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The New Age of Catastrophe
The world is entering a new age of catastrophe. The exceptional is becoming normal. The last such crisis, between 1914 and 1945, witnessed two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Holocaust. Now humankind faces fresh existential threats - the COVID-19 pandemic, wildfires, floods and other extreme weather events caused by accelerating climate change, and the danger of nuclear war in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
These threats, argues Alex Callinicos, have their common source in a multidimensional crisis of the capitalist system, which is hitting the buffers, hurling us towards societal collapse. It embraces the increasing destruction of nature and the degradation of labour, a world economy stagnant since the global financial crisis, and escalating inter-imperialist conflicts between the United States, China, and Russia.
So far, the main political beneficiary has been the far right, which may capture the White House again in 2024. But the new age of catastrophe is also an age of revolt. Following on from the Black Lives Matter, MeToo protests and revolts in Sudan, Sri Lanka and Iran, multiple faultlines in the system will provoke still more mass movements that can challenge myriad forms of oppression and open the way to a just and sustainable world.
These threats, argues Alex Callinicos, have their common source in a multidimensional crisis of the capitalist system, which is hitting the buffers, hurling us towards societal collapse. It embraces the increasing destruction of nature and the degradation of labour, a world economy stagnant since the global financial crisis, and escalating inter-imperialist conflicts between the United States, China, and Russia.
So far, the main political beneficiary has been the far right, which may capture the White House again in 2024. But the new age of catastrophe is also an age of revolt. Following on from the Black Lives Matter, MeToo protests and revolts in Sudan, Sri Lanka and Iran, multiple faultlines in the system will provoke still more mass movements that can challenge myriad forms of oppression and open the way to a just and sustainable world.
197 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 5, 2023
2 people are currently reading
95 people want to read
About the author
Alex Callinicos
141 books71 followersAlexander Theodore Callinicos, a descendant through his mother of Lord Acton, is a political theorist and Director of the Centre for European Studies at King's College London. He holds both a BA and a DPhil from Oxford University.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
May 13, 2023
The title of Alex Callinicos' book The New Age of Catastrophe echoes Eric Hobsbawm who described the years between 1914 to 1950, containing as they did two world wars, economic crisis and the Holocaust, as the "Age of Catastrophe". Callinicos argues that we are in a comparable period, which confronts us "with a crisis of civilisation" where "the forms of living that were made possible by the development of industrial capitalism... and that became increasingly generalised in the twentieth century are no longer viable". In fact they are "hurtling us towards societal collapse."
Callinicos shows how existing movements can become the part of the revolutionary process that might create a new socialist society. But at the same time, Callinicos makes it clear - there are no shortcuts to building those movements, and there are perils and divisions. Readers however will find The New Age of Catastrophe an indispensable aid to navigate the terrain of reaction and revolution. I highly recommend it.
Full review on the blog: http://resolutereader.blogspot.com/20...
Callinicos shows how existing movements can become the part of the revolutionary process that might create a new socialist society. But at the same time, Callinicos makes it clear - there are no shortcuts to building those movements, and there are perils and divisions. Readers however will find The New Age of Catastrophe an indispensable aid to navigate the terrain of reaction and revolution. I highly recommend it.
Full review on the blog: http://resolutereader.blogspot.com/20...
August 24, 2023
It is difficult to overstate just how dreadful this book is. Callinicos here weaves together the various elements of the biases and anxieties that the professional managerial class has succeeded in imposing upon a movement once associated with the struggles of labor, from the perspective of someone fully onboard with the project. The author is a long-standing member of the British Socialist Workers’ Party, and probably its only remaining intellectual of any reputation. While very few people will care what the SWP think about contemporary politics, it is interesting that ‘catastrophe’ is now its latest buzzword of choice, for what it tells us about the more general condition of the postmodern left.
Callinicos acknowledges a long tradition of catastrophizing on the left, referencing Rosa Luxemburg, and Eric Hobsbawm. But while these referred to specific defeats suffered by the labor movement, they were far from the end-of-days variety popularized here. The world eventually recovered from fascism and world war, and there remained hope of a different form of society, embodied within a vibrant working-class movement and culture. The key to understanding contemporary catastrophism is the defeat and disintegration of that project, reflecting a wider shift towards dystopian despair seen in much popular culture.
