Greek tragedy

At last a Minister of Finance with some integrity…..Yanis Varoufakis – to whose important “Global Minotaur” book I devoted a blogpost almost three years ago - has emerged from the chaos that is Greece as the Finance Minister of the new Syriza government. He is either a very foolish or a very courageous man!

His has been one of the clear and strong voices of economic sanity for the past few years, using his blog to great effect – giving us not only analysis but challenging recommendations. In a post earlier this month, he explains why he decided to run in these elections. He’s fully aware of the ease with which honest people get corrupted (in different ways) by office and assures us that will keep a letter of resignation in his inside pocket for use whenever he “loses the commitment to speak truth to power”. The problem, of course, is that he has just become that power!! So his dialogue will have to be with his conscience!

Paul Mason – from whom sadly we do not hear much now that he has moved from radio to television – had a recent interview with him in which Varifakous promised to “destroy the Greek oligarchy system". In 2010, Varifakous wrote (with fellow political economics Professors Stuart Holland and James Galbraith – son of the famous JG) a 12 page modest proposal for resolving the European crisis…..

Klaus Kastner is a retired Austrian banker who has a very sharply-written blog called Observing Greece and gives us not only an interesting and measured response to the Syriza victory but access to the programme on which Syriza ran

We are all very rude about the Greeks – and their role in European events in the last 100 years gives us every reason to be. Their invasion of Turkey in 1919 caused massacres and massive migration treks and regional instability. Of course, Britain’s elite has always had strong Hellenic prejudices and has consistently been on the sidelines cheering the bloodletters and oligarchs on……..A long article in November last year gives the detail on Winston Churchill’s role in the horrific Greek  Civil War post 1944. My gym teacher at school was a Greek communist who was one of many forced to leave the country because of the violence. His nickname was “Wee Pat” and I still remember his stentorian voice as he would bellow to those wanting to be excused the stronger exercises “keep your vest on boy!”!!!

Those wanting to keep in touch with Greek events might usefully use the Macropolis website which started in 2013 specifically to help outsiders try to make sense of the Greek tragedy…..

On being serious in letters

Being part II of  of the introduction to Dispatches to the next generation – the short version

I thought it would be useful to try to write a blurb for this book – on the basis that it might give me a checklist against which I could check whether the text actually fulfilled its promises – or what I thought the book should cover…..

“This is a book”, I started “about the ways we have tried to think about the economic crisis which has gripped us over the past decade”…..I paused to look at the words….”Hang on! That’s not true” I said to myself…”It’s a book about how I have tried to think about the crisis”.

The royal “we” on these occasions tends to creep in unconsciously - perhaps to protect us against accusations of subjectivity, perhaps to add an air of abstraction.

I must have forgotten that, when I first compiled this short version a couple of years ago, I had chosen the title quite deliberately to convey the sense that the book would indeed try to strike a more “personal” note or “tone” than is normal for such subjects.

I was trying, after all, to gather my thoughts together “as if” I was leaving a letter behind for my children…In such an endeavour, I was following the lead of people like Ernest Callenbach who had left behind such a letter – or Alain Touraine or Yanis Varoufakis who had penned highly personal books inspired by the thought of loved ones….

Focus of the posts in Part II

Title	What the reader takes away
The rare Economic Books which enlighten	Specialists have such a narrow focus – and are so used to talking to students and other academics - that they have lost the art of communication. I recommend a dozen books which actually bring economics to life
The Different approaches to the crisis taken by academic disciplines	A unique table I’ve developed which plots books and authors according to both their academic discipline (I selected nine) and ideological position
Other Ways to make sense of it all	This introduces a good “typology” ie a way of classifying the very different approaches and the reasons for their divergent conclusions
Exemplary critics	Application of the typology – with examples of the books and writers who have made sense to me
A rare example of good writing	When you come across an author who holds your interest, you start to ask why others can’t do the same….
PostWar Mood music – how the intellectuals made sense of our economic system	This is my annotated list of important books – from the 1950s to the start of the crash. Be warned - there are about 50 titles

Money Talks - why we need a new Vocabulary of social change

Exactly one hundred years ago. Keynes wrote a famous paragraph about globalisation which started -

The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep.

