A LOT MORE

Owning the Future – power and progress in an age of crisis Adrienne Buller and Matthew Lawrence (2022)

In many senses, the contemporary capitalist system is ruthlessly effective, doing precisely what it is designed to do: accumulate, enclose, concentrate and expand for the benefit of those who own. It has generated extraordinary wealth, but in doing so has made its hallmark poverty amid unprecedented plenty. Now, the same processes of concentration, enclosure, and extraction built into its design are beginning to exhaust the very sources of social and ecological wealth that capitalist economies rely upon to reproduce themselves. The first challenge is to imagine this agenda – and the second to identify the sites of agency and the strategies that can realise it. We believe a future of genuine security for all, one that has broken decisively with the primacy of private property over planetary stability and human and non-human well-being, is wholly attainable (if not easily won). It may be true that ‘it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’ – and indeed, this may be the choice we are facing. It’s not, however, impossible, particularly if we recognise that the world we want is founded on interests and values that the majority share: democracy, justice, equality, freedom. The seeds of this different world are already there. To that end, we hope what follows can contribute to the cohering of such a vision. It is neither a manifesto nor an exhaustive exposition of all that is wrong with our economies and societies, and what collective effort could make right. We do hope, however, that by exploring the role of particular forms of ownership in fettering our potential, it can be a resource to help marry the principles of a radically different vision for the world with the agency of immediate tools and points of leverage to set us on that path

The God Test – AI and the coming cosmic reckoning Robert Wright (2026)

Michael Young – social science and the british left 1945-70 Lise Butler (2020)

Boom, Bust – house prices, banking and the depression of 2010 Fred Harrison 
(1999)

The Future of Change – how technology shapes social revolutions Ray Brescia 
(2020)

What I hope to do in this book is provide a realistic assessment of contemporary communications technologies and the promise they may hold for those interested in bringing about social change. I borrow from both the past and the present, from theory and lived experience, to try to make sense of the social innovation moment we are in today and the moments to come, to understand the relationship between communications technology and social change so that those looking to advance change have a clear-eyed view of the capacities, and potential risks, of harnessing technology to bring about such change.

Different Germans, Different Germanies – new transatlantic perspectives 
ed K Jurausch et al (2016)

Joan Robinson Harcourt and Kerr (2009) Robinson was a famous Cambridge 
economist of the 1930s

JM Keynes Hyman Minsky (2008)

Universal Man – the lives of JM Keynes Richard Davenport-Hines (2015)

Ricardo’s Law – house prices and the great tax clawback scam Fred Harrison 
(2006) https://www.youtube.com/@geophilos

Reading Popular Narrative – a source book ed Bob Ashley (1997)

Albert Einstein’s Why Socialism – the enduring relevance of his classic essay 
ed John Bellamy Foster (2025) 

Apostles of Development – 6 economists and the world they made 
David Engerman (2025)

Bombay native Jagdish Bhagwati is a prolific economist of international trade at Columbia University with a chip permanently implanted on his shoulder. His innovative work on the benefits of international trade—which led him to become a prominent advocate for globalization—remains a touchstone in international economics. His academic articles and his writings for broader audiences have won him wide recognition, including just about every honor except the one he most covets: the Nobel Prize.

The ambitious Pakistani Mahbub ul Haq lived two professional lives. In odd-numbered decades (1970s, 1990s), he won international acclaim from liberals and progressives for redefining development at the World Bank (spearheading Basic Human Needs) and the UN (formulating the Human Development Index). But he was excoriated at home for his service to his nation’s military dictatorships in even-numbered decades (1960s, 1980s).

Lal Jayawardena, a Conversazione Club member at Cambridge, was born to an upwardly mobile Sinhalese family in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). He served his country as both an economic official and a diplomat. He is remembered for establishing a UN development think tank and for being an architect of the modern Sri Lankan economy—an honor that lost some of its luster after the economic meltdown in summer 2022.

Amartya Sen, also a Conversazione Club member, is one of very few in the uniquely Indian category of “VVIPs” when he returns home—but more regularly commutes between Harvard and Cambridge universities. His work reorienting welfare economics won him a Nobel 6 apostles of development Prize in Economics, the first recipient born outside North America or Europe. He has consistently engaged, even shaped, the issues of his age. Given his self-described “skepticism about what could be achieved by activism,” he usually addressed social issues from the confines of his study.

Manmohan Singh, born in a poor village in what is now Pakistan, became a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat, a role that suited his retiring demeanor. Over the course of his long career, he held all the leading economic posts in the Indian government, serving unobtrusively but effectively. He then entered the limelight in 1991 for spearheading economic reforms that reversed more than a generation of Indian economic policy. A dozen years later, he became Prime Minister, among India’s longest serving.

Rehman Sobhan, born to the English-speaking upper crust of Bengali society, became an “ideological Bengali,” devoting himself to East Bengal, a place he had rarely visited with a language he didn’t speak. During his decade-plus at Dhaka University, he joined the movement that earned Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan. After stints in the Bangladesh government, he served, and indeed still serves, as a figure of great national interest

The Continuum Companion to Anarchism ed Ruth Kinna 2010

Flourishing Together – Karl Marx’s vision of the good society Jan Kandiyali 
(2024)

Ulrich Beck – pioneer in cosmopolitan sociology and risk society Ulrich Beck 
(2014)

The Metamorphosis of the World Ulrich Beck (2016) 

https://resolutereader.blogspot.com/2025/06/olivier-de-schutter-poverty-of-growth.
html

The Hegemony of Growth – the OECD and the making of the econmic growth 
paradigm Matthias Schmelzer (2016)

UN Report on Eradicating Poverty https://docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/56/61 (2026)

Money – Myths etc Mary Mellor 2021
After Capitalism Schweikert 2012
The Lost Future and how to reclaim it Jan Zieloniski 2023

The Production of Money – how to break the power of bankers Ann Pettifor (2017)

Fully a year later in September 2008 when Lehman Brothers imploded, it dawned on the wider public that the international financial system was broken. By then it was too late. The world was perilously close to complete financial breakdown. The fear that bank customers would not be able to draw cash from ATMs was real. On the Wednesday after Lehman fell, Mohamed El-Erian, CEO of PIMCO, asked his wife to go to the ATM and withdraw as much cash as possible. When she asked why, he said it was because he feared that US banks might not open.1 Blue-chip industrial companies called the US Treasury to explain they had trouble funding themselves. Over those hair-raising weeks, we lived through a terrifying economic experiment that very nearly did not work.

Given this backdrop, it came as no surprise that policymakers, politicians and commentators had no coherent response to make to the crisis. Many on the left of the political spectrum were just as stunned. Like most economists, they seemed to have a blind spot for the finance sector.

Instead their focus was on the economics of the real world: taxation, markets, international trade, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, employment policy, the environment, the public sector. Very few had paid attention to the vast, expanding and intangible activities of the deregulated private finance sector. As a result, very few on the Left (taken as a whole, with clear exceptions), nor the Right for that matter, had a sound analysis of the causes of the crisis, and therefore of the policies that would need to be put in place to regain control over the great public good that is the monetary system.

