Writing a book about a subject you don’t
understand is an activity I’ve recommended for everyone to help dispel the
confusions we all have (if we’re honest enough)…
Have a look at any argument against a proposed reform - you will find it a variant of these three.
More challenging is when the topic proves to
be more amorphous - and changes shape as you work on it.
Such has been my experience with text
I started almost 20 years ago – long before the financial crash of 2008…It
started with a critique that went as follows -
- Consumerism is killing the planet – and
making people miserable.
- The poor are getting poorer
- political culture is getting ever more centralised
(notwithstanding Scottish devolution).
- Social democrats like New Labour have
sold the state to corporate interests.
- don’t blame individuals such as Tony Blair
– it’s in the nature of modern politics. Note the political corruption in
Italy, Belgium, Germany, France and even Britain.
- The EU is selfish and lacks vision
The paper then looked at the organisations
and people I admired; what
they were achieving; where they seemed to be
failing and why;and
went on to raise the question of how someone of
my age, experience and resources might better contribute to society.
Many, of course, will scorn such an
aspiration – seeing it as typical of a western “do-gooder”…I readily
admit my natural inclination to intervene in social processes (ie my “activist”
mode) and that a lot of the recent writing on “chaos theory” and even “systems
theory” seems to me to run the risk of
encouraging fatalism – one of the four world views Mary
Douglas introduced us to and which Chris Hood’s The Art of the State (1999)
analyses so brilliantly
The world is getting increasingly complex these days – so it’s hardly
surprising that we increasingly hear the argument for “leaving well alone” (or “laisser-faire”
as it used to be called). But we do need to look carefully at who makes - and indeed
funds - such arguments. They are the right-wing US Foundations funded by such
billionaires as the Koch brothers..
One of my favourite writers - AO Hirschmann – actually devoted an
entire book (”The
Rhetoric of Reaction”; 1991) to examining three arguments conservative
writers use for dismissing the hopes of social reformers:
- The futility thesis argues
that attempts at social transformation will
simply not work
- the perversity thesis holds
that any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or
economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to
remedy.
- the jeopardy thesis argues
that any proposed change or reform endangers
some precious feature.
Have a look at any argument against a proposed reform - you will find it a variant of these three.
But such fatalism offends my sense of what we
used to call “free will” (and now “agency theory”). Powerful people exist –
whether in corporations, international agencies or governments – who can and do
influence events. Our job as citizens is to watch them carefully and protest
when we can..
In the 1930s it was not difficult to identify
the enemy…Today the enemy is a more
voracious and complex system which we variously call “globalisation” or “neoliberalism”
and only more recently “capitalism” - whose disastrous consequences the
activists of Porto Allegro had exposed……although it took the crash of 2008 to
prove the point…
Yanis Varoufakis used the appropriate term “the
Global Minotaur” for his brilliant 2011 story of how surplus capital
had sought its rewards – with all the (creative) destructiveness that Joseph Schumpeter
had first described in Capitalism,
Socialism and Democracy (1942)
The Minotaur not only survived but managed
the amazing trick of transferring bank losses onto state exchequers and
bringing on austerity and further vilification of the state…
It was the poisoning of the state I first noticed – thanks to George Monbiot’s The
Captive State – the corporate takeover of Britain (2000) - and
started to blog about in 2009. But within a few years such a critique of the
political class had become commonplace.
I knew I had to put my distaste for economics
books aside and take time try to understand not so much the financial crash but
rather the true nature of this turbulent system.
And remember, I have an Economics degree and
actually taught the subject for a few years in a Polytechnic in the 1970s….But
I readily
admit my confusions.. and, clearly, globalisation, the new tools of
financial engineering and IT have introduced totally new dimensions to the economic
world about which I know little.
So, a couple of years ago, I carefully noted both
my current and previous reading in this field and produced two rare annotated lists of books. First of the
key books written before the 2008 financial crash; then of those I judged
worthy of mention which had
appeared after the crash. How, you might reasonably ask, did you select
these books? Why should we trust your judgement? I try to answer
such questions here
One thing I noticed was how
differently the various academic disciplines dealt with the subject.
Economists seemed the obvious people to start with – but their texts were
remarkably dry and clearly oblivious to a lot of important factors. For people
who had failed to anticipate the crash, their tone was also a bit too cocky and
self-assured.
The sociologists had a more plausible story to tell but generally seemed too ready to lambast everything.
The sociologists had a more plausible story to tell but generally seemed too ready to lambast everything.
I was most impressed with the smaller numbers
of political economists (Blyth, Collier, Stiglitz, Streecken and Varoufakis),
economic historians (Tooze) and even a few journalists (Mander)