Two world wars checked capitalism's dynamism - although the post-war period enjoyed what the French have called "the glorious 30 years". A new phase, however, came into play in 1971 with Nixon's unilateral decision to take the US out of the 1944 Bretton Woods system of global finance. The UK's Big Bang liberalisation of banking and the EU's Single Market 15 years later; and the establishment in 1995 of the World Trade Organisation were further boosts to a new phase of global financialisation.
These past 40 years of increasingly instantaneous financial flows have made a mockery of both democracy and of sovereignty. It is capital markets which now decide the shape and scope of state policy-making - and which have destroyed the model of social democracy. 
When countries borrow, it is the money markets who make the judgements about the risks and therefore the range of interest rates payable.

Whatever the rhetoric of party manifestos, it is money - not politics - which now talks and which should make us take more seriously the question posed more than a decade ago by the veteran US political scientist SM Wolin in Democracy Incorporated – managed democracy and the spectre of inverted totalitarianism (2008) - namely whether capitalism and democracy can continue to coexist. Robert Kuttner's Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism? (2018) clearly doubts it

The ideology of "neoliberalism" may well be a useful one for academics but is disastrous as an explanatory tool for social activists - let alone one likely to help persuade others. We do therefore desperately need a proper vocabulary for persuasive conversations with others about the nature of the system which is grinding us asunder. I've taken in recent blogposts to refer to it, variously, as "The Beast" or the Elephant - although Yanis Varoufakis's "Minotaur" is probably the best metaphor.
When I was born, capitalism was something which stood or fell according to its ability to produce real things - now it is more of a psychic process so well described in Adam Curtis' documentaries. The 2011 book Monoculture - how one story is changing everything is one of the few good reads about all this.

Skidelsky's "Money and Government", which was the positive focus of the last post, is an important book in its (sadly all too rare) attempt to make the world of money comprehensible to the average citizen. But it has, these past few weeks, been lying unread in my car - I just didn't have the patience to wade through the economic history it offers.
Something called "Modern Monetary Theory" has suddenly become flavour of the month in leftist circles thanks apparently to one of Bernie Saunders' advisers, one Stephanie Kelton whose book The Deficit Myth  has been attracting feverish reviews - although Michael Roberts, the Marxist economist, needs some convincing 
Such is the level of interest in this new body of work that Real Economics devoted an entire issue to the subject which is well worth reading

update; last year saw the publication of this book which argues against the prevailing view that capitalism is destroying democracy – balancing the 2013 book Managing Democracy; managing dissent – capitalism, democracy and organising consensus.

Can Economics change its Spots?

I’ve written fairly savagely about economists in the past – so it’s about time I recognised there are some in the new generation who are thinking differently. And I’m not talking about the behavioural economists who, for me, have little to offer – they’e just making minor adjustments to what remains a thoroughly complacent, arrogant and selfish view of human nature. The table which follows doesn’t do justice to the new wave of iconoclasts who are clamouring for our attention – but it’s a start

	Famous for	Key Books
Kate Rawarth	The concept of planetary limits	“Doughnut Economics”
Isabella Weber,	Questioning prevailing wisdom about inflation	“How China Escaped Shock Therapy”
Mariana Mazzacato	Exploding myths about corporations and the State	“The Entrepreneurial State” “The Vaklue of Everything” “Mission Economy”
Thomas Pikety	Exposing the scale of inequality	“The Economics of Inequality” “Capital” “Capital and Ideology”
Mark Blyth	Ruthless dissection of the politics behind the economics	“Austerity – the history of a dangerous idea” “Angronomics”
Yanis Varoufakis	Being the bad boy of the eurozone – but a great story-teller!	A textbook an autobiography “The Global Minotaur” “And the Weak Suffer What They Must?”

 
And, because I’m impatient to get this post – with all its usual hyperlinks – to my readers, 

let me finish with a great review of Thomas Pikety’s latest book “Time for Socialism” from 

what is rapidly becoming a never-to be-missed journal - Jacobin
 

The fact that a thinker with Piketty’s intellectual influence has embraced socialism is significant in itself, paving the way for greater numbers of people to begin envisioning a world beyond capitalism. But what should we make of his vision of socialist transformation?

Talk of a relatively gradual and already underway shift toward socialism will no doubt raise eyebrows among radicals trained to expect that a break with capitalism will necessarily require some form of revolutionary rupture in the state and economy. Yet this gradualist vision should not be dismissed out of hand.