There is certainly more than a hint of what the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy referred to as the ‘dark joy’ which underlined the reaction of many on the left to the recent pandemic in Callinicos’ assessment that COVID-19 “has brought us close to the great pandemics of the past: the outbreaks of bubonic plague in the sixth and fourteenth centuries.” The left Callinicos represents certainly seemed to wish this to be true, constantly seeking out and trumpeting the most extreme worst-case scenarios they could find. This may be because the incessant doom-mongering, doggedly defended even in the face of contrary real-world evidence, is integral to the catastrophist narrative, in which any balanced assessment readily gives way to the bleakest alternatives, with more critical approaches immediately dismissed, whilst a willful naivety greets official propaganda.
So, there were apparently no problems with the m-RNA vaccines, apart from the fact that they were not being distributed widely enough, just as there no problems with lockdowns, apart from the fact that they weren’t being implemented stringently enough. The emergence of the Omicron strain of Covid-19 is illustrative of how this mindset operates. Incredibly, Callinicos is still using this to illustrate his uncritical championing of Covid jabs, despite the fact that by late 2021, the South African Medical Association were explaining that the new strain resulted in mild disease, “without prominent syndromes” and that hospitals in the region were not being overburdened by Omicron patients. The economic shutdowns and school closures that the western left continually agitated for, however, did have consequences in less developed regions that could reasonably be described as catastrophic for the poor.
The glue that holds these narratives together is the bogeyman the postmodern left refers generically to as ‘the far right’, a threat loosely-defined but everywhere, just as the red menace was for McCarthyites in the 1950s. Anyone who questions the catastrophist narratives are, by default, fellow-travelers of this terrifying beast. The movements which developed against the jab mandates, often led by workers such as the NHS staff who marched at the head of the big demonstration in London, are patronizingly dismissed as dupes of this amorphous phenomenon.
Callinicos attempts to air-brush away the eagerness with which the lockdown left embraced state authoritarianism, whereby absenting itself from opposition to draconian police powers became evidence of that opposition being right-wing. Whilst intellectually lazy terms like ‘Covid deniers’ and ‘anti-vaxxers’ are hurled around, nowhere does Callinicos engage with the growing wealth of evidence which strongly suggest lockdowns had very little if any positive effect, or the dreadful collateral damage they caused.
So far, so predictable. Most extraordinary, however, is the extent to which Callinicos ties himself in cognitive knots in order to justify the left’s capitulation to postmodernist gender ideology, fawning over the work of Judith Butler, which he describes as “brilliant and prophetic”, in order to build a case that “the nature–culture distinction is conceptually slippery.”
The talk of “the emergence of a powerful movement” centered upon the right of individuals to “choose their own gender”, elides the reality of a largely top-down phenomenon rather than a grassroots movement, supported by the US Democrats (and many Republicans), the Pentagon, the mainstream corporate media, the vast majority of mainstream parties and institutions in the West, and, of course, the left’s new best buddy, Big Pharma. As the socialist feminist blog Freer Lives has noted, this trend “gathered strength in the 1990s not as a result of struggle but during a period of retreat, and the rise of queer theory, which was informed by postmodernism’s political passivity and contempt for liberation politics.”
The notion that biological sex is simply a social construct we can individually opt in and out of cannot fail to involve a trivialization of the materiality of sex and the myriad ways it affects real lives. This new idealism, which cloaks itself behind a pseudo-opposition to ‘biological essentialism’ in order to suggest that the ways in which we socially produce and reproduce are wholly unmoored from our physical nature, inevitably involves spouting the sort of mind-bending nonsense Callinicos indulges here.
In conclusion, this book could not have been written by anyone claiming an adherence to Marxist politics in the majority of the twentieth century, and represents a left that has stopped thinking, and that has abandoned class-based politics, anchored in any sort of materialism, for a postmodernist dystopia. What stands out, above all, is its crushing conformity. Just like MSNBC and CNN, Callinicos clearly believes that the threat of authoritarianism comes exclusively from the right, ignoring the coordinated assaults in recent years on freedom of expression orchestrated by the Democrat US government and various state agencies, which may as well have occurred in a universe he is not even aware of, reminding us just how much we should beware a left that has been comprehensively defeated, and is in an accelerated process of becoming something else.
Callinicos acknowledges a long tradition of catastrophizing on the left, referencing Rosa Luxemburg, and Eric Hobsbawm. But while these referred to specific defeats suffered by the labor movement, they were far from the end-of-days variety popularized here. The world eventually recovered from fascism and world war, and there remained hope of a different form of society, embodied within a vibrant working-class movement and culture. The key to understanding contemporary catastrophism is the defeat and disintegration of that project, reflecting a wider shift towards dystopian despair seen in much popular culture.
