Saul's book is great and my students thought so too.
An excellent accompaniment is Morris Berman, (2006) Dark Ages America:
The Final Phase of Empire, (Norton).
----- Forwarded message from [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----
Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2008 21:09:03 -0400
From: Mike Spencer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [Futurework] The Collapse of Globalism
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To the extent that "globalism" is a significant factor work work, this
should be on-topic.
I just found John Ralston Saul's 2005 book, _The Collapse of Globalism
and the Reinvention of the World_ [1] on the remainder shelf for a couple
of bucks. (I guess I should get out more if the remainder shelf is
the first I've heard of a new book by our former First Gentleman. :-)
Has anybody (or everybody) else already seen and read this? If so,
I'd like to hear comments.
Browsing it in the store, when I saw that it had a chapter entitled A
Short History of Economics Becoming a Religion, I was sold. I've
observed before (possibly on this list) that one of the chief targets
of 1950s rhetoric opposing "godless communism" was the allegation that
communism made economics the foundation of civilization. Get labor,
production, capital, resources, trade and bookkeeping all tidied up
and and we'll enter the Eternal Golden Age. And of course, loyal
Americans (Canucks, Brits et al.) knew that there's more, way more, to
civilization than the least common denominator of economics.
Fast forward to the fall of the Berlin wall and the Soviet empire.
Then George Bush (41) is talking about "free markets and free men", in
that order and the current dogma, spoken or unspoken, has become that
free markets, unregulated trade and unrestrained capital flows will
resolve all the world's ills and lead to democracy, liberty, wealth
and [drumroll] the Eternal Golden Age [rimshot].
Anyhow, I haven't quite gotten to that chapter yet -- I find Saul a
source both of fulminating ideas and insights and of rather hard to
follow prose -- but I'd welcome others' comments on the book.
It would be nice to believe the the role of ordinary people (vs. that
of global "investors") has been upgraded from biomass to something more
closely resembling citizenship.
- Mike
[1] Viking Canada/Penguin, 2005, ISBN 0-670-06367-3
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada .~.
/V\
[EMAIL PROTECTED] /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/ ^^-^^
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----- End forwarded message -----
W.-Robert Needham
Professor Emeritus
Department of Economics
University of Waterloo
Home Tel: 519-578-4143
http://economics.uwaterloo.ca/fac-needham.html
The dominant consideration in our economic system is not what people want,
either as consumers or workers, but what people can afford or be persuaded to
buy, and what they can be persuaded by force of circumstance to do for
money, as
a job. To put the matter another way, the modern economy is driven, not by the
aggregate desires of what people want out of the economy, but by what the
economy can get out of them. The only fitting word for this is
slavery. Michael
Rowbotham, The Grip of Death: A Study of Modern Money, Debt Slavery and
Destructive Economics, (Charlbury: Jon Carpenter Publishing, 1998),
73. Emphasis
added.
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