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The Master's Tools:How Finance Wrecked Democracy (And a Radical Plan to Rebuild It)
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Finance serves the rich and powerful. We need to democratize it.
Why is democracy so broken and how might it be fixed? In The Master's Tools, award-winning author Michael A. McCarthy argues the answer can be found in the flows of credit and investment bound up with finance capital.
Today, finance guides and constrains our politics, but there is no reason why this must be so. In this groundbreaking work, McCarthy develops a political and social theory of institutional transformation rooted in the interconnectedness of finance and democracy.
Inspired by ancient Athens, where small groups chosen by lottery were used to ensure democratic participation, he shows how democracy and working-class power can be strengthened by introducing new forms of financial governance, focusing on the inclusion of historically excluded groups.
His proposals for democratic financial institutions point the way to imbuing finance with a socio-environmental purpose and the funding of a just green transition, social housing, and other necessary public goods. And these financial institutions might be the first step toward a whole new kind of economy.
Reviews
False prophets of democratizing finance are everywhere. Michael A. McCarthy is a real one. He pitches democracy as a system of minipublics and nested spaces of distributed ownership and decision-making drawing on our collective intelligence. This is not just critique. It’s a cookbook.
This book is an original intellectual contribution to the timely debates about democratizing finance. It offers a new framework featuring governance processes that center deliberation and sortition (the random selection of decision makers). Michael A. McCarthy makes a compelling case for shifting who has decision-making power, and how decisions are taken in financial institutions. An essential read.
The lead weight of fictitious capital deprives us of our future. Mike A. McCarthy has a plan to regain it: democratize finance.
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Given the vast inequalities and debilitating crises to which the capitalist financial system plainly gives rise, criticizing that system is easy. Considerably harder is the work of thinking carefully and creatively about the possible form of alternative financial institutions designed to serve the many rather than the few. Making a full-blooded case for a genuine democratization of control of financial investment, The Master’s Tools represents an original, welcome and extremely interesting intervention.