Capitalism and the Death Drive is a set of essays and interviews published between 2012 and 2020 by South Korean-born Swiss-German philosopher and cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han. The stress in these pieces is on such ideas as the “digital panopticon” of the internet, the surveillance state and our voluntary cooperation with it, the idea of the foreign, capitalism as death drive, and so on. Each is pervaded by a general hopelessness.

We are well trained in our culture not to speak of communism and love in the same breath, or indeed, of any kind of politics and love in the same breath, but Richard Gilman-Opalsky, author of The Communism of Love, defies this taboo; he cuts through the nonsensical idea of love as necessarily apolitical, and is especially against the idea of love as something to be isolated in the tiny ghetto of the romantic-erotic duo.

The title of this both intelligent and highly accessible book made me suspect it would simply advocate an anti-capitalist theology and present a vision of Jesus as a socialist. But in effect, Jesus and the Politics of Mammon by Hollis Phelps, does something a little different than simply presenting a socialist Christ.

Ronald Purser’s new book, McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality is a strong account of the commodification of mindfulness by the market, and presents a stunning takedown of a mindfulness that has been hijacked and manipulated by capitalist culture to neuter its political potential and make it useful to the corporate world.