A USEFUL - IF RATHER OLD - BOOK

Reclaiming Development – an alternative development policy manual Ha-Joon Chang and Ilene Grabel (2004)

In the wake of the Great Western Crash of 2008, following on a long series of financial crashes since the 1980s, it should be clear that the neoclassical conceptual framework harbours systematic fallacies about how capitalist economies work. That framework generated theories which justified and celebrated the structure of Western economies – a structure which generated rising levels of financial fragility; and it occluded the impending collapse from the sight of almost all professional economists. As the self-styled queen of the social sciences, the discipline has betrayed the trust of society in its expertise and professional ethics.

What follows is a discussion of how the current mainstream builds in fallacies about how capitalist economies work and marginalizes other frameworks; which leads directly to the value of Reclaiming Development. We begin the book in Part I by presenting and rejecting the six major ‘Development Myths’ that are used to justify the neoliberal policies that have been pursued with such disastrous results in the developing world during the last quarter of a century (Chapters 1–6). Part II is the heart of the book. Here we provide activists, policymakers and students of development policy with an array of concrete policy options that are superior to their neoliberal counterparts. In these chapters we look specifically at policies towards trade and industry (Chapter 7), privatization and intellectual property rights (Chapter 8), foreign bank borrowing and portfolio and foreign direct investment (Chapter 9), domestic financial regulation (Chapter 10), and exchange rates and currencies, central banking and monetary policy, and government revenue and expenditure (Chapter 11). In each case, we explain why the neoliberal policy recommendations in these domains have failed, often with disastrous consequences for developing countries. We then counterpose an array of alternative policies that can promote faster economic development than can neoliberalism, while ensuring that it is equitable and sustainable.

We must emphasize at the outset that we present this range of proposals in the spirit of pluralism and humility. We do not share the hubris of neoliberals, and therefore do not argue that there is an ideal, single approach to ‘good’ policy. We hope that this work will contribute to the promising new search within developing countries, multilateral agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and activist communities for alternatives to neoliberal policy regimes.

We hope that this book is an antidote to the defeatism found among many opponents of neoliberalism who do not challenge these policies, believing that there are no credible alternatives. We also hope that our book empowers those who seek concrete alternatives to neoliberal policy. Towards these ends, we present our ideas in a clear and accessible manner so that both busy policymakers and those with little formal training in economics can make use of this book. However, the book is not simply a ‘beginners’ guide’ to development policy. Professional economists will also find that our arguments are firmly grounded – even if plainly argued – in frontier research in development economics. Our greatest hope for this book is that it is useful, empowering and accessible. We hope that it stimulates discussion of the ways that development policies can be reclaimed by those seeking to promote rapid economic development around the world that is equitable, stable and sustainable.

Economics Without Illusions – debunking the myths of modern capitalism Joseph
 Heath (2009)
A book very much in the American style which fails to get to the root of 
the matter.Cooperation and Social Justice Joseph Heath (2022)
A rather philosophical discourse – consisting of separate essays without 
any attempt at a conclusion

A BRECHT POEM, SOME THOUGHTS ON DEMOCRACY and on JOURNALISM

PLEASURES

The first look out of the window in the morning 
The old book found again 
Enthusiastic faces 
Snow, the change of the seasons 
The newspaper 
The dog 
Dialectics 
Taking showers, swimming 
Old music 
Comfortable shoes 
Taking things in 
New music 
Writing, planting 
Travelling 
Singing 
Being friendly. 

Brecht (Last Poems) p448
from Willett and Mannheim’s Bertolt Brecht Poems 1913-1956 (1976)
I would add “the smell of grass after rain” – having gone out to the balcony on my 
mountain house in Sirnea and being struck by the smell of grass after a squal. 
Perhaps I should draft a poem in the Brechtian style?

I’m not sure why I’ve taken to making a list of the books I’ve been downloading 
– I should obviously try rather to do a more thematic list – for example on 
democratic, journalistic and environmental issues.
Geoff Eley is a good place to start – eg one of his books on democracy and the 
Left - Forging Democracy Geoff Eley (2002)

Between the later 1970s and early 1990s Europe’s political landscape was radically rearranged. The 1989 revolutions removed the Eastern European socialist bloc, and the Soviet Union dissolved. Through an equally drastic capitalist restructuring, Western Europe was transformed. Whereas socialist parties recaptured government across Europe during the later 1990s, moreover, these were no longer the same socialist parties as before. Profoundly deradicalized, they were separating rapidly from the political cultures and social histories that had sustained them during a previous century of struggle. Communist parties, consistently the labor movements’ most militant wings, had almost entirely disappeared. No one talked any longer of abolishing capitalism, of regulating its dysfunctions and excesses, or even of modifying its most egregiously destructive social effects.

For a decade after 1989, the space for imagining alternatives narrowed to virtually nothing. But from another perspective new forces had been energizing the Left. If labor movements rested on the proud and lasting achievements built from the outcomes of the Second World War but now being dismantled, younger generations rode the excitements of 1968. The synergy of student radicalism, countercultural exuberance, and industrial militancy jolted Europe’s political cultures into quite new directions. Partly these new energies flowed through the existing parties, but partly they fashioned their own political space. Feminism was certainly the most important of these emergent movements, forcing wholesale reappraisal of everything politics contained. But radical ecology also arrived, linking grassroots activism, communitarian experiment, and extra-parliamentary mobilization in unexpected ways. By 1980, a remarkable transnational peace movement was getting off the ground. A variety of alternative lifestyle movements captured many imaginations. The first signs of a new and lasting political presence bringing these developments together, Green parties, appeared on the scene.