There is certainly more than a hint of what the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy referred to as the ‘dark joy’ which underlined the reaction of many on the left to the recent pandemic in Callinicos’ assessment that COVID-19 “has brought us close to the great pandemics of the past: the outbreaks of bubonic plague in the sixth and fourteenth centuries.” The left Callinicos represents certainly seemed to wish this to be true, constantly seeking out and trumpeting the most extreme worst-case scenarios they could find. This may be because the incessant doom-mongering, doggedly defended even in the face of contrary real-world evidence, is integral to the catastrophist narrative, in which any balanced assessment readily gives way to the bleakest alternatives, with more critical approaches immediately dismissed, whilst a willful naivety greets official propaganda.
So, there were apparently no problems with the m-RNA vaccines, apart from the fact that they were not being distributed widely enough, just as there no problems with lockdowns, apart from the fact that they weren’t being implemented stringently enough. The emergence of the Omicron strain of Covid-19 is illustrative of how this mindset operates. Incredibly, Callinicos is still using this to illustrate his uncritical championing of Covid jabs, despite the fact that by late 2021, the South African Medical Association were explaining that the new strain resulted in mild disease, “without prominent syndromes” and that hospitals in the region were not being overburdened by Omicron patients. The economic shutdowns and school closures that the western left continually agitated for, however, did have consequences in less developed regions that could reasonably be described as catastrophic for the poor.
The glue that holds these narratives together is the bogeyman the postmodern left refers generically to as ‘the far right’, a threat loosely-defined but everywhere, just as the red menace was for McCarthyites in the 1950s. Anyone who questions the catastrophist narratives are, by default, fellow-travelers of this terrifying beast. The movements which developed against the jab mandates, often led by workers such as the NHS staff who marched at the head of the big demonstration in London, are patronizingly dismissed as dupes of this amorphous phenomenon.
Callinicos attempts to air-brush away the eagerness with which the lockdown left embraced state authoritarianism, whereby absenting itself from opposition to draconian police powers became evidence of that opposition being right-wing. Whilst intellectually lazy terms like ‘Covid deniers’ and ‘anti-vaxxers’ are hurled around, nowhere does Callinicos engage with the growing wealth of evidence which strongly suggest lockdowns had very little if any positive effect, or the dreadful collateral damage they caused.
So far, so predictable. Most extraordinary, however, is the extent to which Callinicos ties himself in cognitive knots in order to justify the left’s capitulation to postmodernist gender ideology, fawning over the work of Judith Butler, which he describes as “brilliant and prophetic”, in order to build a case that “the nature–culture distinction is conceptually slippery.”
The talk of “the emergence of a powerful movement” centered upon the right of individuals to “choose their own gender”, elides the reality of a largely top-down phenomenon rather than a grassroots movement, supported by the US Democrats (and many Republicans), the Pentagon, the mainstream corporate media, the vast majority of mainstream parties and institutions in the West, and, of course, the left’s new best buddy, Big Pharma. As the socialist feminist blog Freer Lives has noted, this trend “gathered strength in the 1990s not as a result of struggle but during a period of retreat, and the rise of queer theory, which was informed by postmodernism’s political passivity and contempt for liberation politics.”
The notion that biological sex is simply a social construct we can individually opt in and out of cannot fail to involve a trivialization of the materiality of sex and the myriad ways it affects real lives. This new idealism, which cloaks itself behind a pseudo-opposition to ‘biological essentialism’ in order to suggest that the ways in which we socially produce and reproduce are wholly unmoored from our physical nature, inevitably involves spouting the sort of mind-bending nonsense Callinicos indulges here.
In conclusion, this book could not have been written by anyone claiming an adherence to Marxist politics in the majority of the twentieth century, and represents a left that has stopped thinking, and that has abandoned class-based politics, anchored in any sort of materialism, for a postmodernist dystopia. What stands out, above all, is its crushing conformity. Just like MSNBC and CNN, Callinicos clearly believes that the threat of authoritarianism comes exclusively from the right, ignoring the coordinated assaults in recent years on freedom of expression orchestrated by the Democrat US government and various state agencies, which may as well have occurred in a universe he is not even aware of, reminding us just how much we should beware a left that has been comprehensively defeated, and is in an accelerated process of becoming something else.
