“The Silent Coup”, “The Big Myth”, “Rentier Capitalism”…are titles of some of the books which have hit us in recent years. People keep churning out books which just repeat what most of us already know!
When is someone going to build
on these critiques from the past 50 years and do a proper exploration of “what
is to be done” to give us a civilized society? One of the best is “The
Capitalism Papers - fatal flaws in an obsolete system” published in 2012 by
the famous US activist and journalist Jerry Mander. It has everything –
·
the
ecological concerns;
·
questioning
of the legal basis of the corporation and the inequities and iniquities they
cause;
·
recognition
that military spending and advertising supports the whole rotten system
·
that
democracy is being privatised
· as is our very consciousness
Mander draws it all
together in a masterful conclusion in some 35 pages starting at page 258 (of
the hyperlink given in the title above) which has 4 sub-headings -
·
Nature
Comes First
·
The
Primacy of Scale: Not Globalization, Localization
·
Experiments
in Corporate Values and Structure.
· Hybrid Economics . . .
The only thing it’s light on is an annotated bibliography. It has a 7 page bibliography but would have been useful to have had Mander’s reasons for selecting those particular works (from p296)
None of the titles with
which this post starts have a recommended reading list but all have extensive notes
·
The Big Myth – how American businesses taught
us to loathe government and love the market N Oreskes and E Conway 2023
·
The Silent Coup – how Corporations
overthrew Democracy C
Provost and M Kennard 2022
·
Rentier
Capitalism – who owns the economy and who pays for it? Brett Christophers
2020
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