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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I just can't believe its not capitalism, 17 Aug 2006
Yes this book is so utterly green that it takes a while for the truth of its message to sink in - as Caroline Lucas endorsement states on the hard cover edition - "For those who want to see through the deception of the money system and have dreams of a more just society there can be no better starting place."
But this is because Molly Scott Cato is none other than the Green Party's speaker on Economics. I was at a course she gave recently at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales when she challenged people to realise the enormity of the revelations in this book. It was no surprise to watch some of their reactions as the truth dawned on them in complete amazement at the con-trick which is the modern economic system.
Here you will at last find a complete account of the startling facts which are carefully hidden from the modern consumer. The uncomfortable truth that we are being massively conned by the politicians and bankers alike. From the way that money is fraudelently created to the system which administers it in the guise of a respectable market theory, it is all here.
But she is not satisfied to criticse the modern world without offering an alternative. Indeed it is the very assumption of an alternative value system which leads her to such clarity in her criticism. While giving an exhaustive account of the history of capitalism and its opponents she goes on to give a visionary appeal to the heart as well as the pocket. The reader is left with a priceless compendium of alternatives and case studies of radical change. Read this and be transformed.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Highly recommended, 22 Jun 2007
Just occasionally, you read a book that gives you an Archimedes-in-the-bath moment. Market Schmarket is one of those.
We are all at least dimly aware that the machinations at 11 Downing Street have a dramatic impact on our everyday lives.
But, short of the predictable media furore on the day of the Budget, the workings of the economy remain largely unseen and unquestioned. Molly Scott Cato, an economics speaker for the Green Party and a Senior Lecturer in Social Economy at the University of Wales Institute, takes this to task.
In Market Schmarket, she questions some of the most fundamental assumptions of our modern market economy. Why do we need economic growth, if it is the main driver behind continued environmental destruction and doesn't make us happier? Why do so many policies support the idea of a `free market' when the concept only exists on paper? Why is there still an ever-increasing tendency towards global supply chains, when it's clearly evident that the localisation of products and services makes communities healthier, stronger and richer?
Many of these are concepts with which environmentalists are already familiar.
But the book ploughs on to ask some even more unsettling questions. Money, far
from being the stable, regulated system we perceive, is revealed to be the product of private banks, which simply create it against the debts they are owed.
Without continued consumption and the debts this creates, the economy would grind to a halt.
Throughout the book, Scott Cato exposes a deeply flawed system, which she analogises to the old `frog in a vat' hypothesis - if you raise the temperature slowly enough, the frog will be boiled alive. We are the frog.
Neither a wholesale dismissal of market economics nor a Marxist tract, the book
is both well balanced and solution-oriented. Fair trade, cooperatives and guilds are some of the ways forward to which Scott Cato points. It leaves you with a real feeling that something can still be done.
This review originally appeared in the Ecologist Magazine, May 2007 edition.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Published in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 20 Jun 2007
Despite the seeming dominance of globalized capitalism Scott Cato maintains that hers is a counsel of hope rather than despair. She draws inspiration from a range of thinkers including Shelley, Gandhi, Rosa Luxemburg and William Morris as well as initiatives such as local currencies and alternative economic models including the UK's Co-operative Movement. She is confident that a new economy will emerge and that capitalism is not the monolith that it appears. It is fracturing in the experiences of Russia and China and the more independent routes of India, Venezuela and Cuba. Also as capitalism moves more and more into pure financial speculation real productive assets may become available for socialized ownership. She points to the 200 `liberated' factories that workers controlled following the financial collapse in Argentina and the occupation of unused land in Brazil by landless people supported by the MST.
One of the areas she focuses on is the role of money and finance, in particular the link between a critique of capitalism and a critique of the structures of money issue and circulation. This goes further than a critique of finance capital and explores the role of money, banking and credit in general. The basic aim is to split the issue of money and credit from capitalist control and bring it under social ownership and democratic control. The core of this argument is that lack of understanding of, and political challenge to, the creation and circulation of money is giving capitalism the capacity to dominate the world economy and gobble up the world's assets using what should be a social asset. Scott Cato argues that radical thinkers are missing this political pressure point as `money is one of the most marginalized issues of our time' (p.111). One `big idea' she identifies is Richard Douthwaite's concept of EBCU, an environment-backed currency unit to replace the dollar as the world's reserve currency. This would play a similar role to the `bancor' proposed by Keynes at Bretton Woods. Such a global currency would be issued on a per capita basis and any imbalances in trade would be subject to fines by an International Clearing Union.
For Scott Cato green politics is about limits and meeting needs. She seeks culturally sympathetic economies grounded in place based on trade subsidiarity, local production and exchange with contraction and convergence in resource use, technology transfer and fair trade in exotics. This leaves the question as to whether green economics has any room for the market. Scott Cato's response is that the market should be one institution among others. `when adequately constrained by environmentally oriented taxes and regulations, such as global basic health and safety standards and resource taxes, markets would be allowed to function as distribution mechanisms' (p.36). However, Scott Cato prefers mutual ownership and decentralised democratic ownership and control of assets rather than the market or state ownership.
Despite its rather odd title, this book is a radical green analysis that provides hope and inspiration by linking a critique of capitalism with new analyses and possible alternatives.
Reviewed by Mary Mellor
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