Radical Demon

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Remaking Scarcity

From Capitalist Inefficiency to Economic Democracy
Costas Panayotakis

Neoclassical and neoliberal economics tell us material scarcity is an inevitable product of an insatiable human nature. Costas Panayotakis argues that scarcity results from capitalism’s own inability to make rational use of the productive potential at our disposal. Remaking Scarcity is a powerful challenge to economic orthodoxy, asserting the core principle of economic democracy as the ultimate solution to scarcity and ecological crisis.
With an Introduction by Joel Kovel, editor, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism

Costas Panayotakis teaches Sociology at New York City College of Technology.

Subject areas:Humanities, Social Sciences, Political Economy, Politics, Economics, Professions, Environmental Studies

Extremely timely ... Panayotakis develops a critical approach to an issue that is central to neo-classical economics but rarely the subject of critical analysis.

- Molly Scott Cato, Reader in Green Economics, Cardiff University

Capitalist-produced scarcity proves to be an extraordinarily enlightening vantage point from which to analyse both capitalism and its socialist alternatives. Panayotakis’s book provides an extremely scholarly, insightful and well-argued contribution – with ecology and feminism given the attention often denied them – to this crucially important literature. Highly Recommended

- Bertell Ollman, author of Dance of the Dialectic: Marx’s Method
This book is recommended for the following courses on this site
  • Introductory Historical Materialism (demonstration outline)
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    The Birth of Capitalism

    A Twentieth-Century Perspective
    Henry Heller

    In the light of the deepening crisis of capitalism and continued non-Western capitalist accumulation, Henry Heller re-examines the debates surrounding the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe and elsewhere. Focusing on arguments about the origin, nature and sustainability of capitalism, Heller offers a new reading of the historical evidence and a critical interrogation of the transition debate. He advances the idea that capitalism must be understood as a political as well as an economic entity. This book breathes new life into the scholarship, taking issue with the excessively economistic approach of Robert Brenner, which has gained increasing support over the last ten years. Heller concludes that the future of capitalism is more threatened than ever before. The new insights in this book make it essential reading for engaged students and scholars of political economy and history.

    Henry Heller is Professor of History at the University of Manitoba, Canada. He is the author of The Cold War and the New Imperialism: A Global History, 1945-2005 (2006); The Bourgeois Revolution in France (2006) and Labour, Science and Technology in France 1500-1620 (1996).

    Subject areas:Humanities, History, Social Sciences, Politics

    Heller places the development of the state at the centre of the birth of capitalism. For Heller, Brenner is guilty of economic determinism in his disregard of the importance of the state as “the ultimate linchpin of capitalism”. By placing the state back into the centre of the analysis of the emergence of capitalism, Heller suggests we overcome the false contrast between the “European” path to capitalism, which is caricatured as a purely economic development, and the alternative development of capitalism elsewhere driven by state intervention. The state was important in nurturing capitalism in its beginnings and in overseeing its development through mercantilism. As well as helping to reject an overly economistic view of capitalism and a false distinction between economics and politics, Heller’s book emphasises the continued importance of the state in capitalism today.

    - Sarah Young, Socialist Review, December 2011
    This book is recommended for the following courses on this site
  • Introductory Historical Materialism (demonstration outline)

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