This book offers a new perspective on the financialisation of the economy and its profound technological transformation in an increasingly interdependent and globalised world. A deterioration of capitalist property has led to the reactivation of pre-capitalist social phenomena such as slavery. Meanwhile secular deflation and international destruction of the social state have wrought havoc with all familiar modern welfare infrastructure. Yet, Sapelli argues, there is still hope in the form of the gradual evolution of a community-based socialism based on diverse forms of ownership, co-operative living and working, and sustainable capitalist property. Sapelli presents a severe and dramatic look at the present world, where there is still a light at the end of the tunnel.

Suggests European rules and an imbalance of power among states creates an impossibility of growth in a system with fixed exchange rates and a single currency Illustrates the profound transformation of the international system centred on the role of the US and China Provides thought-provoking, original insights into the makings of the present world

Autorentext

Giulio Sapelli is Professor of Economic History at the University of Milan, Italy. He has more than 400 publications to his name.

Inhalt
Part I: The global crisis caused by deflation.- Chapter 1: Transformation of global capitalism, deflation with unemployment and rhetoric around intergenerational conflict.- Chapter 2: Public spending and social reproduction: overturning the rhetoric.- Chapter 3: Transformation of public intervention in the crisis in USA and Japan.- Chapter 4: The European exception to the generational narrative.- Chapter 5: Deficit and debt.- Chapter 6: Low growth, demographics, labour: problems to be solved.- Chapter 7: European growth is possible only if the public debt paradigm changes.- Chapter 8: Europe is the epicentre of deflation and power imbalance.- Chapter 9: France and Germany.- Chapter 10: Neocolonialism and neoimperialism.- Chapter 11: New areas of state: between Leviathan and Behemoth.- Part II: Financialised, high-tech capitalism based on modern slavery.- Chapter 12: The advent of owner capitalism: ordoliberalism and new technologies.- Chapter 13: A new Kondratieff cycle.- Chapter 14: Atechnology for long-term stagnation?.- Chapter 15: Mechanics, commodities, labour.- Chapter 16: Soul of the capitalist machinery.- Chapter 17: Why should we research workers and employees today?.- Chapter 18: Disappearance of trade unions: deinstitutionalised capitalism?.- Part III: Is a non-capitalist economy possible?.- Chapter 19: Histories, wars, markets.- Chapter 20: The problem is ownership and its variable forms.- Chapter 21: Faith?.- Part IV: Freedom and diversity: the anticapitalist revolution.- Chapter 23: More on allocation of ownership.- Chapter 24: Common goods.- Part V: Against rhetoric, back to theory and struggle.- Chapter 25: Living worlds...communities?.- Chapter 26: People: our strength.- Part VI: Blowing into the bottle.- Chapter 27: Adriano Olivetti and the language of hope.