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Book Talk: Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World

Banks have taken a backseat since the global financial crisis over a decade ago. Today, our new financial masters are asset managers, like Blackstone and BlackRock. And they don’t just own financial assets. The roads we drive on; the pipes that supply our drinking water; the farmland that provides our food; energy systems for electricity and heat; hospitals, schools, and even the homes in which many of us live—all now swell asset managers’ bulging investment portfolios. As the owners of more and more of the basic building blocks of everyday life, asset managers shape the lives of each and every one of us in profound and disturbing ways.

Join us for a book talk with author Brett Christophers, David Harvey, Clara Mattei and Doug Henwood as they peel back the veil on “asset manager society” and the business model of making quick profits instead of long-term investments.

BOOK LAUNCH: A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse with David Harvey, Kanishka Goonewardena and Nancy Fraser

David Harvey’s Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse builds upon his widely acclaimed companions to the first and second volumes of Capital in a way that will reach as wide an audience as possible. Marx’s stated ambition for this text – where he was thinking aloud about some of possible metamorphoses of capitalism – is to reveal “the exact development of the concept of capital as the fundamental concept of modern economics, just as capital itself is the foundation of bourgeois society.” While respecting Marx’s desire to “bring out all the contradictions of bourgeois production, as well as the boundary where it drives beyond itself,” David Harvey also pithily illustrates the relevance of Marx’s text to understanding the troubled state of contemporary capitalism.

On March 7, 2023 we held a conversation between David Harvey, Kanishka Goonewardena and Nancy Fraser to celebrate the launch of A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse.

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