The Trouble with Capitalism: An Enquiry into the Causes of Global Economic Failure - Softcover

'Identifies an impressive array of potential problems.' The Christian Science Monitor 'Shutt is one of the few to expose capitalism's lies and imperfections, faults that critically threaten our democratic survival.' Publishers Weekly 'In this thoughtful treatment of the current economic scene, one feels convinced that the collapse of Western civilization as we know it is at hand.' Library Journal 'Offers no easy answers, but suggests the West is going to have to face the fact that profit-maximising capitalism has run its course.' Tribune 'Based on wide knowledge, well documented source material and sharp analysis, everyone who reads it will learn from it...' Liberation 'This has been the most interesting discussion with an economist I have ever had in my life' George Galloway, Press TV 'Shutt [has] a message for every saver and investor: a crash of 1929 proportions is almost inevitable' Dan Atkinson in The Guardian (on the first edition of this book)

The recent collapse of the banking system and instability in the financial markets has dramatically shaken confidence in the global economic order. Is the current variant of 'free market' capitalism really sustainable? The Trouble With Capitalism - originally written, with remarkable prescience, in 1998 - anticipates such a development and explains the underlying economic fragility it has revealed. Rather than being merely a temporary blip in the march of capitalism, Shutt argues forcefully that the on-going crisis has arisen as a result of fundamental economic problems, stemming from the growing redundancy of both labour and capital since the 1970s. In doing so, he exposes the sham of the laissez faire prospectus, showing that state power and capital are increasingly being used to prop up capital while pretending that the aim is to roll back the frontiers of the state. The implications of the author's startling conclusion (re-examined in a new foreword) - that the maximisation of profit must cease to be the main basis for allocating resources - are profound.