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Capitalism's New Clothes
Enterprise, Ethics and Enjoyment in Times of Crisis
Colin Cremin
Pluto Press, 2011

From broadsheet newspapers to television shows and Hollywood films, capitalism is increasingly recognised as a system detrimental to human existence. Colin Cremin investigates why, despite this de-robing, capitalism remains a powerful and seductive force.

Using materialist, psychoanalytic and linguistic approaches, Cremin shows how capitalism, anxiety and desire enter into a mutually supporting relationship. He identifies three ways in which we are tied in to capitalism – through a social imperative for enterprise and competition; through enjoyment and consumption; and through the depoliticisation of ethical debate by government and business.

Capitalism's New Clothes is ideal for students of sociology and for anyone worried about the ethics of capitalism or embarrassed by the enjoyments the system has afforded them.

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front cover of Totalled
Totalled
Salvaging the Future from the Wreckage of Capitalism
Colin Cremin
Pluto Press, 2015
Have you ever felt totaled? In this book, Colin Cremin tackles the overbearing truth that capitalism encompasses the totality of our social relations, having woven itself deeply into the fabric of what it means to be human. He shows how the capitalist system totalizes everything in its path, as evidenced in industrialized warfare, modern surveillance, commodification, and political control. With ever deepening social crises and ecological catastrophes this system threatens civilization as we know it. But among the wreckage of capitalism, Cremin argues, we can still find functioning parts, machines to be salvaged. To do so, it is imperative that we be able to both imagine and realize a future other than the apocalypticism forewarned by scientists, prescribed by economists, accommodated by politicians, and made into spectacle by the entertainment industry.
            Totalled maps the deteriorating socio-economic, political, and ecological conditions in which we live. Yet Cremin asks how a utopian possibility discernable in the power of human creation can be realized even though as a society we are bound up materially, ideologically, libidinally—totally—to the capitalist machine of destruction. Totalled concludes with a politically and economically grounded set of propositions on how we might begin to imagine such a possibility.
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