by Jonathan Howard
City Book Reviews
September 16th, 2011
The economic system that we’re all familiar with, the one that we currently find ourselves in, is Capitalism. Since the fall of the Soviet Empire and China’s economic reforms, there has been no opposing or alternative economic model on Earth. Despite its near universal usage, Capitalism has always had its detractors, professional and otherwise, who felt the system was broken, inefficient, wasteful, and deeply, deeply biased. These people’s voices haven’t had much chance to be heard in the past though, when things were good. The recent economic disaster and the resulting crash and our current recession have changed that. Now with people looking at the numerous crises approaching they wonder why the current model seems incapable of (or refuses to) handle them and they’ve start to look for alternatives.
“I’m saying that there are indeed visible concentrations of capitalist power, that the territorial state may be more than ever the point of concentration of capitalist power, that global capital needs the power of the state, and depends on this global system of multiple states.”
In Capitalism and Its Discontents Sasha Lilley collects interviews with fifteen eminent thinkers, economists, and political scientists on the Left—including such luminaries as Noam Chomsky, David Mcnally, and Ursula Huws. Their collected thoughts and wisdom on Capital’s failings and what the future might hold was not simple read but there isn’t a better time for it to be heard than now.