G'day Mark'n'Chas,
Doug describes his intention for the book (no book can do it all, but this bit
certainly needed doing) as attempting 'to get down and dirty with how modern
American finance works and how it's connected to the real world'. Then he
ends his thoroughly enlightening, thoroughly well written, thoroughly
researched and thoroughly comprehensive book with a prescription for market
socialism in light of the notion that 'a future society has to emerge out of
this one, on the basis of experimentation and struggle'.
Oh, and in between, he explicitly recommends that Marx's point about the
contradictions in corporate capitalism creating the conditions of possibility
for its own transcendence should be recovered. A point Keynes's economics
occasionally (depending how you read him) hints at from a safe distance,
perhaps - but then he retreats much more explicitly than he had ever
approached (see the concluding notes to his *General Theory*, for instance) -
and Keynes's articulately avowed social theory, scientistic bigotries and
Bloomsbury aesthetics certainly recoil at the very idea.
So put me down as one who sees the book as much closer to a Marxian text than
a Keynesian one. Not that a few left-Keynesians in positions of authority
wouldn't be a wondrous thing right now ...
Anyway, for my part, I'll start criticising when I do something half as useful
for people looking for a cogent and accessible analysis of the driving
institutions in our lives - and to people to whom the possibility has dawned
that what's wrong is radically wrong, and in need of radical social transformation.
Or even if I move a WSJ editor to call me 'scum' just once ...
Cheers,
Rob.
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