Comment by piva00
9 hours ago
I haven't listened to the talk but read Mobiot's book when it came out last year :)
On the same vein, I'd recommend "Capitalist Realism" by Mark Fisher, Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine", and even the original "A Neo-Liberal's Manifesto" by Charles Peters to understand how the term is slippery and diverged a lot from the original manifesto.
And I'm not an anti-market, full-blown communism person. The feeling I have is that all the aftermath from the dogmatic implementation of an unsound ideology has brought much of our contemporary malaise, the allowance of finance to take over the real economy, the productive economy, has just eroded any semblance of a good market-driven society. I'm against that, the supremacy of finance over all other economical activity, it's a cancer that festers on every single big corporation.
Amen to that. Thanks for the reading recommendations. However my book backlog is a bit out of control. ;0)
>And I'm not an anti-market, full-blown communism person
Also, it is interesting that you feel the need to say you aren't a communist before criticising the current system. I guess that is a sign of just how entrenched it is.
I see it more as a sign of how few mainstream alternatives have been proposed. I've been guilty of generally assuming a communist bent when I see a negatively zealous response to the "free market" ideology. I don't act on the assumption, but from my experience, it tends to be the most common result.
Our political system seems hell-bent on only ever having two solutions to a problem, though.
We seem to be stuck at a local maxima[1]. The current system works great for the 0.001% who have all the money and the power, so it isn't in their interest to change it. But there definitely seems to have been a failure of the imagination amongst the 99.999%. Too distracted by social media and our phones perhaps?
[1] There is a lot to dislike about the current system, but there have been far worse ones (feudalism, communism etc).
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