The truth is that we have no way yet to precisely predict the form that a transition to socialism will take in an advanced capitalist democracy. Piketty’s insistence that the radical reforms he envisions will be won through struggle against (rather than accommodation to) corporate power is likely sufficient as a strategic horizon for the foreseeable future. Though a more rapid and less peaceful revolutionary break may eventually be put on the agenda in the face of minoritarian employer reaction, there’s no need nor any political benefit to project immediate revolution as the only possible path forward.

Some radicals may similarly frown upon Piketty’s insistence that the transition to socialism is already underway, as seen in the growth of the welfare state and related declines in economic inequality. Yet here too the author is onto something: the reforms won by socialists, organized labor, and social movements over the past century have made significant incursions into market relations.

Despite neoliberalism’s ravages, the welfare state has not been dismantled even in places like the United States and the UK — current and future struggles for decommodification are thus being waged on a significantly higher social baseline than they were in, say, the 1930s. As such, the most pertinent criticism of social democrats — one shared by Piketty — is not that they were gradualists, but rather that they eventually proved incapable of being effective gradualists. Instead of continuing to shift power and control toward working people, social democratic parties largely abandoned this project in the face of economic crisis, globalization, and employer resistance from the 1980s onward.

Nor does it make sense to criticize Piketty for omitting calls for the nationalization of the economy’s commanding heights. There’s a strong argument to be made that markets for private goods are fully compatible with (and arguably necessary for) a thriving socialist society — provided that the state radically undermines capitalist power and wealth, that firm-based economic democracy is expanded, and that robust welfare policies provide everybody with the essential services they need to survive. That said, Piketty’s case would have been strengthened had he engaged more with proposals for a complete democratization of firms, as famously envisioned by Sweden’s “Meidner plan.”

A more significant limitation is that Piketty says little in the book about the importance of rebuilding the power of organized labor. This question gets passing mentions in his admonitions to “rethink institutions and policies including public services, and in particular, education, labor law, and organizations and the tax system” and to “stop denigrating the role of trade unions, the minimum wage, and salary scales.” Yet the author’s relative inattention to organized labor today is somewhat surprising given his commendable focus on the urgency of bringing back working-class politics and his consistent acknowledgement of the historical importance of trade unions in reducing inequality.

Perhaps Piketty, with his expertise in leveraging data to identify historical trends and policy solutions, felt that it was best to leave it to others to flesh out the strategic lines of march necessary to win his proposed vision. But without a revitalized labor movement to change the balance of class power, the author’s most ambitious policy solutions are unlikely to pass — and some of his other proposals might not have their intended consequences. Employee comanagement, for example, generally can serve as a tool for increasing workers’ influence when paired with robust trade unions. But in the absence of the relatively favorable relationship of forces created by strong working-class organization and the credible threat of disruptive workplace action, comanagement plans risk becoming toothless at best and mechanisms of employer control at worst, pushing workers to rubber stamp bosses’ prerogatives.

57 Varieties of Capitalism

Last October I developed a table in what was probably the most important post of the year – one in a series about capitalism. The table listed 11 academic disciplines; showed how 3 “schools” of thinking could be discerned in each discipline; and how they tended to treat the subject.

The key variable distinguishing these schools was the extent to which they recognised the realities of power. I named them “market theoreticians”; “mixed” and “critical-realist” respectively.

The subsequent matrix produced 33 different “lens” with which to try to understand the system which rules over us with Minotaur-like voraciousness. I was proud of the result – I had never seen it done before. Of course there was a school of political economists which developed in the 1980s and 90s called the Varieties of Capitalism approach – but this focused on essentially two basic models. 

My matrix is distinctive in 3 ways – first that so many academic fields are listed. At best people will mention economics, sociology and political science – with little recognition that economics has several very different sub-fields. And I might have added “complexity science” which has rapidly developed its own specialism.

The second original aspect of the table is the recognition of three very different “schools” or approaches…Most economists, of course, still adhere to highly theoretical and unrealistic assumptions which were explored (and exploded) in this recent post

But political and behavioural economists – let alone the sociologists, geographers and even psychologists have been muscling in….Indeed I have had to add the psychologists to the table…giving 36 "lens" or squares

And the final distinctive aspect of the table is the identification of so many books – almost 50 covering most of squares…
I have selected the books which appear in the table according to whether they portray a world of “perfect competition” in which, according to the theory, no one has any power or, at the other extreme, a world of large companies and groups exercising power (legal and illegal). 

We are prone these days to use ideological labels too easily – so I want to avoid that by using less obvious labels.

