"The Truth About Corporate Cons, Globalization and High-Finance Fraudsters". Greg Palast proves two things with this mind blowing book (John Pilger said "This information is a hand grenade"). Firstly that investigative reporting isn't dead, secondly that it is the sort of reporting that really matters. Starting from a detailed account of how a daddy's boy with a low IQ stole the election for the leader of the free world, moving on to globalization, corporatization and privatization, he shows the seedy seemy side of political and corporate life that our media are paid to gloss over rather than look into. Through leaked documents, undercover operations and general hard work, he gives us a peek into the underbelly of the controlling elites culture. It is through the control of information that corporations maintain their stranglehold on our society, and it will be through the freedom of information that we will break that control. Someone once said "The Wars of the Future will be fought with information", and this information really is an intellectual hand grenade. Greg Palast has done his bit, the least you can do is read it.
Books
This book was released with enough hype that I had heard about it for a while before I had any idea what it was about, therefore I assumed it was a stupid novel or something. I'm not sure how I came about to know what it was really about and read it, but I was very glad I did. This book talks about what is behind the facade of trends and brands in our modern world, how they are created and sustained both in the factories of impoverished countries, and the soulless designer offices of the PR world. Like all great books, it goes beyond any description I could give it in a short space, unions, pr, sweatshops, corporations, advertising to children, temporary workers, and it even gets around to letting you know what resistance to this is forming. The western world has changed rapidly and deeply in the last few decades, and books like No Logo and Fast Food Nation fill you in on whats driving it and why it's so harmful. We have become the product - if you want your humanity back, read No Logo.
This book looked really interesting from the first time I heard about it, and with Noam Chomsky recommending it on the cover (Along with Rev Tim Costello and Natasha Stott Despoja) I kept trawling the library for it until it finally came in. I must say the first few pages really rocked my world, particularly about the disjunct between the union and social justice facets of the left. From then on it got into what the book is about, that we have given economics far too central a position in the political and social life of our culture. It makes this point well, and quite thoroughly, I think it's a book that is important for people who think economic growth is the be all and end all of society to read. For those of us who already understand that this isn't the case, it will be less enlightening. However I don't think it was written with someone like me in mind, though that is not to say I didn't enjoy it, it is an easy read and makes a lot of points without which our culture will not move beyond it's current self destructive phase.
I've always been attracted to the freedom and responsibility of the individual inherent in anarchism as a political philosophy. It was my readings of Noam Chomsky and interviews he'd given on anarchism that first made me identify as an anarchist. Still, as someone who considers themself as a democrat might never have heard of the demos in Athens, I wasn't really aware of the history of anarchism and the thinkers who had contributed to it over time.
Wandering aimlessly in Waterstone's bookshop in Gower St London, this title jumped out at me as something which might fill in the gaps of my understanding of anarchism. It was almost not so much to deepen my understanding of anarchism that I wanted to read it, but so that I might understand the totality of what was meant when I used the term.
The book is long, the print is small, this is not a tome for those with short attention spans. It rambles on in a strange course as well, tempting one to wonder whether the meaning of anarchy as disorder was a guiding principle in its development, but it was navigable and I made it through. Perhaps on rereading this book, as I intend to do, I'll understand better why it is laid out as it is.
Anarchism as a word comes from the ancient Greek, but being espoused in its modern sense as a political philosophy only began with the Frenchman Proudhon in the first half of the 19th century. The book however goes back in history looking for people that could be called anarchists. It is roughly laid out chronologically wandering from the ancient Greeks, Taoists and Buddhists, on through anarchist religious sects in the middle ages such as the Divine Heresy, onto the intellectual founders of modern anarchism, Godwin and Proudhon, onto the times when anarchists assassinated heads of state in the 1890s and essentially destroyed anarchism as a valid political philosophy for decades, then to the anarchist communities in Spain crushed by the fascism in the 1930s and finally the more modern anarchists of the latter 20th century. There are also many chapters discussing various aspects of anarchism and bringing together, often repeating, parts from the sections about individual anarchists.
If you are interested in Anarchism, and wonder what people like Bakunin, Oscar Wilde, Tolstoy, Gandhi and Chomsky said about it, you are going to find it in this book and much more. If you want to be challenged intellectually this book will do that at every turn. Get rid of states, remove prisons, let people organise their own work, the theories set out in this book are as radical as it gets. It informed my anarchism, made me aware of everything represented by that term, and left me more committed to the ideals of anarchism as a guiding force for the development of the individual into our future.