July 11, 2023
A brilliant accessible book by the Marxist social theorist author that describes and analyses the world as it is, how we got here and some reasons to hope we can change it.
About capitalist modes of production Callinicos says, "It is this system that defines our horizons and unifies the different dimensions of the multiple crises we confront." It’s easy these days to pile up everything that’s wrong with the world. We have conversations at my work every day that slide into the problems of ordinary life however they begin. The cost of living, food, energy, the wars, creaking health services, hopeless public transport systems, lack of social care, unaffordable child care, poor pay and sometimes its about climate, racism and transphobia. These topics come up again and again because we can’t avoid the state the world’s in.
Perhaps surprisingly, reading this has renewed my sense of purpose because there’s an analysis here that makes sense of the mess. It’s divided into sections covering the destruction of nature, production of surplus value and capitalists competing to maximise profit, the competitive drive to imperialism, the crisis of the “extreme centre” and rise of the far right and then how “race” and gender have become the frontlines of class struggle.
It reminded me of the power of amazing struggles in the last few decades. From the massive - perhaps 250 million strong Indian farmers movement including millions of women, or relatively small workplace struggles that began unionising Amazon to revolutions with varying degrees of success. Struggles break out because capitalism cannot leave ordinary people no matter how much we want a quiet life.
I was struck by the idea of the technical fix of vaccinations. On the one hand they save millions of lives and on the other, they mean governments don’t have to deal with the conditions that created the SARS-CoV-2, Covid-19 pandemic in the first place. That would mean changing our relationship to nature and would interfere with maximising profit for individual capitalists. But the chapter on economic stagnation shows how some government’s central banks and reserves have pumped trillions of dollars into saving capitalism and continue to do so. Which doesn’t clash with ordinary people’s experience of paying for crisis after crisis with lower wages, more taxes and the erosion of social services.
The analysis of the far right is very useful. It’s about the mainstreaming of racist populism, its relationship to the pandemic, brutality and fake anti-capitalism and how the various forms mesh internationally or differ from each other.
The breadth of reading and activity behind this book meant I learnt a lot and reminded me that I don’t read enough. But the notes have lots of references to relatively short articles that flesh out the arguments, so it's a book to make sense of the disasters we face and find a way out.
About capitalist modes of production Callinicos says, "It is this system that defines our horizons and unifies the different dimensions of the multiple crises we confront." It’s easy these days to pile up everything that’s wrong with the world. We have conversations at my work every day that slide into the problems of ordinary life however they begin. The cost of living, food, energy, the wars, creaking health services, hopeless public transport systems, lack of social care, unaffordable child care, poor pay and sometimes its about climate, racism and transphobia. These topics come up again and again because we can’t avoid the state the world’s in.
Perhaps surprisingly, reading this has renewed my sense of purpose because there’s an analysis here that makes sense of the mess. It’s divided into sections covering the destruction of nature, production of surplus value and capitalists competing to maximise profit, the competitive drive to imperialism, the crisis of the “extreme centre” and rise of the far right and then how “race” and gender have become the frontlines of class struggle.
It reminded me of the power of amazing struggles in the last few decades. From the massive - perhaps 250 million strong Indian farmers movement including millions of women, or relatively small workplace struggles that began unionising Amazon to revolutions with varying degrees of success. Struggles break out because capitalism cannot leave ordinary people no matter how much we want a quiet life.
I was struck by the idea of the technical fix of vaccinations. On the one hand they save millions of lives and on the other, they mean governments don’t have to deal with the conditions that created the SARS-CoV-2, Covid-19 pandemic in the first place. That would mean changing our relationship to nature and would interfere with maximising profit for individual capitalists. But the chapter on economic stagnation shows how some government’s central banks and reserves have pumped trillions of dollars into saving capitalism and continue to do so. Which doesn’t clash with ordinary people’s experience of paying for crisis after crisis with lower wages, more taxes and the erosion of social services.
The analysis of the far right is very useful. It’s about the mainstreaming of racist populism, its relationship to the pandemic, brutality and fake anti-capitalism and how the various forms mesh internationally or differ from each other.
The breadth of reading and activity behind this book meant I learnt a lot and reminded me that I don’t read enough. But the notes have lots of references to relatively short articles that flesh out the arguments, so it's a book to make sense of the disasters we face and find a way out.