Bankers, too, were at first stunned into submission, desperate for taxpayer-funded bailouts and, even for a moment, humbled. But that was not to last. After the bailouts, politicians faced a vast policy vacuum. G8 politicians, led by Britain’s Gordon Brown, at first co-operated at an international level to stabilise the system. That co-operation and an internationally co-ordinated stimulus quickly evaporated. Worldwide, politicians and policy-makers fell back on, or were once more talked into, orthodox policies for stabilisation, most notably fiscal consolidation. As Naomi Klein had warned, many in the finance sector quickly understood the crisis as an opportunity to reinforce the global financial system’s grip on elected governments and markets. After some hesitation they jumped at this opportunity, in contrast to much of the Left, or the social democratic parties.

No fundamental changes were made to the international financial architecture. The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision tinkered with post-crisis reforms, but made no suggestions for structural changes to the international financial architecture and system. Neoliberalism – the dominant economic model – prevailed everywhere. Paul Mason wrote a book in 2009 called Meltdown with the subtitle: The End of the Age of Greed. How wrong he was. Ten years now from the start of the 2007 recession, while inequality polarizes societies, the world is dominated by an oligopoly greedily accumulating obscene levels of wealth. And despite the initial meltdown, the global financial crisis has not come to an end. Instead it has rolled around from the epicentre of the Anglo-American economies to the Eurozone and is now focused on so-called ‘emerging markets’. Private bankers and other financial institutions are gorging on cheap debt issued by central bankers, and have in turn dumped costly debt on firms, households and individuals. The publics in western economies have suffered the consequences. At the time of writing, millions are in open revolt, backing populist, mostly right-wing political candidates. They hope that these ‘strong men and women’ will protect them from hard-headed neoliberal policies for unfettered global markets in finance, trade and labour.

The Second Machine Age Bjonsylvsson and McAfee (2014)

A Nation in Crisis – division, conflict and capitalism in the UK Neville Kirk 
(2024) A book to which I wish to return

Owning the Future – power and property in an age of crisis Adrienne Buller 
and Matthew Lawrence (2026)

Modernism in the Streets – a life and times in essays Marshall Berman (2015)

The Politics of Authenticity – radical individualism and the emergence of 
modern society Marshall Berman (1970)

The Contentious French Charles Tilly (1986)

Land Power Michael Albertus (2025)

Rewiring the State O’Donnoll Report (2025) 35pp
Rewiring the State Select Ctte Report (2026) 70pp

Crude Capitalism – oil, corporate power and the making of the world market 
Adam Hannieh (2024)

The Death of the Liberal Class Chris Hedges (2010)

War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning Chris Hedges (2004)

Ambivalence  Brian Dillon (2026)

The Crisis of German Ideology George Mosse (1964)

From Weimar to Hitler – studies in the dissolution of the Weimar Republic 
and the establishment of the Third Reich ed Beck and Jones (2019) 

A Confusion of Mandarins Ron Culley (2022)

The Spectre of State Capitalism Ilias Alami and Adam Dixon (2024)

Together – a manifesto against a heartless world Ece Temelkuran (2021)

Nation of Strangers Ece Temelkuran (2026)

Nonesuch Francis Spufford (2026) novel

The Myth of Chinese Capitalism - the worker, the factory and the future of the 
world Dexter Roberts ( 2020)

The Ethics of Ambiguity Simone de Beauvoir (1948) 

Critique of Modernity Alain Touraine (1995) 

What is Democracy? Alain Touraine (1997)

To Change China Jonathan Spence (1969) about the missionaries

Vassal State – how America runs Britain  Angus Hanton (2024)
https://socialistalternative.info/2025/03/05/book-review-vassal-state-by-angus-hanton/ 

Complex Thought – an overview of Edgar Morin's Intellectual journey 
ed Heath-Carpentier (2023)

To Change All Worlds – critical theory from Marx to Marcuse Carl Trueman (2024)

The year in which this book was completed—2023—was the eightieth anniversary of C. S. Lewis delivering the lectures that later became the small but important volume, The Abolition of Man. In 1943, Lewis astutely identified a deep anthropological crisis facing the West. To put it more bluntly, the West was losing its ability to define what it means to be a human person. And if that was true in 1943, how much more so is it today, when a basic anthropological question such as “What is a woman?” is proving too complicated for some of the finest public minds to answer with any conviction or clarity? This is where critical theory becomes important. Once we step back from pressing political concerns, it is clear that the critical theorists, from an early figure such as Theodor Adorno to later figures such as Gail Rubin, are all wrestling with the question of what, if anything, it means to be human? Critical theory is, of course, an umbrella term for a variety of different and even incompatible approaches. The Marxism of an Adorno is not the queer theory of a Rubin. But all share this in common: a basic preoccupation with anthropological questions. This is not to defuse the contemporary political significance of critical theories. All critical theories—at least, all truly critical theories—are revolutionary. But it is to set them in the context of our times and to see them as one set of responses to that age-old question which has in the flux and volatility of modernity taken on peculiar urgency: What is man? Is he defined by making and producing or by consuming? Are biological relationships important or not? What does the good life look like? How has technology changed our understanding of human nature? Has it liberated us or enslaved us? Is sexual desire part of our core identity? Does the universe have a moral shape? Is there such a thing as “human nature”? Are we free agents or merely functions of broader cultural forces? And, of course, the pointed question so succinctly expressed by Pilate: What is truth? Christians wrestle with these questions, intensely so in our chaotic contemporary world. And critical theorists do so as well. If nothing else, we share with them a set of serious questions about the human condition that demand serious answers.

Confusion to our Enemies - selected journalism of Arnold Kemp 1939-2002 ed J Kemp (2012) 

The Price of Peace Zachary Carter (2020)
Today, Keynes is remembered as an economist because it was through the field of 
economics that his ideas exercised their greatest influence. College students are 
taught that he urged governments to accept budget deficits in a recession
and spend money when the private sector cannot. But his economic agenda was 
always deployed in service of a broader, more ambitious social project. Keynes 
was a philosopher of war and peace, the last of the Enlightenment intellectuals 
who pursued political theory, economics, and ethics as a unified design. 
He was a man whose chief project was not taxation or government spending 
but the survival of what he called “civilisation”—the international cultural milieu 
that connected a British Treasury man to a Russian ballerina. A decade after 
Genoa, when a reporter asked him if the world had ever seen anything like 
the unfolding Great Depression, Keynes replied in perfect sincerity: “Yes. It was 
called the Dark Ages, and it lasted 400 years.” Keynes first saw the darkness 
encroaching at the outbreak of war in 1914. He gave his opponents different 
names—“militarists” and “imperialists” in the years before the Second World War, 
“brigand powers” and even “enemies of the human race” in those that followed. 
Any idea or tactic was fair game so long as it protected his community of art, 
letters, and fine living from the march of authoritarianism. At different stages of 
his career, he embraced everything from free trade to stiff tariffs as potential 
remedies. His best-known work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest 
and Money, was not just an effort to provide theoretical justification for public works
 projects but a frontal assault in his crusade against militarism—a book he hoped 
would be used as kind of tool kit for anti-imperialist policymaking. “If nations can 
learn to provide themselves with full employment by their domestic policy,” he 
wrote in the book’s conclusion, “there need be no important economic forces 
calculated to set the interest of one country against that of its neighbours.” 
To his students at the University of Cambridge in the 1930s, many of whom would 
go on to implement his ideas around the world, the book contained an entire 
philosophy of life. In the words of one such student, David Bensusan-Butt,
“The General Theory was to us less a work of economics theory than a Manifesto 
for Reason and Cheerfulness, the literary embodiment of a man who, to those 
who ever saw him, remains the very genius of intellect and enjoyment. It gave a 
rational basis and moral appeal for a faith in the possible health and sanity of 
contemporary mankind.” That was not an easy belief to sustain amid the rise of 
fascism in the 1930s. Nor is it easy to maintain in our own time, as new bastions 
of authoritarian extremism consolidate power across Europe, the United States, 
Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. But it is an essential faith for any who 
hope to address the world’s problems through persuasion and the written word
—and a conviction fundamental to the practice of democracy itself. 
As democratic institutions again find themselves under assault in the early 
twenty-first century, there is no intellectual from the twentieth century whose 
thought—its triumphs, its failures, and its fragilities—is more relevant than that 
of John Maynard Keynes.

