KEVIN BRYAN reviews new releases by The Outlaws, Mark Radcliffe & David Boardman, Clarence White
Latest editorial
Illusions of the Ponzi circus
WILL PODMORE takes issue with a faulty analysis of capitalist crisis that cannot see the wood for the trees
BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATERS: Farmers have parked their tractors on a small bridge over a highway in Frankfurt, Germany on January 26 2024
BOB NEWLAND reviews a book that will take many back to the final years of apartheid in South Africa
GAVIN O’TOOLE examines the fatal relationship between environmental crimes and politics in Brazil and the inspiration provided by Indigenous people
MARIA DUARTE and LEO BOIX review Little Trouble Girls, Big Boys, The Roses, and Caught Stealing
MARY CONWAY admires a study of environmental idealism that aspires to Chekhov but is arrested in a deluge of middle-class opinion
ANGUS REID questions whether a human scriptwriter is behind the multiple plagiarisms of Disney’s much-lauded and vacuous extension of the Alien franchise
You always hurt the one you love: central banks and the murder of capitalism
Bernard Connolly
Unicorn, £30
BERNARD CONNOLLY is the excellent economist who wrote the brilliant critique of the euro, The Rotten Heart Of Europe. In this fine book, he analyses what he calls “the global Ponzi scheme” that is present-day capitalism.
He acknowledges that “there has been extractive behaviour (what Marxists would call exploitation) on a massive scale... What has happened in Western economies in this century in terms of financial crises and massive inequalities of income and particularly, wealth, can appear to validate Marxist predictions.”
As he notes, Marx believed that crisis was inherent in the nature of capitalism and wanted the crisis to be resolved by instituting a socialist system. Friedrich von Hayek, by contrast, believed that recurrent crises in capitalism were caused not by the nature of private property but by monetary mismanagement, and wanted crises to be resolved in a way that preserved capitalism.
More from this author
WILL PODMORE welcomes the case put by a feminist, disentangling the abusive rhetoric of the trans rights debate
WILL PODMORE welcomes a timely and clear-eyed account of both Nato and Britain’s fatal role in the process that led to war in Ukraine
WILL PODMORE peruses a new history of the opening weeks of conflict between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia
WILL PODMORE recommends an excellent and useful introduction to a lesser-known giant of the scientific revolution in Britain