- “Market theoreticians” (column 3) are those whose writing is based on the totally unrealistic assumptions of perfect competition

“Mixed economy” therefore covers those who clearly argue for what used to be called “the mixed economy” and are quite clear that they wish a better, more balanced capitalism;

- The “critical-realist” label covers those who go further in their critical approach, extending their analysis to the role exercised by dubious and illegitimate power players who try to buy democracy and whose activities threaten the planet’s very survival.

Some academic disciplines, of course, like economics, are almost exclusively associated with one school (market) whereas others are more pluralist 

Needless to say, the allocation to one particular column is arbitrary and could be disputed – as can the choice of illustrative authors and books (not all of which I have actually read)

The table is, however, a rather superb example of what post-modernism has done to us – which I will explore in a subsequent post   

The table is, however, a good example of what post-modernism has done to us

 Key Texts about the future of capitalism – by academic discipline and “approach”

 

Academic Discipline	1. Critical-Realist	2. Mixed approach	3. “market theoreticians”
Economics	Debt and Neo-Feudalism; Michael Hudson (2012)  Credo – economic beliefs in a world of crisis; Brian Davey (2015). Davey is not a career or conventional economist!   23 Things they didn’t tell you about capitalism; Ha Joon-Chang (2010)	People, Power and Profits – progressive capitalism for an age of discontent; Joseph Stiglitz (2019) The Future of Capitalism – facing new anxieties; Paul Collier (2018) Shifts and Shocks – what we’ve learned, and still have to, from the financial crisis; Martin Wolf (2014) Conceptualising Capitalism – institutions, evolution, future; Geoff Hodgson (2015)	Why Globalisation Works; Martin Wolf (2004)     most of the discipline
Economic history	Capitalism and its Economics – a critical History; Douglas Dowd (2000) Never Let a Good Crisis go to waste; Philip Mirowski  (2013)	Crashed – how a decade of financial crises changed the world Adam Tooze (2018)	Economic historians by definition have a strong sense of political and other institutions
Political economy	Inside Capitalism – an intro to political economy; Paul Phillips (2003) Susan Strange - States and Markets (1988) - Casino Capitalism ; (1986) - The Retreat of the State (1994)	Austerity – the history of a dangerous idea; Mark Blyth (2013) Yanis Varoufakis - And the Weak Suffer what they must – Europe, austerity and the threat to global stability (2016) - The Global Minotaur (2012)	The discipline still rediscovering itself but, again, by definition, has a strong sense of the importance of institutions
Political Science	Crisis without End - the unravelling of western prosperity: A Gamble (2014)  Democracy Incorporated – managed democracy and the spectre of inverted totalitarianism; Sheldon Wolin (2008)	Paul Hirst eg Revisiting Associative Democracy; ed Westall (2011).  The Great Disruption – human nature and the reconstitution of social order; Francis Fukuyama (1999)  Mammon’s Kingdom – an essay on Britain, Now; David Marquand (2015)	Only a few brave pol scientists trespass into the economic field – although it is becoming more fashionable
Policy analysis/Think Tanks		“The Locust and the Bee – predators and creators in capitalism’s future”; G Mulgan (2015)	An Intro to Capitalism (IEA 2018)
Sociology	Wolfgang Streeck. - How will Capitalism End?; (2016) - Buying Time – the delayed crisis of democratic capitalism (2013) End of capitalism? Michael Mann (2013) Capitalism; Geoff Ingham (2008)	Vampire Capitalism – fractured societies and alternative futures; Paul Kennedy (2017)	The sociological voice is still inspired by C Wright Mills, Veblen, Weber and Durkheim
Geography	David Harvey - Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (2014) - The Enigma of Capital (2010) - A Brief History of Neo-Liberalism (2005).	Danny Dorling - A Better Politics – how government can make us happier (2016 - Injustice (2014)	The geographers are a bolshie lot - with a strong sense of geo-politics
Environment	Come On! Capitalism, short-termism, population and the destruction of the planet; (Club of Rome 2018).	Why we can’t agree about Climate Change; Mike Hulme (2009) Natural Capitalism – the next industrial revolution; Paul Hawken (1999)	they pride themselves on their technocracy
Management and man’t studies	“The Dictionary of Alternatives – utopianism and organisation”; M Parker (2007)	Rebalancing Society; Henry Mintzberg (2014) Peter Senge Charles Handy	Most mant writers are apologists – apart from the critical mant theorists
Religious studies	Laudato-Si – Pope Francis’ Encyclical (2015). Accessible in its entirety here	The Crisis of global capitalism – Pope Benedict XVI’s social encyclical and the future of political economy; ed A Pabst (2011)	Questions of Business Life; Higginson (2002)
Psychology	Herbert Marcuse What about me – the struggle for identity in a market based society?; Paul Verhaeghe (2014)
Journalism	Post Capitalism – a guide to our Future; Paul Mason (2015) ….  The Capitalism Papers – Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System; Jerry Mander (2012).	How Good Can we be – ending the mercenary society Will Hutton (2015)  Capitalism 3.0 Peter Barnes (2006)	They don’t enjoy the tenure of the academics (altho Hutton is a college Director)

