New Books in Economics

A provocative examination of the ways our economy has been rigged by financialization, and the importance of games to our dangerous political moment. In an age when capitalism feels like an unwinnable game, extreme reactionary ideas and politics are on the rise. The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, Squid Game and much of reality TV are cultural reflections of a society of relentless, lonely competition, where each of us must become a player: a savvy risk-taker, a miniature corporation of one. But in a gamed economy we players feel played, and new forms of fascism promise harsh justice and revenge. This book theorizes the connections between the financialization of the capitalist economy, the gamification of our lives, and the rising threat of a uniquely twenty-first century form of fascistic politics. From vicious online swarmings to the QAnon conspiracy fantasy, from the siege of the US Capitol to the abuse of “free speech,” The Player and the Played: From Gamed Capitalism to 21st-Century Fascism with Max Haiven (MIT Press, 2026) analyzes the “playgrom” as a new form of extremist violence. Max Haiven explores how “derivative fascisms” both repeat and reinvent the terrors of the past in a financialized form. How have we learned to love the cheats who have power but loathe the cheats without it? It unpacks the worldbuilding (and world-destroying) urge of Silicon Valley. And it poses the urgent question: what is the antifascist game?
Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since the early 1980s. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds three PhDs in game studies (LMU Munich, University of Passau & University of Vechta). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm HNU, Germany, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section, and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter Game Studies Watchlist.

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As affordability crises once limited to coastal cities have spread across the broader United States, the history of home and land ownership has never been more relevant. In Property Values: The Rise and Fall of the American Homeowner (Princeton University Press, September 2026), Dr. Joshua Specht traces how ownership has challenged the nation’s politics and promise from the founding to the present day.

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The twenty-first century has seen major transformations in the US electricity sector—but while the use of coal power wanes and the need for renewable energy becomes more urgent, financial actors maintain a complicating influence on the trajectory of energy transition. Brokers of Power: The Financialization of the US Electricity System (University of Minnesota Press, 2026) identifies changing patterns of investment intertwined with the shift from state-regulated electricity monopolies to a market-driven price model and the embrace of wind and solar hookups to the grid.
Drawing from case studies such as catastrophic Winter Storm Uri that hit Texas in 2021 and in-depth interviews with people working in the electricity and financial sectors, Dr. Conor Harrison reveals how the various entanglements of private equity, investment banking, and financial modeling are shaping the future and raising the costs of this vital infrastructure. Today’s financial firms, he shows, are engaged in the electricity industry beyond matters of investment: they own electricity generation infrastructure, trade electricity on markets, capture federal renewable energy tax credits, and advise on electricity firm operating strategy.
Looking beyond technology and policy, Dr. Harrison interrogates what it means to have powerful financial institutions as the primary agents of change in the fraught and ongoing energy transition. A timely and invaluable contribution to the fields of geography, environmental studies, and the energy social sciences, Brokers of Power is a cautionary account delving into the complexities surrounding the push for decarbonization.
This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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How can we achieve lasting social and political equality for women? Dr. Leda Pérez tackles this thorny question in Searching for Democracy: Women, Domestic Work, and Social Reproduction in Latin America (Temple University Press, 2026) by interrogating egalitarianism in Latin America, where nearly 20% of women work in domestic service. She examines how women’s participation in society, labor, and politics continues to be conditioned by their relationship to domestic and care work.

Dr. Pérez argues that women’s relationship to these spheres of life is indicative of a nation’s development and democracy. She provides a comparative focus on the socio-cultural valuation of this labor and the experiences of women in Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and Uruguay, among other countries. Pérez asserts that it is only by changing sociocultural views on this “women’s work” that nations can create political change, foster equitable legislation, and ensure implementation of effective policies that benefit women.

Searching for Democracy shows why real and lasting equality cannot be achieved without fully enfranchising women in the lowest tiers of employment and closing the equality gap among women. Dr. Pérez’s models for gender equality are relevant for women around the world.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
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“The general thrust of capitalist policy in this period aims at the intensified imposition of work in response to ongoing struggle against it.”

—Harry Cleaver, “Work Is Still the Central Issue: New Words for New Worlds,” in Points of Departure, ed. Robert Ovetz and Kevin Van Meter, p. 35.

What changes if we begin the history of capitalism not with what capital does to workers, but with what workers force capital to do?

This reversal helps set Harry Cleaver’s approach to Marxism apart from more traditional accounts of capitalism and labor. In Points of Departure: Refusal of Work and the Crisis of Capitalism, editors Robert Ovetz and Kevin Van Meter bring together Cleaver’s writings from several decades, including hard-to-find and previously untranslated work.

The first volume in Common Notions’ new Class Compositions series presents Cleaver’s work not simply as theory, but as a practical way of making sense of everyday struggles from the worker’s standpoint. The refusal of work, unwaged labor, class composition, capitalist crisis, and self-valorization take on renewed significance amid contemporary struggles over work and organization. Greek and Turkish translations are also in the works.

Listeners may know Cleaver from his landmark 1979 book Reading Capital Politically. For more than five decades, he has helped develop what became known as autonomist Marxism, an approach that places working-class self-activity at the center of its analysis. In this interview Ovetz and Van Meter discuss the traditions from which his work emerged, and what they hope a new generation of readers might do with it in their search for alternatives.

Although more conventional accounts of political economy often begin with companies restructuring workplaces, introducing new technologies, moving investment, or tightening workplace discipline. Cleaver instead, turns the perspective around by asking what forms of worker resistance may have compelled capital to make those changes in the first place.

That reversal in turn raises questions the editors grapple with, such as: How do everyday acts of resistance become collective power? How can we demonstrate that corporate restructuring is actually a response to worker resistance, and what might other approaches add to or supplement Cleaver’s inversion of class perspective? And when workers create organizations of their own, how can those institutions preserve autonomy without hardening into less responsive bureaucracies?

Drawing on concepts like workers’ inquiry, workplace cooperation, self-valorization, cooperatives, as well as the significance of Zapatistas, we consider what it means to move beyond refusing existing forms of work toward creating new forms of collective life.
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