America Against America Wang Huning (1991)

There are eleven chapters in this book to which I would like to point to here: the uneven development of society and its various features; the values that dominate political life and their flux; the diverse character of the nation and its social efficacy; the formal and informal mechanisms that regulate people's social activities; the political forces active in society and their relations; the democratic and non-democratic elements in election campaigns; top-down political operations and their characteristics; non-political coordination mechanisms and socialized regulation; the reproduction of culture, values and even institutions and the connection with education; the role of ideas in the development and management of society; the various undercurrents that threaten future development. Although these eleven chapters contain quite a few aspects, the object is a large country, so the facets actually covered are only a limited aspect of American society. From this perspective, I think the book falls short on two counts. First: The book is limited in its coverage and cannot possibly cover all aspects of every tree in the American forest, so it should be said that there are limitations. It cannot be said that these aspects adequately reflect the subject matter of this book. I wanted to do a "peek-a-boo" thing, but the question is whether the "peek-a-boo" was found. I think we have found some, but not many. The good thing is that we can find a lot of other literature that can make up for the shortcomings of this book. Second, I analyze American society as an observer rather than a researcher. Some of the data and materials, though sourced, do not meet the standards of rigorous statistics. I am afraid that some of the issues discussed may be subjective, or even erroneous. Therefore, I hope that people will read this book from a macro-sociological point of view, rather than treating it as microbiology.

Parenti was an independent (in all senses of the word) academic, blackballed by 
academia by virtue of his activism who was a prolific writer eg

• Inventing Reality – the politics of news media Michael Parenti (1986)

• Make Believe Media – the politics of entertainment Michael Parenti (1991)

• Dirty Truths Michael Parenti (1996) 

• Blackshirts and Reds Michael Parenti (1997)

This book invites those immersed in the prevailing orthodoxy of “democratic capitalism” to entertain iconoclastic views, to question the shibboleths of free-market mythology and the persistence of both right and left anticommunism, and to consider anew, with a receptive but not uncritical mind, the historic efforts of the much maligned Reds and other revolutionaries.

The political orthodoxy that demonizes communism permeates the entire political perspective. Even people on the Left have internalized the liberal/conservative ideology that equates fascism and communism as equally evil totalitaran twins, two major mass movements of the twentieth century. This book attempts to show the enormous differences between fascism and communism both past and present, both in theory and practice, especially in regard to questions of social equality, private capital accumulation, and class interest. The orthodox mythology also would have us believe that the Western democracies (with the United States leading the way) have opposed both totalitarian systems with equal vigor. In fact, U.S. leaders have been dedicated above all to making the world safe for global corporate investment and the private proõt system. Pursuant of this goal, they have used fascism to protect capitalism, while claiming to be saving democracy from communism.

History for Tomorrow Roman Kznaric (2024)

The insights of history are a shared treasury for the future of humanity. We

live in an era dominated by the present tense, which vastly undervalues the

accumulated experience of the past as a guide for where we go next. Faced

with the collective challenges of the twenty-first century, from the threat of

ecological breakdown and growing wealth inequality to the risks of

artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, we are failing to draw on the

immense store of wisdom bequeathed by generation upon generation of our

forebears. There is an urgent need to look backwards to help chart a way

forwards.

Ecocivilization – making a world that works for all Jeremy Lent (2026)

The only way to structure society, it is assumed, is in the form of growth-based consumer capitalism—a system in which corporate profits ultimately drive the decisions that affect the lives of everyone on the planet, the health of the living Earth, and the destiny of future generations. Virtually all policy proposals under serious consideration to fix our grave problems work within the framework of the current system rather than examining the system itself.

This book constitutes the dethronement of TINA. There is, in fact, an

alternative.

A FAULTY OPERATING SYSTEM

The alternative we’ll be exploring, though, is not the kind that Thatcher, Reagan, and countless adherents of market-based capitalism had been railing against. Back in those days, and in fact throughout the entire twentieth century, the battle lines were clearly drawn between capitalism on one side and socialism (or, in its extreme form, communism) on the other. A society could either be organized primarily by the market or by the state. There were, of course, many countries that attempted a blend between the two, most notably European nations after the Second World War that explored possibilities of a welfare state with a meaningful safety net for those who fell through the holes ripped open by the market. In the United States, after FDR’s New Deal, the state played a significant role in people’s lives. But the choice was always between the poles of market and state, closing off any other possibility for organizing human activity.

Surprisingly perhaps, these opposing sides shared considerable common ground. Both prized their particular ideology over the dignity of normal human lives: Submit, people were told, either to the invisible hand of the market or the authoritarian fist of the state. Both worshiped at the altar of economic growth as the supreme aspiration of policymaking. And perhaps most consequentially, both viewed the entire Earth as nothing more than a resource to exploit in the interest of pursuing that growth.

This pursuit of endless growth on a planet with limited resources has propelled human civilization onto a terrifying trajectory. The uncontrolled climate crisis is the most obvious danger: Even as we reel from the impact of little more than one degree Celsius of global heating, the world’s current policies have us on track for a staggering three degrees increase by the end of this century—and climate scientists publish dire warnings that amplifying feedbacks could make things far worse than even these projections.

But even if the climate crisis were somehow brought under control, continued untrammeled economic growth in future decades will bring us face-to-face with a slew of further existential threats. Our civilization is already running at forty percent above its sustainable capacity. We’re rapidly depleting the Earth’s forests, animals, insects, fish, freshwater, and even the topsoil we require to grow our crops. Animal populations worldwide have declined by a staggering 73 percent since 1970. In the oceans, coral reefs are on track to be virtually annihilated by the middle of this century. At this rate, we’re well on the way to causing the sixth great extinction of species since life began on Earth—except this is the first driven by the actions of a single species. Surveying this devastation across the board, in 2017 over fifteen thousand scientists from 184 countries issued an ominous warning to humanity that time is running out: “Soon it will be too late,” they wrote, “to shift course away from our failing trajectory.”

Look around the natural world, and you will see fractal patterns everywhere. From microscopic living structures to the entire Earth system, nature uses a fractal design with similar patterns manifesting at different scales. You can see them in the shapes of tree branches, coastlines, cloud formations, lung brachia, and neural networks, to name just a few.

Ecologies are themselves fractal, with tiny cells that are part of an organism, which is nested in a population, which is embedded in an ecosystem, which is integrated into the living Earth. In all cases, the longterm health of the larger system requires the flourishing of each of its parts.

This universal principle of fractal flourishing inspires the ultimate objective of an ecocivilization: to create the conditions in which the flourishing of each of us naturally contributes to the greater wellbeing of the systems in which we’re embedded.

