It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism by Bernie Sanders

It's OK to be angry about capitalism. It's OK to want something better. Bernie Sanders takes on the 1% and speaks blunt truths about a system that is fuelled by uncontrolled greed, and rigged against ordinary people. Where a handful of oligarchs have never had it so good, with more money than they could spend in a thousand lifetimes, and the vast majority struggle to survive. Where a decent standard of living for all seems like an impossible dream.

How can we accept an economic order that allows three billionaires to control more wealth than the bottom half of our society? How can we accept a political system that allows the super-rich to buy elections and politicians? How can we let it happen any longer? We must demand fundamental economic and political change. This is where the path forward begins.

Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin & Cory Doctorow

In Chokepoint Capitalism, Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow argue we’re in a new era of ‘chokepoint capitalism’, with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well illustrated by the plight of creative workers. By analysing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct ‘anti-competitive flywheels’.

In the book’s second half, Giblin and Doctorow explain how to batter through those chokepoints, with tools ranging from transparency rights to collective action and ownership, radical interoperability, contract terminations, job guarantees, and minimum wages for creative work.

Cannibal Capitalism by Nancy Fraser

Capitalism has come, in the twenty-first century, to dominate nearly every sphere of life, from ecology and race to the organisation of care and the practice of politics.

In this tightly argued but urgent volume, leading Marxist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser charts the voracious appetite of capital, tracking it from crisis point to crisis point, from ecological devastation to the collapse of democracy, and from the devaluing of care work to racial injustice. These crisis points all come to a head in the perfect storm of Covid-19, which Fraser argues can help us envision the kind of resistance we must build to stop capital from cannibalising our whole world.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

The heady optimism of the Internet’s early days is gone. Technologies that were meant to liberate us have deepened inequality and stoked divisions. Tech companies gather our information online and sell it to the highest bidder, whether government or retailer. Profits now depend not only on predicting our behaviour but modifying it too. How will this fusion of capitalism and the digital shape our values and define our future?

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is a deeply-reasoned examination of the threat of unprecedented power free from democratic oversight. As it explores this new capitalism’s impact on society, politics, business, and technology, it exposes the struggles that will decide both the next chapter of capitalism and the meaning of information civilisation.

The Spirit of Digital Capitalism by Jenny Huberman

Digital technologies are now central to the machinations of capitalism. But how are they changing forms of capital accumulation and domination, and in what terms are these changes being promoted and justified by a new, incredibly powerful techno-elite?

In this book, Jenny Huberman takes on these questions. Beyond demonstrating how digital technologies make new forms of capital accumulation possible, she interrogates the ideological transformations that have accompanied the emergence of digital capitalism. She examines how business gurus, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists make claims about the way digital technologies contribute to the common good, foster collaboration and connectivity, and render life more convenient, even if this convenience comes at the expense of once cherished values such as privacy and liberty.