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Stolen

How to Save the World from Financialisation

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Stolen

By: Grace Blakeley
Narrated by: Grace Blakeley
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For decades, it has been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

In the decade leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, booming banks, rising house prices, and cheap consumer goods propped up living standards in the rich world. Thirty years of rocketing debt and financial wizardry had masked the deep underlying fragility of finance-led growth, and in 2008 we were forced to pay up.

The decade since has witnessed all kinds of morbid symptoms, as all around the rich world, wages and productivity are stagnant, inequality is rising, and ecological systems are collapsing.

Stolen is a history of finance-led growth and a guide as to how we might escape it. We've sat back as financial capitalism has stolen our economies, our environment and even the future itself. Now, we have an opportunity to change course. What happens next is up to us.

©2019 Grace Blakeley (P)2019 Watkins Media Limited Communism & Socialism Ideologies & Doctrines Labor & Industrial Relations Politics & Government Sociology Capitalism Socialism Banking Economic disparity Economic Inequality

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Read by the author herself too, quite a plus from this woman, covering in a brilliantly succinct fashion a very arcane topic.

Griftopedia across the pond, plus theory & history

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One of many critiques of recent economic trends called neoliberalism and financialization. Talk of "contradictions" of capitalism leading to talk of what "must" be done. The recommendations are for new allegedly democratic organizations called "peoples'" this and "citizens'" that. Relative to these policy recommendations there was little if any discussion of what has happened in the past when contradictions of capitalism and talk of what must be done led to the well-known history of the Soviet Union and of China under Mao. Questions are answered with vague generalities and references to social justice. Hard questions are dodged. Must we entwine the fight against climate change with the fight for social justice, thereby possibly delaying progress against an ineluctable physical danger that may require a different analysis of the problem altogether from the analysis Marx partially worked out almost 200 years ago? Under socialism, what is to motivate people to work, or would we simply draft industrial armies, a la the Communist Manifesto? And is not the author's vision really one of state capitalism, consisting of a basically capitalist system that has been nationalized but remains largely intact in its essentials? I guess I should not expect too much from a 26-year-old with an undergraduate degree. She still has plenty of time and talent to investigate the hard questions that need to be answered before we get too far down the road she recommends.

Socialist alternatives to recent capitalism

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This book exceeded my expectations. Don't say that often. Unlike the many forensic takes on 2008, Blakeley's analysis is informed by Marx, yes Marx. That means it takes into consideration all of the deeper political-economic and historical insights occluded by even the most left-liberal "economists" following a price-centered, distributive analysis. The internal contradictions and tragedies of our current system of "automatic, inhuman accumulation" are so rarely addressed in popular publications that it thrilled me to see that this was written by a young person (yeah, I'm an old hippy). And unlike so many writers influenced by the Marxist legacy, she is willing to jettison Frankfurt School pessimism and academic woefulism and actually dare to offer a workable political agenda. It's easy to take sophisticated cheap shots at a book like this, from left or right, I just want Blakelely to keep writing, not backslide, attract young people, build a structure, reintroduce the best of Marxist thinking, and make it exciting! To repeat, if you are under 30 and don't get this argument, please reset!

Must Read (Sorry for Cliche) for Anyone Under 30

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