Lent’s Conclusion

The Japanese experience is the poster child for a decidedly grim theory of transformative change in history laid out compellingly by historian Walter Scheidel in The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Scheidel’s thesis is as simple as it is disheartening. Stable times, he argues, invariably cause elites to accumulate wealth at the expense of ordinary people. Historically, he maintains, only cataclysmic systemic shocks have reduced inequality, in the form of what he calls “the Four Horsemen of Leveling”: war, revolution, pandemics, and state failure. Even these four “horsemen” only achieve leveling if they are apocalyptic in scale, rupturing society’s bonds with extraordinary levels of violence, suffering, and misery. Scheidel’s research is extensive and authoritative. If his thesis is correct, the implications are daunting. It suggests that the only pathway to an ecocivilization is a blood-soaked one, littered with bodies. In the words of historian Roman Krznaric, “no historical thesis could be more disempowering,” because it renders futile all well-intentioned efforts to transform society by peaceful means. Is apocalypse, indeed, our only gateway to a better future, or are there alternative routes that might avert calamitous suffering? The bulk of this book has sketched the contours of an attractive potential future for humanity and the living Earth—one that creates conditions for all to flourish. In this final section, we’ll investigate how we might possibly get from here to there. How can we transform our currently ruinous system into one that’s beneficial for all? What are the most effective strategies that might enable such a transition to happen?

The Alibi of Capital – how we broke the earth to steal the future on the promise to get a better tomorrow Timothy Mitchell (2026)

The aim of this book is to ask how we came to organise collective life on the principle of the impoverishment of the future; explore the development of this principle in the destruction of rivers, the colonising of territories, the expansion of cities, the building of infrastructure, and the burning of carbon; see how lives today are encumbered by the repayment of earlier extractions; and connect this mode of impoverishing the many and enriching the few to the climate crisis. Its aim is also to examine the political and economic language that developed to describe and order these forms of life – terms like capitalism, technology, finance, the economy and its growth – and ask whether they are adequate for making sense of how the impoverishment operates and of our inability to act in the face of climate breakdown.

Rather than seeing capital as a relation to the future, the alibi substitutes an old view of capital as funds that have been saved up from the past, to be loaned to entrepreneurs, typically to invest in the machines or technology required to make more money. In the popular imagination, and many economists’ models, this technical equipment comes to stand for capital itself. The windfalls and interest payments accrued by investors and entrepreneurs can then be described as the reward given to those whose apparent ‘savings’ have been used to grow more wealth – rather than the charge imposed by investment funds and financial institutions that, thanks to their state-guaranteed privileges and protections, organise the command of payments from the future.

In other chapters of this book, we will introduce a number of terms for understanding the place of economics in both facilitating and obfuscating the capture of the future. These include the idea of ‘technopolitics’, meaning an approach to studying politics and political economy that treats technical and material processes not merely as the object of political and economic analysis but as the arrangements through which our politics takes shape; ‘capitalisation’ and ‘economisation’, referring to the ways in which goods and activities are captured and made calculable; the ‘EconoCon’, referring to the production of ‘the economy’, by analogy with Michel Foucault’s reading of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, as a device for ordering desire and managing the future; and ‘oikodicy’, by analogy with the theological concept of ‘theodicy’, for understanding the role of economics in the justification of human suffering.

For now, however, let us stay with the simpler idea of Uber. Despite the evidence to the contrary, economists continue to attribute the extracting of future rents to supposed improvements in technology. In the case of Uber, the firm employed its own economists to describe the increasing command of surplus as a customer benefit. The company’s monopoly provided the private data through which such claims could be made. In setting passenger fares and drivers’ wages, Uber benefited from exclusive control of the information gathered from every ride taken. This enabled the firm to adjust charges according to an algorithm that calculated how low drivers’ wages could be pushed, or how high passenger fares increased, to maximise its own share at every moment. Known as ‘surge pricing’, this evasion of fare regulation and minimum wage payments was promoted as the technological source of new value. The proprietary data from millions of private fare payers was used to construct the argument.

EIGHT MORE BOOKS

I start today's post with an interesting book written some 35 years ago by a member of China's politburo

America Against America Wang Huning (1991)

There are eleven chapters in this book, and I would like to briefly point to

here:

• the uneven development of society and its various features;

• the values that dominate political life and their flux;

• the diverse character of the nation and its social efficacy;

• the formal and informal mechanisms that regulate people's social activities;

• the political forces active in society and their relations;

• the democratic and non-democratic elements in election campaigns;

• top-down political operations and their characteristics;

• non-political coordination mechanisms and socialized regulation;

• the reproduction of culture, values and even institutions and the connection with education;

• the role of ideas in the development and management of society;

• the various undercurrents that threaten future development.

Although these eleven chapters contain quite a few aspects, the object is a

large country, so the facets actually covered are only a limited aspect of

American society. From this perspective, I think the book falls short on two

counts.

First: The book is limited in its coverage and cannot possibly cover all

aspects of every tree in the American forest, so it should be said that there

are limitations. It cannot be said that these aspects adequately reflect the

subject matter of this book. I wanted to do a "peek-a-boo" thing, but the question is whether the "peek-a-boo" was found. I think we have found some, but not many. The good thing is that we can find a lot of other literature that can make up for the shortcomings of this book.

Second, I analyze American society as an observer rather than a researcher.

Some of the data and materials, though sourced, do not meet the standards

of rigorous statistics. I am afraid that some of the issues discussed may be

subjective, or even erroneous. Therefore, I hope that people will read this

book from a macro-sociological point of view, rather than treating it as

microbiology.

Parenti was an independent (in all senses of the word) academic, blackballed by academia by virtue of his activism but who was a prolific writer eg

• Inventing Reality – the politics of news media Michael Parenti (1986)

• Make Believe Media – the politics of entertainment Michael Parenti (1991)

• Dirty Truths Michael Parenti (1996) 

• Blackshirts and Reds Michael Parenti (1997)

This book invites those immersed in the prevailing orthodoxy of “democratic

capitalism” to entertain iconoclastic views, to question the shibboleths of free-market mythology and the persistence of both right and left anticommunism, and to consider anew, with a receptive but not uncritical mind, the historic eôorts of the much maligned Reds and other revolutionaries.

The political orthodoxy that demonizes communism permeates the entire political perspective. Even people on the Left have internalized the liberal/conservative ideology that equates fascism and communism as equally evil totalitarian twins, two major mass movements of the twentieth century. This book attempts to show the enormous differences between fascism and communism both past and present, both in theory and practice, especially in regard to questions of social equality, private capital accumulation, and class interest.

The orthodox mythology also would have us believe that the Western democracies (with the United States leading the way) have opposed both totalitarian systems with equal vigor. In fact, U.S. leaders have been dedicated above all to making the world safe for global corporate investment and the private proõt system. Pursuant of this goal, they have used fascism to protect capitalism, while claiming to be saving democracy from communism.

History for Tomorrow Roman Kznaric (2024)

The insights of history are a shared treasury for the future of humanity. We

live in an era dominated by the present tense, which vastly undervalues the

accumulated experience of the past as a guide for where we go next. Faced

with the collective challenges of the twenty-first century, from the threat of

ecological breakdown and growing wealth inequality to the risks of

artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, we are failing to draw on the

immense store of wisdom bequeathed by generation upon generation of our

forebears. There is an urgent need to look backwards to help chart a way

forwards.

Ecocivilization – making a world that works for all Jeremy Lent (2026)

The only way to structure society, it is assumed, is in the form of growth-based consumer capitalism—a system in which corporate profits ultimately drive the decisions that affect the lives of everyone on the planet, the health of the living Earth, and the destiny of future generations. Virtually all policy proposals under serious consideration to fix our grave problems work within the framework of the current system rather than examining the system itself. This book constitutes the dethronement of TINA. There is, in fact, an alternative.