October 5, 2025
Alex Callinicos is a smart man. It's just a shame his smarts are directed towards justifying an ideological position rather than exploring the world.
This book's project is to try to herd society's discontents into a marxist framing. He surveys discontent across climate, financial issues post COVID/invasion of Ukraine, the far right, race, gender etc. Then at the end, he argues these groups should all coalesce behind a working class movement. This was an incredibly clumsy final step in the book that ignores wrinkles in the class framing like BLM protestors being mostly very rich white people, Extinction Rebellion not being a working class movement, the gender battles being a college-educated issues etc.
The most unforgivable part of the book is Callinicios shilling for Russia in more or less every chapter. He advances Putin's talking points like the invasion being caused by NATO expansion and the US not respecting Russia's sphere of influence. He is so blinded on Russia that he didn't mention Russia in the chapter on the far right. Just in case we need a reminder, Russia's economy is entirely based on extracting fossil fuels, it has banned the LGBT movement, and is supportive of every far right movement in Europe, plus the likes of Farage, Trump, Le Pen etc have a crush on Putin. This is where I lost my intellectual respect for Callinicos.
It's a shame because others parts of the book were good. I thought the chapter on climate was genuinely excellent in how it weaved climate science and a critique of capitalism. I guess he can write well on this because environmental destruction is undeniably linked to the adoption of capitalism. Ofc the wrinkle he ignores is that the "anti-Imperial" states often love fossil fuels even more than the Western states (e.g. Venezuela, Iran, Russia etc).
His writing on the financial crisis was OK. It was overly reliant on criticisms from actual economists, who were quoted at length. This is similar for how he wrote about race and gender, where he didn't really advance his own argument, and instead collected other critical voices like a magpie.
In general, Callinicos is an old school Marxist historian incapable of writing about the role of ideas, technology, religion etc. Everything is boiled down to a simplistic class analysis, even when it doesn't make sense (e.g. the race and gender protestors are very affluent Americans, not the working class). Similarly, he can't reconcile contradictions like the CCP (supposedly embodying socialism) having less welfare and worker rights than the capitalist West.
More importantly, he doesn't care about the importance of human freedom. That's why he's happy to see Ukraine crushed (and children kidnapped) in the name of Russia's sphere of influence. I will not forgive him for this. He lets old ideology trump the importance of individuals.
This book's project is to try to herd society's discontents into a marxist framing. He surveys discontent across climate, financial issues post COVID/invasion of Ukraine, the far right, race, gender etc. Then at the end, he argues these groups should all coalesce behind a working class movement. This was an incredibly clumsy final step in the book that ignores wrinkles in the class framing like BLM protestors being mostly very rich white people, Extinction Rebellion not being a working class movement, the gender battles being a college-educated issues etc.
The most unforgivable part of the book is Callinicios shilling for Russia in more or less every chapter. He advances Putin's talking points like the invasion being caused by NATO expansion and the US not respecting Russia's sphere of influence. He is so blinded on Russia that he didn't mention Russia in the chapter on the far right. Just in case we need a reminder, Russia's economy is entirely based on extracting fossil fuels, it has banned the LGBT movement, and is supportive of every far right movement in Europe, plus the likes of Farage, Trump, Le Pen etc have a crush on Putin. This is where I lost my intellectual respect for Callinicos.
It's a shame because others parts of the book were good. I thought the chapter on climate was genuinely excellent in how it weaved climate science and a critique of capitalism. I guess he can write well on this because environmental destruction is undeniably linked to the adoption of capitalism. Ofc the wrinkle he ignores is that the "anti-Imperial" states often love fossil fuels even more than the Western states (e.g. Venezuela, Iran, Russia etc).
His writing on the financial crisis was OK. It was overly reliant on criticisms from actual economists, who were quoted at length. This is similar for how he wrote about race and gender, where he didn't really advance his own argument, and instead collected other critical voices like a magpie.
In general, Callinicos is an old school Marxist historian incapable of writing about the role of ideas, technology, religion etc. Everything is boiled down to a simplistic class analysis, even when it doesn't make sense (e.g. the race and gender protestors are very affluent Americans, not the working class). Similarly, he can't reconcile contradictions like the CCP (supposedly embodying socialism) having less welfare and worker rights than the capitalist West.
More importantly, he doesn't care about the importance of human freedom. That's why he's happy to see Ukraine crushed (and children kidnapped) in the name of Russia's sphere of influence. I will not forgive him for this. He lets old ideology trump the importance of individuals.
