Hardcover: 192 pages
Publisher: Verso (March 28, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9781786631343
ISBN-13: 978-1786631343
ASIN: 1786631342

I began this book with not a lot of hope and sure enough, after just the first chapter my fears were confirmed. Pettifor correctly poses the problems of the economy being over-leveraged,  hyper-financialized, and threatened by deflation. All of it rooted in a political system  bought lock, stock and barrel by the same financial interests that by a whisker nearly collapsed the economy in 2008. The wider public, she bemoans, lacks “a wider understanding of where money comes from and how the financial system operates” while the official Left, blind-sided by the crisis beginning in 2007 but blooming in 2008, essentially put its collective head in the sand when they weren’t, that is, helping implement austerity (see Syriza in Greece) which, along with Quantitative Easing, was the solution chosen by the system. As a corollary to the system’s response to the crisis, she rightly notes, ours is not a robotic future devoid of human labor, which is another way to attack the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, because “this vision is touted as if the supply of minerals essential to robots, . . . and the emissions associated with their extraction, are infinite.”

So far so good. But what is the solution? It is not going to come from the those manning the heights of the political system as theirs is an “ideology of austerity . . . wedded to free market fundamentalism . . . [and] deeply embedded in Western government treasuries.” First, she writes, we need “wider public understanding of where money comes from and how the financial system operates.” Second, a progressive movement to channel anger away from the Populist Right personified by Trump and “into a progressive and positive alternative.” What is that “progressive and positive alternative?” By golly, its the prescriptions put forth by  . . . John Meynard Keynes “an intellectual whose only equal to my mind is Charles Darwin.” In short, she continues, ” the answer in my view can be summed up in one line: bring back offshore Capitalism back onshore.”

What!! Here we have a bit of Hegel combined with a bit hero worship. Politicians and policy makers simply have the wrong ideas and are not driven by class forces. Noooooo! Let’s re-introduce Keynes who worked in a completely different socio-political environment with Capitalism still ascendant even if  battered by two world wars.   You see Keynes “was concerned with prevention of crisis not cure.” Of course the question of the balance of class forces, and thus who holds power, is not a concern along with the indelible structural instability of Capitalism. If a cure is not in the cards then, in the end, how can crisis be avoided and if so for how long?

All this was dealt with by Marx who she decisively avoids and for good reason. It would blow up her project of making nice with Capitalism. In this I find her intellectual dishonesty, and yes dishonesty is not too strong of a term, quite striking. How can she as  a writer, educator, historian and political scientist avoid the elephant in the room named Marx. She need not agree with Marx in any way but to not grapple with his analysis in a book that claims to be about “How To Break The Power of The Bankers” and fall back on the tired trope of offshoring (a staple of the populist Right and a denial of the unbreakable international character of Capital) is worrisome and, more damning, politically treacherous. Wittingly or not she is  squarely falling in with the Official Left (psuedo-Left in my view) she excoriates throughout the first chapter. Rather than break the bankers this book, through misdirection (i.e. not concentrating on the structural or systemic roots of their power), will assist in making them. I am not even possessed of a fancy Phd like she is and could see through the several smokescreens she throws up before settling on what promises to be ( I could not bear reading the rest of the book) a meagre helping of  political nourishment at best or a thinly disguised apologia for Capitalism at worst. For a book that promises much, it is disappointing that it could not even get out the gate.