A FAULTY OPERATING SYSTEM

The alternative we’ll be exploring, though, is not the kind that Thatcher, Reagan, and countless adherents of market-based capitalism had been railing against. Back in those days, and in fact throughout the entire twentieth century, the battle lines were clearly drawn between capitalism on one side and socialism (or, in its extreme form, communism) on the other. A society could either be organized primarily by the market or by the state.

There were, of course, many countries that attempted a blend between the two, most notably European nations after the Second World War that explored possibilities of a welfare state with a meaningful safety net for those who fell through the holes ripped open by the market. In the United States, after FDR’s New Deal, the state played a significant role in people’s lives. But the choice was always between the poles of market and state, closing off any other possibility for organizing human activity. Surprisingly perhaps, these opposing sides shared considerable common ground. Both prized their particular ideology over the dignity of normal human lives: Submit, people were told, either to the invisible hand of the market or the authoritarian fist of the state. Both worshiped at the altar of economic growth as the supreme aspiration of policymaking. And perhaps most consequentially, both viewed the entire Earth as nothing more than a resource to exploit in the interest of pursuing that growth.

This pursuit of endless growth on a planet with limited resources has propelled human civilization onto a terrifying trajectory. The uncontrolled climate crisis is the most obvious danger: Even as we reel from the impact of little more than one degree Celsius of global heating, the world’s current policies have us on track for a staggering three degrees increase by the end of this century—and climate scientists publish dire warnings that amplifying feedbacks could make things far worse than even these projections.

But even if the climate crisis were somehow brought under control, continued untrammeled economic growth in future decades will bring us face-to-face with a slew of further existential threats. Our civilization is already running at forty percent above its sustainable capacity. We’re rapidly depleting the Earth’s forests, animals, insects, fish, freshwater, and even the topsoil we require to grow our crops. Animal populations worldwide have declined by a staggering 73 percent since 1970. In the oceans, coral reefs are on track to be virtually annihilated by the middle of this century. At this rate, we’re well on the way to causing the sixth great extinction of species since life began on Earth—except this is the first driven by the actions of a single species. Surveying this devastation across the board, in 2017 over fifteen thousand scientists from 184 countries issued an ominous warning to humanity that time is running out: “Soon it will be too late,” they wrote, “to shift course away from our failing trajectory.”

Look around the natural world, and you will see fractal patterns everywhere. From microscopic living structures to the entire Earth system, nature uses a fractal design with similar patterns manifesting at different scales. You can see them in the shapes of tree branches, coastlines, cloud formations, lung brachia, and neural networks, to name just a few. Ecologies are themselves fractal, with tiny cells that are part of an organism, which is nested in a population, which is embedded in an ecosystem, which is integrated into the living Earth. In all cases, the longterm health of the larger system requires the flourishing of each of its parts. This universal principle of fractal flourishing inspires the ultimate objective of an ecocivilization: to create the conditions in which the flourishing of each of us naturally contributes to the greater wellbeing of the systems in which we’re embedded.

Lent’s Conclusion

The Japanese experience is the poster child for a decidedly grim theory of transformative change in history laid out compellingly by historian Walter Scheidel in The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Scheidel’s thesis is as simple as it is disheartening. Stable times, he argues, invariably cause elites to accumulate wealth at the expense of ordinary people. Historically, he maintains, only cataclysmic systemic shocks have reduced inequality, in the form of what he calls “the Four Horsemen of Leveling”: war, revolution, pandemics, and state failure. Even these four “horsemen” only achieve leveling if they are apocalyptic in scale, rupturing society’s bonds with extraordinary levels of violence, suffering, and misery. Scheidel’s research is extensive and authoritative. If his thesis is correct, the implications are daunting. It suggests that the only pathway to an ecocivilization is a blood-soaked one, littered with bodies. In the words of historian Roman Krznaric, “no historical thesis could be more disempowering,” because it renders futile all well-intentioned efforts to transform society by peaceful means. Is apocalypse, indeed, our only gateway to a better future, or are there alternative routes that might avert calamitous suffering? The bulk of this book has sketched the contours of an attractive potential future for humanity and the living Earth—one that creates conditions for all to flourish. In this final section, we’ll investigate how we might possibly get from here to there. How can we transform our currently ruinous system into one that’s beneficial for all? What are the most effective strategies that might enable such a transition to happen?

The Alibi of Capital – how we broke the earth to steal the future on the promise 
to get a better tomorrow Timothy Mitchell (2026)

The aim of this book is to ask how we came to organise collective life on the principle of the impoverishment of the future; explore the development of this principle in the destruction of rivers, the colonising of territories, the expansion of cities, the building of infrastructure, and the burning of carbon; see how lives today are encumbered by the repayment of earlier extractions; and connect this mode of impoverishing the many and enriching the few to the climate crisis. Its aim is also to examine the political and economic language that developed to describe and order these forms of life – terms like capitalism, technology, finance, the economy and its growth – and ask whether they are adequate for making sense of how the impoverishment operates and of our inability to act in the face of climate breakdown.

Rather than seeing capital as a relation to the future, the alibi substitutes an old view of capital as funds that have been saved up from the past, to be loaned to entrepreneurs, typically to invest in the machines or technology required to make more money. In the popular imagination, and many economists’ models, this technical equipment comes to stand for capital itself. The windfalls and interest payments accrued by investors and entrepreneurs can then be described as the reward given to those whose apparent ‘savings’ have been used to grow more wealth – rather than the charge imposed by investment funds and financial institutions that, thanks to their state-guaranteed privileges and protections, organise the command of payments from the future.

In other chapters of this book, we will introduce a number of terms for understanding the place of economics in both facilitating and obfuscating the capture of the future. These include the idea of ‘technopolitics’, meaning an approach to studying politics and political economy that treats technical and material processes not merely as the object of political and economic analysis but as the arrangements through which our politics takes shape; ‘capitalisation’ and ‘economisation’, referring to the ways in which goods and activities are captured and made calculable; the ‘EconoCon’, referring to the production of ‘the economy’, by analogy with Michel Foucault’s reading of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, as a device for ordering desire and managing the future; and ‘oikodicy’, by analogy with the theological concept of ‘theodicy’, for understanding the role of economics in the justification of human suffering.

For now, however, let us stay with the simpler idea of Uber. Despite the evidence to the contrary, economists continue to attribute the extracting of future rents to supposed improvements in technology. In the case of Uber, the firm employed its own economists to describe the increasing command of surplus as a customer benefit. The company’s monopoly provided the private data through which such claims could be made. In setting passenger fares and drivers’ wages, Uber benefited from exclusive control of the information gathered from every ride taken. This enabled the firm to adjust charges according to an algorithm that calculated how low drivers’ wages could be pushed, or how high passenger fares increased, to maximise its own share at every moment. Known as ‘surge pricing’, this evasion of fare regulation and minimum wage payments was promoted as the technological source of new value. The proprietary data from millions of private fare payers was used to construct the argument.

About Capitalism

 Talking to my Daughter about the Economy Varoufakis (2018)

Besides the works of literature and the poems mentioned in the text, as well as the science-fiction movies without which I find it hard to understand the present, I shall mention four books: Jared Diamond’s Guns, Steel and Germs, which underpins the story in the first chapter that explains the emergence of gross inequities and, ultimately, racist stereotyping; Richard Titmuss’s The Gift Relationship, whose discussion of the blood market underscores ideas first developed in Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation; Robert Heilbroner’s majestic The Worldly Philosophers; and novelist Margaret Atwood’s Payback, which I recommend unreservedly as perhaps the best, and most entertaining, book ever written on debt.