Surprise and Delight

I notice that I’m not reading other blogs as often as I once did. Of course I’ve been busy writing a lot – and also dealing with the pile of books which have arrived over the last couple of months but, somehow, the blogs which used to delight me have palled a bit. There are almost 20 such blogs on my blogroll – as well other, more cultural links – where I can access the thoughts of people such as Craig Murray, Ann Pettifor, Yanis Varoufakis, Matt Taylor, for example, but rarely do. The more intense Boffy ("theory of the crisis" part 103 for god’s sake!!), John Ward and Eva Balogh in Hungarian Spectrum no longer invite me in (how do they keep it up?) – nor do the more academic and technocratic sites – such as Fistful of Euros or Stumbling and Mumbling 

A few still retain their interest – the RSA blogs which come to me almost daily from a variety of people offering insights into aspects of the projects in which they are engaged are always fresh; and European Tribune is also a team effort bringing different angles.

Too many blogs, it seems to me, are ploughing the same furrow over and over again. 

We need more surprise and delight….In the past week, I;ve come across three such delightful blogs – the first, More than Wine, has a passion also for paintings and….motor bikes (with the latter taking up too much space for my liking)

Jost a Mon is a guy with great maverick tastes –  whether for buildings or mores….

But my favourite at the moment is Rio Wang whose raison d’etre completely escapes me but seems to have central European/Spanish/jewish provenance. But just great, eclectic stuff  wherever you go – whether it’s sketches from the  Petrograd revolution; photos of Maramures; photographs of an early 20^th century german photographer or of even more harrowing scenes from Warsaw. 

One of the posts called Brave Old World does offer a list if you scroll down the page.....

The delights are the painting blogs on my blogroll - and my friend Keith's photography and text about his amazing mountain walks. His snaps capture remote Scottish lochs and superb perspectives from the mountain tops ..... 

Sketches of a new world? - part IV of the series

My recent posts won’t have made a great deal of sense to those who have come to the blog for the first time (you can actually read each year’s posts as an E-book – by going to appropriate line of the list in "new material" the right-hand corner of the blog).

Even my regular readers, however, would probably find a recap useful….

I’m writing a text entitled “Dispatches to the Next Generation” which, in confessional mode, tries to make sense of the mess which my generation has made of things……

I am, of course, well aware that thousands of books have been written about the global crisis - but almost all have one simple defect – they attribute blame to other people.

I start, instead, from the spirit which infused a 1978 book called “The Seventh Enemy” (by R Higgins) which listed 6 global enemies- then seen as “the food crisis”; the “population explosion”; scarcity; environmental degradation; nuclear threat; and scientific technology. The seventh enemy was….ourselves….our moral blindness and political inertia…Another such rare book is Danny Dorling’s hugely underrated Injustice (2011) which identified 5 “social evils” – elitism, exclusion, prejudice, greed and despair – and explores the myths which sustain them. Unusually, the argument is that we are all guilty of these evils and of sustaining these myths......

There is a further problem about the literature about the global crisis – which is that a lot of it identifies the problem as the financial bubble which exploded ten years ago and fails to do justice to other issues and to the other voices which were issuing strong warnings from the 1970s……It’s only in the past year that people have been realizing that this crisis is deeper and goes back longer…..