In the writings of historians, sociologists and social theorists, cultural critics, and political commentators of all kinds, as well as in the Left’s own variegated discourse, an enormous challenge to accustomed assumptions was generated during the last quarter of the twentieth century. The crisis of socialism during the 1980s not only compelled the rethinking of the boundaries and meanings of the Left, the needs of democracy, and the very nature of politics itself but also forced historians into taking the same questions back to the past. Contemporary feminism’s lasting if unfinished achievement, for example, has been to insist on the need to refashion our most basic understandings in the light of gender, the histories of sexuality, and all the specificities of women’s societal place. More recently, inspired partly by the much longer salience of such questions in the United States and partly by practical explosions of racialized conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s, a similar examination of race and ethnicity has begun. Many other facets of identity joined a growing profusion of invigorating political debates.

In the process, the earlier centrality of class, as both social history and political category, dissolved. While class remained an unavoidable reality of social and political action for the Left in the twenty-first century, the earlier centering of politics around the traditional imagery of the male worker in industry had to be systematically rethought. Conceived in one era, therefore, this book was completed in another. I began writing in a Europe of labor movements and socialist parties, of strong public sectors and viable welfare states, and of class-centered politics and actually existing socialisms. Though their original inspiration was flawed and the Soviet example was by then damaged almost beyond recall, Communist parties in the West remained carriers of a distinctive militancy.

In the public sphere, rhetorics of revolution, class consciousness, and socialist transformation still claimed a place. With Socialists riding the democratic transitions triumphantly to power in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, Polish Solidarnosc tearing open the cobwebbed political cultures of Eastern Europe, and French Socialists forming their first postwar government, things seemed on the move. The years 1979–81 were for socialists an encouraging and even an inspiring time.

This gap between optimism and its ending, between the organized strengths of an already formed tradition and the emergent potentials for its succession, is crucial to the purposes of my book. I’ve written it to capture the drama of a still-continuing contemporary transition. To do so required both a detailed accounting of the past and a bold reconstruction of the present because both the achievements and the foreshortenings of the old remain vital to the shaping of the new. Although the century after the 1860s claims the larger share of the book, accordingly, the lines of the later twentieth-century argument are always inscribed earlier on. In that sense, I would argue, history can both impede the present and set it free. Moreover, beginning in the 1860s, my account moves forward through a series of pan-European revolutionary conjunctures, from the settlements accompanying the two world wars through the dramas of 1968 to the latest restructuring of 1989–92.

This book is written from great passion and great regret. It has taken me two long decades. Its writing was shaped and buffeted by a huge amount of contemporary change. It has required a willingness to rethink and surrender some valued assumptions and deeply cherished beliefs. Nonetheless, even allowing for the narratives of knowingness and consistency we like to construct for our intellectual biographies, the main lines of argument remain in many ways consistent with my thinking in the mid-1980s, though I’m sure I understand the implications far better now. It was on one of my returns to England in the spring of 1984, reentering the unique contemplative space of the railway journey (also a thing of the past) and reeling from the brutalized public atmosphere surrounding the miners’ strike, that I knew the world had changed.

I can still weep for all the loss this entailed, for the wasted sacrifices and poor decisions, for the unsung everyday heroism as well as the more obvious courageous acts, for the crimes perpetrated in the name of virtue as well as those committed against it, for the gaps between promise and achievement, for the movements, communities, and cultures built painstakingly across generations whose bases are now gone. From my vantage point at the close of the twentieth century, there were many times when this seemed a painful book to be writing. It required a lot of letting go. However, it is decidedly not an epitaph or an exercise in nostalgia. It is written from the conviction that history matters, particularly when some vital stories get mistold. That struggle of memory against forgetting has become something of a commonplace of contemporary writing, but is no less empowering for that. During the 1990s new amnesias brought some essential histories under erasure. The history of the Left has been the struggle for democracy against systems of inequality that limit and distort, attack and repress, and sometimes seek even to liquidate human potential altogether.

Moreover, this is a history certainly not completed. If my book concentrates in its first three parts on the building of one kind of movement for the conduct of that struggle, the class-centered politics of the socialist tradition, then it seeks to hold that tradition’s omissions and foreshortenings clearly in view. The book’s final part then outlines the potentials from which a new politics of the Left can be made. In that sense, it looks to the future.

And then on to journalism – with a great biography of one of the greatest 
journalists of the 20th century, Claud Cockburn Believe Nothing Until It’s 
Officially Denied – Claud Cockburn and invention of guerilla journalism by 
Patrick Cockburn (2024), his son. The great man himself wrote a trilogy of 
memoirs on which I have only two -
In Time of Trouble – an autobiography Claud Cockburn (1957)
Crossing the Line Claud Cockburn (1959)
And then, the environment, with a powerful little book from the author of 
Extinction Rebellion
Common Sense of the 21st Century Roger Hallam (2019)And, as a final bonus a subject dear to my heart – the social sciences

The History of Social Sciences ed Roger Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine (2010)

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.