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.”
Continue reading