The book at the moment has an odd structure – since it’s made up of posts triggered by my reading of the past decade…..and, as I’ve got deeper into the editing process, I’ve realized that I need to be more disciplined in the selection of key texts which have shaped “our thinking” over the past 60 years… ..And, in this, I’ve been helped by these two diagrams from the Commons in Transition people – one called the “Current Capitalism Paradigm”, the second “Beyond Capitalism”. Last week I presented an improved version of the first diagram which contained hyperlinks to authors who gave good analyses of the various problems identified about the current capitalism paradigm….and a later post gave additional detail on these important writers

Now it is time to look at some of the key texts which appeared after the crisis but once it had sunk in that this crisis was not going away.

Of course, any such list is highly arbitrary – I have tried to offer an all-too-brief justification for most of the choices. The texts are in chronological order....and UPDATED as at Feb 2020

Envisioning Real Utopias; Erik Olin-Wright (2009) It’s appropriate that this book heads the list since Olin-Wright devoted his life to trying to understand the capitalist system and how it might be tamed. His university keeps a full range of his papers accessible here – and they are a real treasure trove for the serious researcher – and activist.

How Markets Fail – the logic of economic calamities; John Cassidy (2009) Amazing that this journalist could not only give us some first thoughts on the global financial breakdown of 2008 but put this in the context of a critical analysis of mainstream economists over the past 2 centuries

The Road from Mont Pelerin – the making of the neoliberal thought collective; ed P Mirowski and D. Plehwe (2009) One of the first books to explain in detail how the thinkers who found themselves on the margins after 1945 got together and found the money to fund the hundreds of Think Tanks which created the neoliberal doctrine which now rules the world.

23 Things they didn’t tell you about capitalism; Ha Joon-Chang (2010) One of the best exposures of the myths economists would have us believe

The Enigma of Capital; David Harvey (2010) Puts the crisis in proper historical and economic context although a bit too technical for my taste.

Why the third way failed – economics, morality and the origins of the “big society”; Bill Jordan (2010) is a very thoughtful treatment of the experience…..reviewed here

The Global Minotaur – America, the true origins of the financial crisis and the future of the world economy; Yanis Varoufakis (2011) One of the few economists on the list and one of the best on the subject….click the title and you get the entire book!!

The Strange Non-Death of NeoLiberalism; Colin Crouch (2011) The first of a wave of books to explore why, far from dying, neoliberalism became even stronger…Crouch is a political scientist but not the easiest of reads.

Injustice – why social inequality persists – David Dorling (2011) Quite excellent treatment from a prolific geographer

The Economics of Enough – how to run the economy as if the future matters; Diane Coyle (2011)

A rare book directed at the active citizen and dealing with our concerns about the environment, scale of debt, lack of trust etc She’s not a fan of the zero-growth school of thinking. Very clear writing and can be highly recommended. Perhaps lacks just a bit of zest. And economical - only 150 pages!!

Debunking Economics – the naked emperor dethroned; Steve Keen (2011) an updated version of his powerful 2001 critique. One of the best there is….

America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy; Gary Alperovitz, (2011 edition) The grand old man of the American left gives us as clear an analysis as you are likely to get (apart from Mander below) 

The Future of Work – what it means for individuals, markets, businesses and governments; David Bollier (2011) A good sound treatment by someone prominent in the P2P movement

Business as Usual – the economic crisis and the failure of capitalism; Paul Mattick (2011) A rare and very clear Marxist explanation of the financial crash

The Crises of Capitalism – a different study of political economy; Saral Sarkar (2011) Sarkar is an Indian-german academic and brings an eco-activist approach to this book.

Misrule of Experts? The Financial Crisis as Elite Debacle M Moran et al (2011) a rare essay which goes beyond the common explanation of the crisis as accident, conspiracy or calculative failure and frames the crisis differently as an elite political debacle

The Crisis of global capitalism – Pope Benedict XVI’s social encyclical and the future of political economy; ed A Pabst (2011) I wasn’t even aware of this encyclical until I came across this book recently

Revisiting Associative Democracy; ed Westall (2011). An overdue assessment of the relevance of Paul Hirst’s ideas more than a decade after his death

The Capitalism Papers – Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System; Jerry Mander (2012). Highly readable analysis from a great American journalist and activist. The title, for once, gives us a clear indication of what to expect - one of the clearest analysis of why the American system needs transformation. Its flaws are dissected one by one before he, rarely, gives us a 60 page indication of what should take its place - small scale, cooperative ventures.  One of the few books on the topic I would recommend. Just don't expect a good analysis of a world without work....  