Finally, it would be remiss not to mention the spectre of Karl Marx, the dramaturgy of the ancient Athenian tragedians, John Maynard Keynes’s clinical dissection of the so-called ‘fallacy of composition’ and lastly the irony and insights of Bertolt Brecht. Their stories, theories and obsessions haunt every thought I ever had, including the ones laid down in this book.

And this is a useful summary of what the book is trying to say - 

“Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism” is a book written 
by Yanis Varoufakis, an economist and former Greek finance minister. The book aims to 
explain complex economic concepts in a simple and accessible manner, targeting a general 
audience, including the author’s daughter.
In the book, Varoufakis provides an engaging and insightful overview of the history of 
capitalism, tracing its origins and evolution from ancient times to the modern era. 
He delves into the key economic ideas and theories that have shaped the world we live in, 
including the role of markets, money, and finance.
Varoufakis also highlights the inherent flaws and inequalities within the capitalist system 
and discusses how these issues have contributed to various economic crises throughout history. 
He addresses contemporary challenges, such as the increasing wealth gap and the impact of 
globalization, offering his perspectives on potential solutions and alternatives for a more 
equitable economic future.
Overall, “Talking to My Daughter About the Economy” presents a captivating and approachable 
exploration of the complex world of economics, making it accessible to readers who may not 
have a background in the subject while encouraging critical thinking about the current economic 
system and its implications for society.

Key concepts and ideas.

1. Capitalism’s Historical Development: The book provides a historical overview of how 
   capitalism evolved over time. It traces its roots back to ancient civilizations, 
   through feudalism and mercantilism, to the industrial revolution and the emergence 
   of modern capitalist societies.

2. The Role of Markets and Money: Varoufakis explains the significance of markets in 
   capitalist economies as mechanisms for the exchange of goods and services. 
   He also discusses the importance of money as a means of facilitating these exchanges 
   and its role in shaping economic activities.

3. Invisible Hand and Self-Interest: The book explores Adam Smith’s concept of the 
   “invisible hand,” the idea that individuals pursuing their self-interest in a 
   competitive market can unintentionally benefit society as a whole.

4. The Division of Labour and Productivity: Varoufakis discusses how the division of 
   labor and specialization in capitalist economies have contributed to increased productivity 
   and economic growth.

5. Capital and Surplus Value: The author delves into the concept of capital and how surplus 
   value is generated in capitalist systems through the exploitation of labor, often leading 
   to income inequality.

6. The Great Depression and Economic Crises: The book examines historical economic crises, 
   including the Great Depression of the 1930s, to illustrate the inherent instabilities 
   and vulnerabilities of capitalist economies.

7. Globalization and Financialization: Varoufakis explores the impacts of globalization and 
   financialization on economies worldwide, emphasizing how these processes have transformed 
   the nature of capitalism in recent decades.

8. Income Inequality and Wealth Concentration: The book addresses the growing issue of income 
   inequality and the concentration of wealth among a small segment of the population, which 
   can have detrimental effects on social cohesion and economic stability.

9. The Role of Governments: The author discusses the role of governments in managing 
   capitalist economies, including their responsibilities for regulation, social welfare, 
   and addressing market failures.

10. Alternatives and Proposals: Throughout the book, Varoufakis presents alternative economic 
    ideas and policies that aim to address the shortcomings of capitalism and promote a fairer 
    and more sustainable economic system.

11. Economic Democracy: One of the core themes is the notion of “economic democracy,” which 
    involves giving citizens a more direct say in economic decisions that affect their lives, 
    rather than leaving these choices exclusively to market forces and corporations.

12. Social Responsibility and Solidarity: The book promotes the idea of fostering a sense of 
    social responsibility and solidarity among individuals and societies, aiming for a more 
    compassionate and just economic order.

Overall, “Talking to My Daughter About the Economy” presents a comprehensive exploration 
of capitalism and its historical development, offering readers an engaging and thought
-provoking perspective on the complex world of economics and its impact on society.


The Destiny of Civilisation – finance capitalism, industrial capitalism 
or socialism Michael Hudson (2022)

Michael’s decision to shift to economics was dramatic. One evening, af­ter moving to New York planning to publish the works of Schenker, George Lukacs and others, he had dinner with Terence McCarthy, an Irish com­munist and translator of Karl Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value. The con­versation turned to how changes in water levels caused crop failures in the United States that led to an autumnal drain of money from the stock and bond market, and hence to periodic financial crises. In Michael’s words, “to me, these interconnections between production, finance and the over­all economy’s systemic relationships were so beautiful, so aesthetic in their unfolding—like musical counterpoint leading to modulation to a higher overtone key—that I decided on the spot to become an economist.” Ever since, he says, he has been able to achieve in his economic writing what he could not have created in music.

Michael’s first training followed his acceptance of the condition Terence McCarthy set to mentor him: that he would read all the works in the bib­liography of Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value. So while taking his graduate degrees and working for Wall Street banks, Michael also worked part-time for the publisher Augustus Kelley to recommend and write introductions to reprints of economic classics. In the process, he acquired a library of books by economists missing from the “normal” history of economic thought.

Childhood and teenage experience—in an adversarial position

Michael’s disposition certainly has a lot to do with his family and social background during his formative years. He was born in March 1939 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, into a family of labor activists. Of all the cities in the world, Minneapolis had the strongest Trotskyist influence. Michael’s father, Carlos Hudson, had worked with Leon Trotsky in Mexico and had been one of the leaders of the great Minneapolis general strike of 1934 as editor of the Northwest Organizer. His father loved Huckleberry Finn, and Michael was called “Huck” by family and friends. But since his father’s par­ty name was Jack Ranger, Michael as a boy also was nicknamed “The son of the Lone Ranger.”

When Michael was three years old, Carlos Hudson was jailed under the Smith Act as one of the Minneapolis 17. Carlos remarked that his year in prison was the happiest time of his life, being assigned to the library, where he collected a long list of proverbs that Michael reproduced on his blog in June 2017. Reading “Dad’s Many Proverbs,” one might come to see not only how J is for Junk Economics came to be structured, but also where Michael’s remarkable sense of humor and witty comments can be traced.

When he was growing up in Chicago, visitors to his house included former German colleagues of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and members of the Third International when Lenin was still alive and in pow­er. There was almost constant discussion of socialist doctrine and tactics in the meetings convened in his home. When Michael was 14 years old, in the University of Chicago’s high school, he was called a fascist by Stalinists and a communist by fascists. He told me, “I was very happy being in an adversarial position, yet also the reasonable voice avoiding ideology. I liked being hated by the right-wing because it made me a lot of friends and I re­cruited many members into the socialist youth groups in Chicago.”

Getting more confident and stronger when put in an adversarial position probably has been one of the key traits of his life. Michael has never accept­ed the world as it is, with its frauds, hypocrisy and injustice. Yet it has taken more than self-confidence and a strong spine to become the great econo­mist that he is today. One reason for his brilliance and uniqueness is that he has not been swayed by his academic training in the unrealistic theories of the economics schools in the universities that justify rather than critically challenge the status quo. Michael has developed his analytic ideas through his real-life work experience in many countries, combined with his deep understanding of the history of economic thought.

