System Crash: The Rich, the Rest, and the Struggle to Remake the World

by Neil Faulkner, Samir Dathi, Marienna Pope-Weidemann

It seems as if we face crisis after crisis. Financial meltdowns have triggered seemingly permanent stagnation. Wars are shaking the global order. Inequality grows staggeringly greater by the year. Unchecked global warming threatens our very existence. Our governments seem too hollow and tired to offer any solutions.

It’s all true—and System Crash explains why it’s happening. Step by step, the authors lead readers through these compounding crises to reveal their roots in the essentially pathological character of neoliberal capitalism, with its insatiable hunger for growth and refusal to account for consequences. The system, they argue, is unreformable—leaving humanity at a crossroads. Do we choose a descent into war, barbarism, and climate catastrophe? Or do we choose collective action, a movement to overthrow the lords of capital and build a new world based on democracy, equality, and solidarity?

Pugnacious, pointed, and unabashedly apocalyptic, System Crash lays bare the causes of the many problems we face and sounds a clarion call for real, lasting, fundamental change.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published August 15, 2015

About the author

Neil Faulkner FSA was a British archaeologist, historian, writer, lecturer, broadcaster, and political activist. Educated at King’s College, Cambridge and the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, Faulkner was a school teacher before becoming an archaeologist.

He was currently a Research Fellow at the University of Bristol, Editor of Military History Monthly, and Co-director of the Great Arab Revolt Project (in Jordan) and the Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project (in Norfolk, England). On 22 May 2008, he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London