Debt and Neo-Feudalism; Michael Hudson (2012) – one of a series of papers where this prominent and radical economist spells out his view of financial capitalism – which can also be found in his blog. A joint article on the rentier aspect of the crisis is here…Also have a look at this 2012 discussion - how finance capitalism leads to debt servitude

Austerity – the history of a dangerous idea; Mark Blyth (2013) A political economy treatment which surpasses and updates Varoufakis.  One of the best!

Buying Time – the delayed crisis of democratic capitalism; Wolfgang Streeck (2013) Highly readable critique from a German sociologist – called, in this long review, a “reluctant radical”

Never let a serious crisis go to waste – how neoliberalism survived the financial meltdown; Philip Mirowski (2013); too much jargon and verbosity for my taste – although it has received a lot of attention as you will see from this symposium. The author defines here the 13 commandments of neoliberalism. “The Road from Mont Pelerin” which he edited in 2009 tells a better story.

Disassembly Required – a field guide to actually existing capitalism; Geoff Mann (2013) A tantalising little book (written in simple English) which purports to offer an explanation free of the usual myths; focuses usefully on the rise of “financialisation” after the 1970s; but, ultimately, disappoints with a “cultivate one’s garden” conclusion.

Perfect Storm; Tim Morgan (2013). A good treatment by an international consultant

“The Entrepreneurial State – debunking private v public sector myths” Mariana Mazucatto  (2013) An overdue argument about the role of the state

Does Capitalism have a Future? Immanuel Wallerstein, Michael Mann, Craig Calhoun (2013)

I came across this very recently….I’m not sure if I missed much – but with such a title and set of authors, it has to be listed

The Locust and the Bee – predators and creators in Capitalism’s Future; G Mulgan (2013) This should be an important book but is written at such a level of generality that I gave up at about p100. For a text supposedly about the potential “good” side of capitalism, it’s significant that there are no entries in the index for “cooperatives” or “ownership” and no mention of Jeff Gates’ “The Ownership Solution” of 1998 despite a credit Gates gave Mulgan…

New Spirits of capitalism? Crises, justifications and dynamics; ed Paul du Gay, Glenn Morgan (2013). A collection of papers from organizational and management theorists who analyse the 1999 book by French theorists.

End of capitalism? Michael Mann (2013) Substantial academic essay from a historical sociologist –and good summary of what the author contributed to the previous book

Take Back the Economy – an ethical guide for transforming our communities; J Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy (2013) Very readable localist approach (see also Douthwaite)

Democratic Wealth (2014) – being a little E-book of Cambridge and Oxford University bloggers’ takes on the crisis

Rebalancing Society – radical renewal beyond left, right and center; Henry Mintzberg (2014) who is my favourite management guru – for the bluntness of his writing…In a famous 2000 HBR article he warned that 1989 and other socio-economic changes were creating a dangerous imbalance.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism; David Harvey (2014). Book can be downloaded – anything from this Marxist geographer is worthy of note

Civic Capitalism (2014) a short paper from the interesting SPERI unit at Sheffield University

Renewing Public Ownership – making space for a democratic economy; Andrew Cumbers (2014) reviewed here

Crisis without End - the unravelling of western prosperity: Andrew Gamble (2014). A political scientist who has analysed neo-liberalism since the 1970s (google the phrase and you will be able to download a very helpful analysis he did as long ago as 1979!)

The Limits of Neo Liberalism – authority, sovereignty and the logic of competition ; William Davies (2014). A well-written and thoughtful sociological analysis which can be read in full at the link

The future of work; Jacob Morgan (2014). A useful overview – if a bit too American in its spirit! The link gives the entire book

Reinventing Organisations; Frederic Laloux (2014) – a strange sort of book (which can be downloaded in full from the link) redolent of the American 1990s’ style of Peter Senge et al who promised a more liberating type of organization.

Shifts and Shocks – what we’ve learned, and still have to, from the financial crisis; Martin Wolf (2014) – with accompanying power point presentation. Although Wolf was an apologist for globalization, he is as clear and objective economist as that breed is capable of producing..

Utopia or Bust – a guide to the present crisis (2014) a small book with a rather misleading title and subtitle – since it actually deals with 6 authors, David Harvey, Robert Brenner, David Graeber, Fredric Jameson and 2 useless others. But it has a good little guide to further reading

The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (2014).Important analysis of the implications and likely impact of information technology

Laudato-Si – the Papal Encyclical of 2015 which threw down an ecological and moral challenge to the power elite. A summary is available here. Its entire 184 pages can be read here

Rise of the Robots; Martin Ford (2015). I’m told this is one of the key writers on this fashionable topic

Sociology, Capitalism, Critique; Dora, Lessenich and Hartmut  Rosa (2015 – translated from 2009 German original). Too many of the references I give are, of necessity, anglo-saxon so I am delighted to include this book.