Wall Street bank experience—countering ideology

While employed by Wall Street banks as a statistical economist to under­stand how the financialized economy works, Michael studied for a Master’s and then a PhD degree in economics at New York University. According to him, most teachers in the master’s program at NYU were part-time. The relatively few full-time academics had no experience working in a bank or corporation; their worldview came from textbooks. Michael fortunately found out for himself how the banks worked, starting as a statistical ana­lyst for the Savings Bank Trust for three years, and then as balance-of-pay­ments economist for the Chase Manhattan Bank from 1964 to 1967.

Initially, Michael’s job was to trace how savings were recycled into new mortgage loans by New York’s savings banks. His research showed that most deposits grew not by new saving, but simply by the accrual of div­idends at compound interest. This exponential growth was recycled into new mortgage loans to buyers of real estate, seeking ever larger debt/eq­uity ratios in order to dispose of the surplus finance capital. He saw that commercial banks did not lend money to finance new industrial capital investment, but only lent against existing assets, seeking above all to turn their profits or rents into a flow of interest payments. In short, rents were for paying interest. And increasingly today, so are wages, because payments on bank loans, mortgage loans, student debt and credit-card debt eat away at the disposable income of most families. This is the monthly “nut” that households pay to the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector off the top of their paychecks.

Later, at Chase Manhattan, Michael compiled statistics to trace how the export earnings of foreign countries were captured into paying debt service. He also traced statistically how U.S. oil companies made profits by “transfer pricing,” selling crude oil production cheaply to tax-free “non-countries” such as Liberia or Panama that used U.S. currency. The oil was then re-sold to refineries in Europe and the USA at a mark-up so high that oil compa­nies had no profits to report, and hence paid no income tax anywhere on their international and domestic operations. To U.S. policy makers, this exploitation was a success story. In 1966 the oil industry had copies of Mi­chael’s report placed on the desk of every senator and representative, and obtained special favoritism as a result of the sector’s strong contribution to the U.S. balance of payments during the Vietnam War years.

The conflict between this reality and academic orthodoxy struck him in 1968 when he had to retake the money-and-banking part of his PhD orals, because his answers were based on his real-world monetary and financial experience, which was at odds with the Chicago School monetarism and vulgarized Keynesian liberalism that had become the academic norm. That was an era when textbooks still taught of helicopters dropping money on the economy—not acknowledging the principle that Michael has made at many monetary conferences ever since: the central bank’s helicopter only flies over Wall Street. Money from this helicopter is lent out to buyers of real estate, stocks and bonds (and to corporate raiders), with little being spent on goods and services. So the effect is asset-price inflation—which Michael has shown leads to debt deflation as homeowners need to borrow higher and higher mortgage loans to afford the debt-inflated cost of hous­ing, leaving them with less to spend on real goods and services. This now-obvious linkage between rising housing costs and debt de­flation was deemed heresy in the 1960s. Mainstream economists thought that as families became wealthier homeowners, they would have more to spend—ignoring the debt dimension of how homes were bought on credit that steadily pushed up the cost of obtaining housing. The Finance, Insur­ance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector was (and still is) treated as if its rentier income should be added to the economy’s output instead of siphoning it off.

Economic historian—delving into the origins of money and debt

Michael’s experience on Wall Street inspired him to set about investigating the origins of money and replacing the individualistic theories of its ori­gin with a more realistic and historically based explanation. His technical articles and monographs are now accepted as documenting how money originated, not in barter among individuals, but as a means of palatial ac­counting in Bronze Age Mesopotamia, above all to denominate debts owed to the palace, temples and other creditors in grain and silver as common denominators whose units were set as having equal value for fiscal pay­ments to the palace.

Michael also has shown that instead of interest being invented by in­dividuals lending cattle or grain to reflect productivity rates (as Austrian theory imagines), early interest rates were set by the palaces or other civic authorities simply on the basis of ease of accounting, in terms of the local system of fractions—60ths in Mesopotamia and Egypt, decimals in Egypt and Greece, and the 12-based duodecimal system in Rome (1 troy ounce on the pound per year), increasingly decimalized into 1 percent per month. Finally, he has applied this historical analysis to modern times by show­ing that throughout history, debts have grown at compound interest faster than the economy is able to pay, leading to foreclosures and economic po­larization if the debts are not cancelled. Indeed, for this reason, personal debts were cancelled when new rulers took the throne in Sumer, Babylonia, Egypt and their neighboring lands, in contrast to Greek and Roman oligar­chic opposition to debt cancellation and imposition of pro-creditor laws.

Michael’s insights into the workings of modern financialized rent-seeking economies, both within the United States and globally, have prompted him to conduct years of research not only into the origins of money and account­ing, but into the origins of labor and how it was paid, the origins of land tenure and taxation, and the origins and history of debt. This analysis has led to his well-known proposition that “debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid,” and to his advocacy that unpayable debts should be cancelled, and can be cancelled without causing economic disruption—and indeed that without doing so, economies will polarize and crash.

At the World Social Forums, I had marched with tens of thousands of participants, including Samir Amin and Immanuel Wallerstein, with a banner whose slogan “Don’t owe, won’t pay” demanded cancellation of debts for impoverished countries of the Global South. However, I some­times wondered if the slogan was chanted by many from a political posi­tion without a deep understanding of how the debts were generated. The slogan would be meek if it were only a political position to express the distress of the indebted countries and peoples, without an appreciation of why and how the debts should be cancelled.

Michael’s advocacy of debt cancellation does not come from a simplis­tic political position, though certainly the proposition itself is profoundly political. The proposition comes from his insider knowledge of the oper­ation of banks, oil companies, the government and even the military. This experience informed his understanding of the domestic and global politics of the United States, and of the financial dynamics of debt and the long history of debt cancellation in antiquity. Exempt from academic dogma­tism and left-wing infantilism, Michael’s economic theories are based on decades of pragmatic statistical and historical inquiry, backed by his earlier training in cultural history as well as his comprehensive reading of Marx’s economic works.

Staunch critic of U.S. Super Imperialism

Working for the accounting firm Arthur Anderson, Michael spent a year analyzing the U.S. balance of payments. His statistics showed that the en­tire payments deficit resulted from military spending on the Vietnam War and elsewhere. Seeking ways to finance that military deficit led the U.S. Government to ameliorate the worsening balance-of-payments deficit by asking U.S. banks to set up branches in offshore banking centers to attract the world’s criminal capital, from drug dealings to kleptocratic embezzle­ment (the world’s new “neoliberal” sectors). This outgrowth of oil-indus­try “flags of convenience” has led to today’s crisis of tax enclaves enabling the world’s wealthy individuals and corporations to avoid taxation and file fictitious economic statistics. Michael has exposed this in numerous intro­ductions to books and in interviews in documentary films.

Michael’s understanding of how the global economy under U.S. hege­mony worked enabled him to forecast in Ramparts in 1968 that the USA would have to go off gold, which it indeed did in August 1971. Explaining how ending the gold standard had inaugurated the U.S. Treasury-bill stan­dard that obliged foreign governments to finance the U.S. balance-of-pay­ments and domestic budget deficits, his first book, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (1972), gained him international recognition and has been translated into many languages. He had hoped to help countries resist the system of dollarization that has enabled the United States to obtain a free ride for its foreign military spending and takeover of other economies. But from the very beginning, the U.S. Government used the book as a how-to-do-it manual. Michael was quickly employed by Herman Kahn’s Hudson Institute to explain to the White House and the Department of Defense how the new international financial order worked.

