Tag: Capitalism

Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism, by Brooke Harrington (Review)

January 24, 2025
Political EconomyReviews
2 Comments

Offshore: Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism, by Brooke Harrington, is a heavily-endnoted “Norton Short” of about 100 pages—at about half the length of Oxford’s VSI series, that makes Offshore a “Very, Very Short Introduction” to the perils and pleasures of covert wealth management, if you will. I found it to be an utterly compelling (and enraging) read, and would only fault it for its brevity (and since that is by design, I can therefore hardly fault it at all). It makes me want to read much more about this topic in general (fortunately there is a generous related readings section after the endnotes to assist with this), and more by Brooke Harrington in particular (I shall be moving on to her other, much longer at 400pp, work on the topic, Capital Without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent very shortly), for the author proved herself to be a reliable tour guide to the many freeports out there, be they actually in Freeport, Bahamas, on other islands  in the former British Empire—one key sine qua non which makes offshore finance even possible—or elsewhere in copycat islands, city-states, and even American states (Delaware, Montana, and a few others being now leaders in “offshoring” attracting foreign capital from a rogues’ gallery of bad hombres the world over, as it happens)….

But I get ahead of myself.

The author, a professional sociologist at Dartmouth, states that she was inspired to immerse herself in the industry of private wealth management (no……

Read More

The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin (Review)

September 17, 2018
Essays
3 Comments

In the new edition of 2011’s The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin updates what is sure to become a classic in the history of political thought.

You can read my much longer “digested read” or “midrash” of the book here

As I write this the populist, Trump-lite and thuggish, Boss-Hogg lookalike Premier of Ontario has invoked what is called the “Notwithstanding Clause” to overturn a judge’s overturning of a bit of legislation that sought to reduce the number of elected representatives on the Toronto city council—a bit of parochial political dirty tricks that make Doug Ford (brother to Rob Ford, the infamous late Mayor of Toronto) seem the most small-minded conservative ever. Yet he has great support from his base for attacking the courts, those “un-elected” challengers to the power of (cough cough) the supposed will of the People. Ford is in fact just playing from the conservative (that is, the “reactionary’s”) playbook, which is analysed in great depth and to superb effect in Corey Robin’s 2017 re-issue and revision of his 2011 book, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump (which originally stopped at Sarah Palin, who is absent from this edition (alas?)).

…

Read More

Capitalism and its Discontents: On Benjamin Kunkel’s Utopia or Bust

March 13, 2016
Essays
0 Comment

I have written on the intersection of capitalism and literature in the past, and I’m intrigued about his project of giving the following thinkers (some of whom are more relatively unknown than others, especially to North Americans) a public hearing. So far, having finished the introduction and skipped to the “Further Reading” pages, I must say that I find his style to be engaging, personable, and forthright. Note:I will be adding reflections on each chapter of the book as I get to them — as of right now Chapters 1 and 2 are complete and can be found below.

Chapter 1: David Harvey

Kunkel locates the essence of Harvey’s work in the capitalist tendency to overaccumulate — “the fount of all crisis”, a word Harvey defines as “surplus capital and surplus labor existing side by side with seemingly no way to put them back together.” Investors sit on piles of cash, unwilling to put it into the hands of workers they won’t risk hiring, but upon whom the economy relies as consumers.

So far Harvey is depicted as assembling stray bits of Marx into a coherent picture of how, in “normal” circumstances, fictitious capital (credit), uses the promise of tomorrow’s profits to bridge today’s gap between a economy’s ability to pay its workers and the workers’ ability to consume what the economy produces. Thus always borrowing from the future imposes the GOD (Grow or Die) imperative on the economy.

Again,……

Read More

The Arc of Modernity: From Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

November 17, 2012
EssaysSplainin
2 Comments

The following is a little potted something that I give to my students when we are trying to puzzle out what it means to be ‘modern’, to work towards an understanding of what historical continuity connects  Hamlet to L20C works like The Unbearable Lightness of Being or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

I include it here as an addendum to my previous post: before you go emailing me about how historically vulgar and Olympian it is, I’d just like to say that it is a bit, yes, vulgar and  Olympian, a bit of a caricature of intellectual history. But young students need to see history in such broad bush strokes to care about it at all, to feel it is relevant to their experience of the world as it feels like it stands now. I reproduce it here because, increasingly, I feel, a lot of contemporary literature has abandoned even this vestigial inkling of historical awareness.

So many writers today feel as if they can safely ignore the efforts of those who have written before us, those modernists hose who have wrestled with one or another version of this narrative: Joyce, Woolf, Beckett, Brecht, Borges, & etc, are now safely consigned to the dustbin of literary history, so easily forgotten in the search for the next Booker short list nominees. Writers today are free to write in any mode they choose, to write, even, as if 19C realism is in no way compromised or problematic. And yet……

Read More