Germany reindustrialized creating a more competitive economic landscape Kotz describes the full-blown class warfare identified by Buffet as Big Business realigned with small business to fight for cuts to its wages, taxes, regulatory costs and unions, and progressive politics.
The financial and economic collapse that began in the United States in 2008 and spread to the rest of the world continues to burden the global economy. David Kotz, who was one of the few academic economists to predict it, argues that the ongoing economic crisis is not simply the aftermath of financial panic and an unusually severe recession but instead is a structural crisis of neoliberal, or free-market, capitalism. Consequently, continuing stagnation cannot be resolved by policy measures alone. It requires major institutional restructuring.
"Kotz's book will reward careful study by everyone interested in the question of stages in…
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
I am Professor Emeritus of Economics, University of Munich. I also taught as a visitor at Duke University, Harvard, University of North Carolina, as well as the University of Vienna, the Vienna School of Economics, and the University of St. Gallen. Since the financial crisis of 2008, I have been writing about current economic issues and the need for new paradigms in economics. I have been advocating a humanistic approach to economics in which people and their quality of life count more than the output of the economy. I have also formulated the need for capitalism with a human face. I have also blogged for PBS.
I think that this book is an excellent introduction to the history of the past four decades as it shows why we ended up with a billionaire authoritarian as the leader of the nation.
It begins with Reaganomics and argues that twelve years of Republican Administration generated sufficient momentum for its pro-market ideology that Democrat Bill Clinton was reluctant to reverse course. He went all in on globalization and continued to deregulate the financial sector that ultimately steered the economy into the financial crisis of 2008. Obama failed to seize the opportunity to end the dominance of the financial oligarchy and maintained the power structure as he found it.
The election of 2016 showed the revolt of the “deplorables” keen on draining the swamp in Washington responsible for their fate.
Best Books of 2022: Financial Times Best Non-Fiction Books of 2022: De Tijd Shortlisted for Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year
The most sweeping account of how neoliberalism came to dominate American politics for nearly a half century before crashing against the forces of Trumpism on the right and a new progressivism on the left.
The epochal shift toward neoliberalism-a web of related policies that, broadly speaking, reduced the footprint of government in society and reassigned economic power to private market forces-that began in the United States and Great Britain in the late 1970s fundamentally changed the world.…
I came to activism at a young age, inspired by a book given to me by a friend in Grade 10. I also grew up poor; my trajectory into university was unusual for my demographic, a fact I only discovered once I was doing my PhD in the sociology of education. By the time I started interviewing activists for my doctorate, I had a burning desire to understand how social change could happen, what democracy really looked like, and who was left out of participating. I am still trying to figure these things out. If you are, too, the books on this list might help!
I’ve loved Wendy Brown’s work since I started reading it while I was doing my PhD back in 2003. I cite her stuff in almost everything I’ve written. This recent book pulls together her vast expertise and insights about political theory, inequality, and democratic practices to explain how neoliberalism has always been anti-democratic, and how it continues to prop up authoritarian styles of leadership, like that of Donald Trump in the US. Key to this, she argues, is how neoliberalism has always made an appeal to ‘tradition,’ which smuggles in patriarchal, classist, and heterosexist notions of the nuclear family, the supremacy of Christian ideals, and a sort of rugged individualism that denies the necessity of a welfare state.
Across the West, hard-right leaders are surging to power on platforms of ethno-economic nationalism, Christianity, and traditional family values. Is this phenomenon the end of neoliberalism or its monstrous offspring?
In the Ruins of Neoliberalism casts the hard-right turn as animated by socioeconomically aggrieved white working- and middle-class populations but contoured by neoliberalism's multipronged assault on democratic values. From its inception, neoliberalism flirted with authoritarian liberalism as it warred against robust democracy. It repelled social-justice claims through appeals to market freedom and morality. It sought to de-democratize the state, economy, and society and re-secure the patriarchal family. In key works…
I am interested in how regimes of ethics and property interrelate, and how this interrelation informs political thought: in questions of cooperatives and collectives, customary use-rights, and household economies. I'm an anthropologist by training and geographically I work in Russia. I've written about socialist property law and stolen late-Soviet penguins, Stalin-era mine-detection dogs and perestroika-era saints, möbius bands, 19th-century Russian cheese-making co-operatives, New World Order theories of “The Golden Billion” and other important matters.
72 people died when the Grenfell Tower burned in 2017, hundreds more lost their homes.
As survivors slept out in London's mosques and churches, one politician suggested requisitioning empty investment properties to house them. But the idea was shot down as a violation of human rights: those of the property owners. Whyte's Morals of the Market opens with this historical anecdote to ask how neoliberalism and human rights discourses evolved together.
Working through published and archival sources, the book shows that neoliberal thinkers “developed their own account of human rights as protections for the market order.” To their authors, such claims were not cynical. They were moral: grounded in a political morality that equated social progress with commercial relations, collectivism with moral failure, socialism with civilizational regression.
As people whose social worlds have been shattered by neoliberal policies increasingly turn to right-wing populism for a new kind of collectivist future,…
Drawing on detailed archival research on the parallel histories of human rights and neoliberalism, Jessica Whyte uncovers the place of human rights in neoliberal attempts to develop a moral framework for a market society. In the wake of the Second World War, neoliberals saw demands for new rights to social welfare and self-determination as threats to "civilisation". Yet, rather than rejecting rights, they developed a distinctive account of human rights as tools to depoliticise civil society, protect private investments and shape liberal subjects.
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
A dozen years ago or so, I started teaching climate change instead of consumer culture. That’s because the very same Marxist critique of capitalism helped explain both the problems of unsustainable consumption and climate catastrophe. I did this work for my students, and I did it for me – and it "woke me from my dogmatic slumber," a term Kant used when he was shocked out of complacency by Hume. Because once I really understood the seriousness of climate change, I realized that nothing about the way we live – and think – will remain the same as before. So I addressed it in a 2019 book and in the new one.
It’s a self-critical diagnosis of what has gone wrong with Leftist politics in the post-war era. It’s a (perhaps) counterintuitive argument that automation could become our friend. And it is a prescription for policy choices, like the UBI, that make sense after the end of capitalism.
It helped me fully appreciate how outdated some of my old ideas about progressive politics were.
Neoliberalism isn't working. Austerity is forcing millions into poverty and many more into precarious work, while the left remains trapped in stagnant political practices that offer no respite.
Inventing the Future is a bold new manifesto for life after capitalism. Against the confused understanding of our high-tech world by both the right and the left, this book claims that the emancipatory and future-oriented possibilities of our society can be reclaimed. Instead of running from a complex future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams demand a postcapitaiist economy capable of advancing standards, liberating humanity from work and developing technologies that expand our…