March 14, 2024
This is a curious book. And the most curious thing is its stark retreat from Marx and towards postmodernism, in the form of its hurrah for Queer Theory. Although a deliberately slippery construct, Queer Theory posits that both gender and sex are essentially cultural fictions, produced by discourse, entwined with nebulous forms of ‘power.’ Queer Theory sits amongst a set of ideas that argue that language is reality. Judith Butler is its best-known theorist, applying idealist philosophies, which are by no means new or novel, specifically to the question of sexuality. Butler seeks to dissolve the distinction between sex and gender. Ultimately, the only way to do this is to declare that biological sex a cultural construct. Although she famously revels in serving up impenetrable word salads, she states very clearly that sex is discursively produced. Every form of being is, in fact, reducible to ‘discourse.’ Here we find Callinicos, ostensibly a seasoned Marxist, capitulating to these ideas like some over-excited freshman on a Gender Studies course.
The question is, why? Callinicos is essentially a (rather turgid) theorist for the Socialist Workers’ Party, of which he has been a leading member for over forty years. The wholesale capitulation to Butlerian idealism set forth in this book has to be placed in that context. Callinicos and his party have to genuflect to Queer ideology in order not to annihilate, at least not any more than they already have, their recruiting potential amongst the milieu of younger people they seek to appeal to. But they cannot do this within a traditional materialist standpoint, as the cognitive dissonance would eventually make their heads explode. Hence, the fulsome praise for Queer Theory. That’s my take, anyway. The alternative would be that Callinicos actually believes this nonsense on stilts, which really would be disturbing.
The question is, why? Callinicos is essentially a (rather turgid) theorist for the Socialist Workers’ Party, of which he has been a leading member for over forty years. The wholesale capitulation to Butlerian idealism set forth in this book has to be placed in that context. Callinicos and his party have to genuflect to Queer ideology in order not to annihilate, at least not any more than they already have, their recruiting potential amongst the milieu of younger people they seek to appeal to. But they cannot do this within a traditional materialist standpoint, as the cognitive dissonance would eventually make their heads explode. Hence, the fulsome praise for Queer Theory. That’s my take, anyway. The alternative would be that Callinicos actually believes this nonsense on stilts, which really would be disturbing.
February 6, 2025
Callinicos surveys the multi-faceted catastrophe we face in the 21st century, examining climate change, disease, economic crisis, inter-imperialist rivalry and the rise of the far right. He opens with an illuminating comparison to the 1930s, when the carnage of the World War and Great Depression decisively discredited liberal capitalism and it was replaced by authoritarian regimes (most notably fascist ones). Another notable chapter involves a comprehensive survey of how climate disasters and epidemics are becoming the new normal at the behest of capital accumulation, and how crisis management treats the populations exposed to these disasters as the problem.
Callinicos is good at using the descriptive content of the work of non-revolutionary theorists to draw the conclusion that we need a socialist revolution to overthrow capitalism. Such theorists include Adam Tooze, Andreas Malm, Judith Butler and Michel Foucault. The downsides of this approach involve confusion (I did not understand the chapter on the role of central banks) and some contradictions. Nevertheless, he convincingly analyses the role of race in this new battleground of crisis and the self-radicalising dimension of the US right.
Callinicos is good at using the descriptive content of the work of non-revolutionary theorists to draw the conclusion that we need a socialist revolution to overthrow capitalism. Such theorists include Adam Tooze, Andreas Malm, Judith Butler and Michel Foucault. The downsides of this approach involve confusion (I did not understand the chapter on the role of central banks) and some contradictions. Nevertheless, he convincingly analyses the role of race in this new battleground of crisis and the self-radicalising dimension of the US right.
August 6, 2023
A detailed, yet accessible, Marxist analysis of how events, which were once seen as unusual are becoming the norm. Events such as economic crises and natural disasters are becoming ever more frequent due to aging capitalism’s effect on the economy and the environment.
It is not all doom and gloom: the discussion of how people across the world are challenging these and ultimately what the answer is, does offer hope for humanity.
A thoroughly engaging book, which - certainly for this reader - requires returning to, so as to gain even more from it. Highly recommended.
It is not all doom and gloom: the discussion of how people across the world are challenging these and ultimately what the answer is, does offer hope for humanity.
A thoroughly engaging book, which - certainly for this reader - requires returning to, so as to gain even more from it. Highly recommended.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews