Appeals to “community” and to “the common” have become increasingly frequent in political thought. In this chapter, I focus on some of the reasons for the appearance of such appeals in the landscape of contemporary political thought. This chapter also highlights some of the uncanny intellectual links across the entire political spectrum, from European post-Marxist and American communitarian philosophers to the public intellectuals of the neofascist “New Right.” These links emerge and play out in a broader intellectual field that is shaped both by the political economy of Western Europe and North America after 1945 and by the failure to address the obvious shortcomings and negative effects of this political economy. Against this broader background, current appeals to community in political thought can be seen as a response to the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism, which has led to a legitimation crisis of liberal constitutional democracy. But I am also going to suggest that appeals to community invariably tend to drift into an antidemocratic direction.

This chapter covers the recent history of plantation archaeology in the Caribbean as it intersects with the discourse of race, ethnicity, and capitalism. Analysis of the artifacts and landscapes in relation to the Caribbean plantation complex allows for renewed questions about the development of race and capital in places where the written record is insufficient. Particularly as it pertains to studies of race, ethnicity, and capital, plantation archaeology in the Caribbean has coalesced around three major themes: (1) African cultural retentions; (2) trade, consumption, and access; and (3) landscapes and social relations.

Chapter 5 compares two novels that portray the self as a multi-scalar collective. Reading David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks (2014) alongside Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio (1999), I show that both novels represent the self as a space of cohabitation and co-evolution, where symbiotic relations embed the temporality of human characters within other timescales. I read these plots as symbiopolitical experiments that question the ‘dis-embedding’ of life performed by biocapitalism. Because it resists the separation of self from non-self, the symbiotic subject destabilises the type of immunological politics theorised by Roberto Esposito and Frédéric Neyrat, where fantasies of biological and social immunity are built upon defensive boundaries. In these novels, such immunitary fantasies are undermined by metaleptic poetics, where the self is both co-written by others within and forced to position itself within the narrative of its own species. These strange loops open up the narrative of the self to the necessity of symbiopolitical relations.

The book opens with an overview of the tensions that increasingly define hip-hop’s role in contemporary culture, namely the way that the music continually shifts between complicity and critique in its assessment of capitalism and racialized inequality. This ambivalence is related back to the currents of pleasure and pain that run through the work of such rappers as Nicki Minaj and Megan Thee Stallion, and to the usage of hip-hop in a recent film soundtrack. After briefly discussing the editor’s own position in relation to the culture, the introduction moves on to an overview of the collection’s general aims. These include the attempt to reflect both the diverse styles and regions of contemporary hip-hop, and the political commitments of the contributors. A short discussion of editorial conventions follows, as well as an account of the book’s approach to hate speech. The section ends with a brief overview of each of the nineteen chapters.

Focusing on William Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814) and related essays and tourist writing of the 1810s, this chapter explains how he adapted traditional views of Anglican churchyards as sacred commons where local community was composted and cultivated over time, even as dislocation and erasure of rural communities, urbanization, and religious diversification undermined ties between churchyards and local belonging. The chapter interrogates how Wordsworth re-membered the geography, residents, and species of the Lake District within and around an idealized Anglican churchyard that was based on the one near to him in Grasmere yet loosened from denominational boundaries. He did so to reclaim local interspecies and semi-egalitarian lifeways among small landowners and their environments perceived to be threatened by extractive, colonizing capitalism. He nonetheless nostalgically distorted and risked denying agency to those re-membered, and uneasily suggested that agents and beneficiaries of capitalist empire might become conservators of traces of formal local lifeways.

Neruda’s temperament was not theoretical, yet several “canonical” poems of his are infused with Marxist thinking. Although there is no evidence that Neruda read Marxist theory, in his thirties he assimilated its totalizing thought from party activism, from his second wife Delia, and from his friend, Spanish poet Rafael Alberti, each a lifelong communist. As an instance, Neruda’s poem “La United Fruit Co.” brings together four types of corporations, economic control of the state, the transportation of product, and subordination of labor. “The Strike” depicts the role of class conflict in the production process. “Cristóbal Miranda (shoveler-Tocopilla)” is one of fifteen portraits of industrial workers focusing on ordinary folk-history-from-below. “Los dictadores,” with its monster engendered by the wealthy autocrat in his palace, demonstrates the functioning of the dialectic in history. Neruda’s Marxism, though more intuitive than discursive, shapes these and other related poems of his.

The study of European capitalism since 1945 has revealed three key findings. First, Europe’s governance of capitalism has been marked by four main periods: : 1) embedded liberalism (1945–73); 2) global attempts at mixed capitalism (1973–92); 3) high neoliberalism (1992–2016); and 4) the return of community capitalism since 2016. Second, Europeans have invented an original system to reach compromise between both states and the three types of capitalist governance, thereby offering choice, far from the image of a neoliberal technocratic dictatorship. The European Union is a mix between the influence of many countries, including Germany, France, and Britain, in addition to Italy and many others. Third, the trinity points to three alternatives that were – and still are – present: the neoliberal free-trade area, the socio-environmental alternative and the challenge of the return of community capitalism, between protectionist tensions, Fortress Europe and the possible hollowing out of the European Union from the pressure of growing nationalism.

Which form of capitalist governance best fosters peace, prosperity, social cohesion, and environmental protection? I argue that making sense of this complexity calls for revisiting the three different principles of capitalist governance: liberty (freeing the market to unleash growth), solidarity (reining in the free market to protect the weak and the environment), and community (safeguarding the group through protectionism and military might). I contend that studying the European Union helps provide insight into how a compromise between liberty, solidarity, and community capitalisms is struck, as the Union is in a constant process of negotiation among bickering members. Dealing with community capitalism, in particular with protectionism and nationalism, has been the most pressing challenge for Europe in the past, not just today. This book will focus on the interaction between capitalism and European integration between 1945 and 2025, drawing on studies from areas of scholarship that rarely enter into dialogue with one other (history, political science, comparative political economy, international relations), as well as through new archival research.

What is the best form of governance for capitalism? It is a balance between three types of capitalist governance, namely liberty capitalism, solidarity capitalism, and community capitalism, i.e. a trinity. In any given society, leaders emphasise liberty if they believe that freeing markets will unleash plenty; solidarity if they prioritise protecting the weak (the poor, minorities, nature); and community if they emphasise the power of the group to which they belong (through protectionism and military might). Each of these three types has a radical variant, such as neoliberalism for liberty capitalism, or Nazi Germany for community capitalism. This trinity is useful in making comparisons across time and space. Capitalism is not solely based on a compromise between liberty and solidarity. Community capitalism must also be taken into consideration. Community capitalism emphasises protectionism, restrictive migration policy, cartelisation and unilateral foreign policies. The chapter examines these three types of capitalist governance one by one (including the question of neoliberalism, of ordoliberalism, of neomercantilism, of the Commons), and then explores how they have applied to various countries.

One of the advantages of the ‘big picture’ approach adopted by Barry Buzan (and his collaborators) is to be able to grasp the profound, macro-changes of social and inter-polity relations over history. This approach is particularly helpful when it comes to the structures of international society, its actors, its fundamental normative architecture, and the main trajectories of its changes and developments. Arguably, the big picture over time is also a big picture of insides and outsides, with standards of civilisations being some of the most crucial markers of those belonging to a given (historical) social order, and those not. The chapter intends to reflect on Barry Buzan’s view of the Standard of Civilisation as a concept and as a practice from a ‘big picture’ perspective, analysing its fundamental components but also engaging with the limitations and the lacunae that such a view inevitably entails.

Flow is a concept used in studies of electronic dance music to articulate a range of social and bodily experiences on dance floors, centred around the musical performances of DJs. It is also used in other scholarly fields and applied in therapeutic and corporate contexts. The catch-all, plural, and positive quality of the concept makes flow easy to apply to many settings and phenomena. This chapter examines flow experiences on dance floors in conjunction with existing notions that club cultures epitomise neoliberal conceptions of creative labour. Overall, it suggests that capitalist logics of flow configure a social environment on dance floors where people can enjoy themselves with others while looking inward, rather than reaching outward in the pursuit of action and social change.

To be adopted, health-producing policies need to be supported by the elites. Although everyone’s health suffers from economic inequality, the poor suffer more social murder. Creating awareness is the challenge. Countries have goals and becoming healthier is one that is possible for the US. Charities and philanthropies, which command great power, mostly serve the rich, and are unaccountable to the public, won’t create the awareness needed to produce health-generating policies. Public resources should benefit the public. The government has subsidized much technology that, once profitable, is given to private industry at no cost. To change American policies requires creating awareness of the problem, reaching an agreement on a potential solution, and some transforming event such as a market shock, invasion, or other stimulus. Various ways of creating understanding are presented. Telling stories is the most effective

Abstract: Dewey’s critique of capitalism centered on the concentration of economic power, the commodification of education, and the corrosive effects of consumerism. However, as McVea argues in this chapter, Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy aligns with alternative economic approaches, such as Austrian economics, which emphasize the entrepreneur’s role in navigating an evolving, uncertain world. As McVea shows, a Deweyan perspective highlights the role of imagination in entrepreneurial decision-making. Entrepreneurs, like artists, engage in dramatic rehearsal, mentally simulating potential futures and harmonizing their ventures with stakeholders and changing environments. This imaginative deliberation is not fantasy but a grounded, experimental process that fosters ethical engagement and continuous adaptation. Rather than maximizing financial returns, the pragmatist entrepreneur seeks to create and recreate harmony among stakeholders. McVea concludes that by integrating ethical reflection into decision-making, entrepreneurs can drive innovation while fostering human flourishing. This approach challenges conventional university business education, calling for new curricula that cultivate moral imagination and responsible value creation.

World-gothic as a project (where the hyphen indicates a world-systems relational perspective) is not meant to simply expand our horizon, by studying gothic that arises beyond the culture industries of the United States and Europe; it looks to redraw the terms and frames of reference used. A world-gothic approach does not simply seek to highlight non-American-European productions within already existing Eurocentric literary categories, lineages of influence, and definition by generic traits. World-gothic looks instead to change our perspective of how we understand gothic, even for those works already long studied and taught. Using the example of the undead, this chapter examines the time and place of gothic as registering the spasms of the capitalist world-system.

This chapter examines the dialectic of positive and negative utopian tendencies in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag trilogy. Critically acclaimed as a landmark series in the British New Weird subgenre, Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), and Iron Council (2004) offer readers rich worldbuilding, blending neo-Victorian steampunk with semi-fascist capitalist oppression. Within the largely negative terrain of Perdido Street Station moments of utopian positivity can nonetheless flourish – most memorably in the inter-species love affair between the scientist protagonist and his insectoid partner. The Scar, which is set on a floating city-state, offers a positive utopian space partly modelled on the social organisation of real-world pirate ships on the eighteenth-century Atlantic. However, it also plays on Ursula Le Guin’s notion of the ‘ambiguous utopia’, with counter-utopian as well as counter-counter-utopian narrative elements. The third novel in the series, Iron Council, sees a transition towards communism, focusing on the political construction of revolutionary utopian ideals. Together, Miéville’s novels present readers with a heady mix of fantastic worldbuilding and Marxist utopian politics, with overt references to the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, and, more recently, the anti-globalisation protests at the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle in 1999.