A New Alignment of Movements? D Bollier (2015) How the thinking of the “platform commons” people has developed

The Butterfly Defect – how globalization creates systemic risks and what to do about it; Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan (2015) I actually don’t know anything about this book but the theme is an important one

Change Everything – creating an Economy for the Common Good; Christian Felber (2015 English – 2010 German). I’m not impressed with this book at all – too simplistic and doesn’t reference the relevant literature but it seems to have encouraged some European groups…..

Credo – economic beliefs in a world of crisis; Brian Davey (2015) An original alternative approach to economics

Commons Transition (2015) a curious book from the Commons in Transition people which is frankly a bit of a scissors and paste job from various projects including one in Ecuador….

Post Capitalism – a guide to our Future; Paul Mason (2015) a best-seller but bit of a curate’s egg whose basic thesis is spelled out here….

Inventing the Future – Postcapitalism and a world without work; N Srnicek and Williams (2015) - sociologists . You can read it for yourself in full here and take in a good review of both above books here. Also a best-seller….

Cyberproletariat – global labour in the digital vortex; Nick Dyer-Witheford (2015) Thought provoking book from a Canadian media/political economy academic

The Locust and the Bee – predators and creators in capitalism’s future; Geoff Mulgan (2015) a typically dispassionate analysis from the ex-head of the Demos ThinkTank who was also Head of Tony Bliar’s Policy Unit

The Next System Report – political possibilities for the 21st Century (2015) The opening essay from a fascinating American project whose latest output is this great series of papers

Rethinking Capitalism – economics and policy for sustainable and inclusive growth; Michael Jacobs and Mariana Mazzucato (2016). Looks well-written and up-to-date – from the social democrat stable

How will Capitalism End?; Wolfgang Streeck. (2016) a collection of this political economist’s key articles, many from New Left Review. Superbly written but weak on future of work and environment

And the Weak Suffer what they must – Europe, austerity and the threat to global stability; Yanis Varoufakis (2016) Partly an update to his “Global Minotaur” but much more – a passionate analysis of the perversity of the austerity doctrine

Utopia for Realists – and how we can get there; (2016 Eng) Journalist whose little book has got a high profile. It certainly is written very well but is very light and focuses mainly on universal income and the short working week. Example of great marketing

  

Globalisation and its Discontent Revisited; Joseph Stiglitz (2017). Stiglitz is one of the clearest writers and has long been free to say exactly what he thinks…

Vampire Capitalism – fractured societies and alternative futures; Paul Kennedy (2017)

A sociologist’s treatment which earns high points by stating in the very first sentence that it has “stood on the shoulders of so many giants that he is dizzy” and then proves the point by having an extensive bibliography with lots of hyperlinks…It can be read in full here

Economics for the Common Good ; Jean Tirole (2017 Eng) Nobel prize winner 2014..French Economist. This is political economy as it should be practised – taking the themes of interest to us all and reasoning seriously with us about them.

Crashed; how a decade of financial crises changed the world; Adam Tooze (2018) The definitive book on the subject, with another good review here

The Future of Capitalism – facing new anxieties; Paul Collier (2018) a very thoughtful book which sparked off a series of posts on my blog

Come On! Capitalism, short-termism, population and the destruction of the planet; (Club of Rome 2018). The quality and bite you expect of Club of Rome publications

The Value of Everything – making and taking in the global economy; Mariana Mazzucato (2018)

It’s remarkable that this is one of the few books to focus on the obvious question of what gives products their value….

People, Power and Profits – progressive capitalism for an age of discontent; Joseph Stiglitz (2019) a dissident ex-World Bank chief economist whose latest book I’ve not had a chance to read….

Capitalism, alone – the future of the system that rules the world; Branko Milanovic (2019) Ditto for the present WB Chief Economist’s

The Globotics Upheaval – globalisation, robotics and the future of work; Richard Baldwin (2019) A highly readable analysis of these topics

Capitalism on Edge - How fighting precarity can achieve radical change without crisis or utopia; Albena Azmanova (2020) excerpts of which I review here