The Spectre of State Capitalism by Ilias Alami and Adam D. Dixon is an Open Access title in the DSA’s Critical Frontiers of Theory, Research, and Policy in International Development Studies series. It offers a comprehensive study of the ongoing reconfiguration of the state’s role as promoter, supervisor, shareholder-investor, and direct owner of capital across the world economy. This wide-ranging analysis makes the book especially timely, as highlighted in a recent blog exploring how its arguments resonate in the context of Trump: State Capitalist Mutations under Trump 2.0. State Capitalist Mutations under Trump 2.0.

The book is open access and free to read, available on the OUP website.

Since its publication last year, the book has been reviewed in Bloomberg, Counterpunch, The Times Literary Supplement, Nueva Revista, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, and Cambridge Review of International Affairs:

“A careful discussion of a topic often dealt with in platitudes and sound-bites… an excellent piece of scholarly work” J. D. Evans, New York University in DC.

Alami and Dixon “produce some astonishing figures to demonstrate how rapidly state capitalism has grown in the 21st century… The authors also invent an interesting concept — the “state-capitalism spiral.” Adrian Wooldridge, global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.

It has been shortlisted for two awards so far: