Disassembly Required. A Field Guide to Actually Existing Capitalism. By Geoff Mann. AK Press. £9.95
This book succeeds well enough as a description of the way capitalism has functioned in recent years, except that the author subscribes to the view that a bank does not have to have the funds it lends, not even in digital form. This is unfortunate as he gives as one of the defining features of capitalism ‘a monetary system based on the production of bank-credit money.’
Banks are certainly central to capitalism in practice but for collecting unused funds and savings and channelling them to capitalist enterprises as money-capital. Revealingly, when it comes to describing the events that led to the sub-prime mortgage bubble, he does not appeal to the theory that banks create money out of nothing to explain the source of funding for this. He says it came from savers in East Asia. In other words, from previously existing funds.
In the final chapter on what to do about capitalism he reveals that ‘for a long time I was convinced that we could never get beyond capitalism without getting rid of money’ but that ‘I am no longer so sure.’ He still knows, though, that there is no way out under capitalism, not even if a left-wing government comes to power in Greece or Spain and takes the country out of the EU. But even though he knows this won’t improve things (and says it may even make them worse) he still supports this, on the grounds that it is better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all. Perhaps, but why not try something that has some chance of succeeding rather than setting yourself up to fail?
Mann ends up advocating that what anti-capitalists can best do today is trying to encourage non-money relations between people (which he says does not include LETS or local currencies). So he doesn’t seem to have entirely abandoned his previous view.
Adam Buick
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