Capitalism: A Ghost Story By Arundhati Roy

Arundhati Roy ↠ 3 free read

Capitalism: A Ghost Story : Roy, Arundhati: : Boeken Capitalism: A Ghost Story

Arundhati Roy has got facts right and has neatly established the capitalism politics and lobbying. Maturity was shown in prescribing few solutions (authenticity of those yet to be tested) in the end rather than bashing Capitalism throughout. Capitalism: A Ghost Story While the book aspires to present how capitalism works globally its focus is on India and it takes a bit to understand local dynamics and political landscape. However very interesting examples of political hypocrisy and exactly what author is arguing how justice disappeared Capitalism: A Ghost Story For me as a North American who rarely follows the politics of the world's second most populous country, this book was an eye opener. A passing reference to Narendra Modi, current Prime Minister of India, has made me wary of the way Modi is currently being touted as a super star. Some sections of the book read as if they're a re hash of material written for other purposes, but I could be wrong. It hardly matters: this is an important work. Read it and weep. Capitalism: A Ghost Story I recently discovered this journalist and author and very proud that the torch bearers like her who speak truth to power, though small in numbers, refuse to be silenced. She is the goddess who cares for the poor and uneducated who are being rendered homeless and suffering from state and corporate violence. Many a journalists who are not as well known have been killed or jailed on fake charges. I pray for her safety. If you really want t o know what really goes on and reported by the corporate mass media, read her scholarly work, and watch her speeches on youtube. If you value human rights and social justice, you should read this. Capitalism: A Ghost Story There is a beautiful variation in Roy's sentence structures. The second part is moralistic but the first part has given a trenchant argument to justify that. The whole makes fewer than one hundred pages. This is masterly polemic.The book's subtitled 'A Ghost Story' not just because of the spectre of communism but because the poor have been ghosted. Written before Modi's re election in 2019, and on the eve of the 2014 elections in which he won the first majority in the lower house since 1984, it looks at what 'good governance' in line with Bretton Woods may mean in practice. Even before Modi's Digital India, Roy is writing here about digitalisation as a 'version of the Enclosure of the Commons' and a surveillance state. Events usually reported as police actions using troops, or as aspects of foreign policy, are seen by Roy in the context of multinationals' investments. Those who resist the privatisation of natural resources (which means the sale of land rights and the displacement of people by state governments) are denounced as Maoists or jihadis. Roy presents it as a tragi farcical repeat of primitive accumulation.The book's afterword is a transcript of a call from Roy for an end to privatised natural assets and the inheritance of real wealth, as well as for a ban on cross ownership over different economic sectors and for universal rights to health care, education and shelter. Cross ownership means not only that the richest 100 people own assets equivalent to a quarter of GDP in a country of 1.2 billion: it means a re creation of 'company towns' on the simply vast scale of the 'Special Economic Zones'. No 'trickle down' occurs because financialisation has broken any link that might have been between 'gush up' and job creation, so privatisation creates vacuums for NGOs that in Roy's view are themselves the creatures of connected foundations like Ford and RAND. Roy has concluded that 'corporate philanthropy began to replace missionary activity' and NGOs are 'global finance's way of buying into resistance movements'; a repressive tolerance (p.29).This analysis endures so far. Modi has come to power since the book was written on an anti corruption, people versus politicians, majoritarian ticket, but his investigations into NGOs go alongside an actual liberalisation of direct investment rules and are part of his authoritarianism and 'perception management' (p.17). Pages 51 to 52 on the irrelevance of the Jan Lokpal Bill to a poor person's circumstances could be read alongside Modi's subsequent currency and further World Bank style 'reforms'. Roy warns us as well that the zombie economy and investment paralysis are still happening in 2014 (though they are likely now to be blamed on COVID19). On pages 36 to 42 she makes a profound attack on the Left for the chauvinism, sexual and otherwise, among its own activists that drove certain constituencies into line with the NGOs' agendas and their 'important, but in the long run stagnant' identity politics. It is the Good Old Cause made topical; it is like Tom Mann trying to unite the Catholic dockers and Protestant carters. Model writing. Capitalism: A Ghost Story