The success of Michael’s books led many Wall Street and Canadian fi­nancial institutions to retain him as a consultant forecasting interest rates and currency exchange rates. The Canadian government invited him as fi­nancial advisor to develop the balance-of-payments dimension of what has become Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), showing that Canada did not need foreign loans to finance its provincial and other domestic spending. His book describing why Canada did not need foreign borrowing for its provinces and companies to spend domestically, Canada in the New Mone­tary Order (1978), showed that when Canada borrowed abroad, the central bank still had to create domestic money in any case to be spent locally as a counterpart to the foreign currency inflow. Hardly by surprise, this led to passionate attacks by Canada’s banks seeking to profiteer by indebting the economy through their loan underwriting. But it also led to further con­tracts with Canada’s State Department and Science Council.

In the late 1970s, Michael was invited by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) to become economic advisor on North-South debt and trade. He warned of the coming Latin American debt defaults, which indeed began in 1982 with Mexico. He subsequently has served as economic advisor to numerous governments, agencies and political parties from Latvia to Greece. He has argued for national protec­tionism and capital controls to resist free-trade imperialism, for domestic money creation to finance domestic spending on less inflationary terms than borrowing foreign currency, and for the need to tax and limit rentier gains in real estate and finance.

Academic and theoretical contributions

Michael has worked within academia on sustained intellectual inquiry. For many years he was on the economics faculty of the University of Mis­souri at Kansas City (UMKC), which became the center of MMT in the early 2000s with Randall Wray, Stephanie Kelton and Bill Black. He was Economic Research Director at the Riga Graduate School of Law (RGSL), where he became Chief of the Committee of Experts for the Renewal Task Force Latvia (rtfl.lv). As for his most well-known academic inquiry, that into the history of debt and money, he was appointed a research fellow in Babylonian economics at the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Eth­nology at Harvard University, where he organized a colloquium every few years from 1994 onward. The five volumes of conference colloquia that he has co-edited have rewritten the economic history of the ancient Near East and classical antiquity.

These colloquia were on privatization, land tenure and real estate own­ership (which were found to be based on fiscal liability), debt cancellation and economic renewal, the origins of money and accounting, and the or­igins of labor services (discovered to have arisen to work on public infra­structure and to work off personal debts). The findings of these colloquia and their members refute previous libertarian individualistic theorizing on economic origins, and have now become the new orthodoxy among Assyr­iologists, Egyptologists and anthropologists, most notably Michael’s friend David Graeber, who wrote his book Debt: The First Five Thousand Years, largely to popularize Michael’s approach. The essential focus of the colloquium volumes is on how money, inter­est-bearing debt and land tenure were innovated in the palaces and temples of the ancient Near East, and on how the privatization of money and credit led to the polarization in ownership of land and other wealth in the hands of private oligarchies from classical antiquity to today’s Western economies.

As one of the few economists who predicted the 2008 crash, Michael published one of his most important theoretical papers in 2006: “Saving, Asset-Price Inflation, and Debt-Induced Deflation.”1

1. In L. Randall Wray and Matthew Forstater, eds., Money, Financial Instability and Stabi­lization Policy (Cheltenham: 2006), pp. 104-24.It accurately explained how the exponential expansion of credit created corresponding debt that would lead to the impending financial crash and its aftermath. On Septem­ber 8, 2009, Dirk Bezemer wrote an article “Why some economists could see it coming” in the Financial Times, which stated that “Michael Hudson of the University of Missouri wrote in 2006 that ‘debt deflation will shrink the ‘real’ economy, drive down real wages, and push our debt-ridden economy into Japan-style stagnation or worse.’ Importantly, these and other analysts not only foresaw and timed the end of the credit boom, but also perceived this would inevitably produce recession in the US.” That article included the set of charts that helped make Michael famous for his explanation of why financial crises are endemic and lead to secular stagnation:

Today, with the world in deep financial crisis, Michael has reiterated his proposition that unpayable or odious debts should be cancelled, and indeed must be cancelled in order to avoid a global austerity crisis and economic polarization stemming from chronic debt deflation. One point of clarifica­tion here. The United States has become the world’s biggest debtor, mainly as a byproduct of the fact that most international debts are denominated in dollars. This poses a basic question: Which debts should be wiped out?

Michael urges that the debts of overindebted households and impover­ished countries in the Global South should be written down, but that one debt should not be cancelled: the official foreign debt of the U.S. Govern­ment. The United States has run up this official foreign debt—like its do­mestic Treasury debt—without expecting ever to actually pay it off. It has no intention of imposing on itself the austerity that it and the IMF demand of other debtor countries. This asymmetry, along with the U.S. sponsorship of today’s New Cold War, has led leading dollar-holding nations such as China and Russia to begin de-dollarizing their economies. This signals the fracturing of the world economy that Michael predicted in his 1977 Global Fracture. The United States is forcing other countries to choose between accepting a dollarized and militarized rentier austerity, or going their own way by creating mixed public/private growth-oriented economies.

For socialism

For us on the Global U team, it has been a great privilege and honor to be learning from Michael, face to face. He was invited to give lectures in Hong Kong and Macau in November 2019, during which he had a dialogue with Wen Tiejun on economic and financial issues in China. During the Seventh and Eighth South-South Forums on Sustainability in 2020 and 2021, he had further discussions with Wen Tiejun. Michael has a particular concern for China’s development, as he feels that China is the leading exception to the U.S.-based neoliberal economic model, not taking the destructive ad­vice of the IMF and World Bank. He has argued that China’s economy can be resilient if it organizes its real estate, debt and tax system to avoid the rentier financialization process that is destroying the West.

In September 2020, while we were chatting online, I sounded the idea that Michael give a lecture series for Global U. Michael accepted on the spot. I emailed him a proposal of 10 topics, and within five hours he came back with a detailed outline. The lectures were delivered weekly in Septem­ber-December 2020. Rewriting these lectures to create the current book took another few months.

I sometimes wonder whether Michael would have had second thoughts if he had known that his spontaneous acceptance of my request would take ten months of his time. But fortunately for readers, this became a blessed opportunity to access his central ideas and be guided to his dozen books. The videoed lectures, subtitled in Chinese and divided into 70 episodes, were screened in April-August 2021 in China. The first episode has been watched by over 188,000 viewers, with 30,000 viewers on average for the remaining episodes. The English-subtitled lectures are available on www.michael-hudson.com. What readers now hold in their hand, the book writ­ten on the basis of these lectures, presents Michael’s dissection of the burn­ing global issues of today, and his explanation of how the industrial capi­talism analyzed in the 19th century by Marx and other classical economists has turned into finance capitalism based on debt and rent extraction. This financialized system is polarizing the Western economies and threatening their collapse in a wave of foreclosures and new privatizations by a finan­cial oligarchy.

Most important are Michael’s proposed alternatives for de-dollarization and de-privatization to avoid global debt deflation and New Cold War im­perialism. Indeed, if civilization is to avoid the destiny of destruction, if humanity is to have a future, socialism is the only way—and that is what Michael has passionately argued in this book.

Lau Kin Chi

Director, Executive Team, Global University for Sustainability Coordina­tor, Programme on Cultures of Sustainability, Centre for Cultural

The Bubble and Beyond – fictitious capital, debt deflation and global crisis Michael Hudson (2012)

Payback – debt and the shadow side of wealth Margaret Atwood (2008)