Capitalism: A Ghost Story

Ms. Roy tells a compelling story of the insidiousness of Capitalism. It has a right to exist and no one is against making money; however, the way in which they make it, is poison to the peoples of the world and their countries. The destructive behavior of "Global Capitalism" misdirects the essential goal of the human project from advancing mankind to advancing a few people. This has been done in the name of trickle-down economics, which, itself, has too few leaks. To little attention is given to spreading the advances of knowledge because of the self-centeredness of a few people who celebrate their advantages and wish to remain so - advantaged. They forget that those below them bureaucratically are still those who put them where they are, the people need to understand their power to remove the advantaged into a more just position. Read the book!

While the book aspires to present how capitalism works globally its focus is on India and it takes a bit more to understand local dynamics and political landscape. However very interesting examples of political hypocrisy and exactly what author is arguing how justice disappeared

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.

She writes well and makes a superb case that money is what is used by the masters to control the world, and how they work among themselves. It appears very credible. But after a while it reads like the full CNN coverage of the Democrat senators speeches to persuade the senate to allow witnesses in the Senate for impeachment. On this 7/23/2020 I really do wish DT had been forced out. Ms. Roy makes me wish a number of people were forced out, and this is global. And I'm basically conservative.

If all this book contained was Arundhati Roy's analysis of the role NGO's have come to play in the world, it would still be worth every penny. This book and Walking with the Comrades lays bare the conditions of millions of downtrodden and marginalized people in India in a manner that rarely makes it through the corporate media/PR haze. Given the range of Indian politicians and celebrities who simply loathe this woman means she must be doing something right.

Roy's rhetoric is both engaging and energizing: her work is equal parts academia and activism. I do wish that more explanation of Indian history had been given as backstory to her discussions of modern politics, though I understand much of that may have been assumed as prior knowledge as Roy writes to an Indian audience. Her transcribed speech to an Occuppy Wallstreet crowd (last chapter) is a great showcase of her prowess as a revolutionary rhetorician.

Collections of essays are often uneven -- one or two essays stand out above the rest -- but Arundhati Roy's work is of high quality throughout. The afterword alone is worth reading the book. If you have any interest in a region that could produce our first full-scale nuclear war, if you want to see how capitalism has ravaged yet another country, or if you just need some motivation to keep the dream of true equality throughout the globe, read this book. It should be required reading for every member of the U.S. Congress.

This is a collection of her essays you will not expected to get light from mainstream media. Arundhati Roy's short sentences are full of punch goes right into the hearts of the reader and they are based on long dangerous process of her gathering information from ground reality. Despite all the hoopla about India being power house, she goes deep into the real players and hopeless widened gap between the poor and high tech middle class.

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.

Like other works by the author, this book is powerful and eloquent--though overstated and unfair in parts of the argument.

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.

Roy describes a phase of crony capitalism we like to think that we've left behind, but that seems rather to be spreading, firstly from the U.S. to south and east Asia and then in its turn colouring the character of western capitalism as the influence of Asian corporations grows. She draws parallels between what's happening in India and the enclosures of common land, specifically in Britain though similar takes can be told throughout the West. The Maoists in India seek to halt 'program's in its tracks, no doubt there are others who see modernization as a necessary historical phase but the question for all of us is how do we stop the Juggernaut at a global level?

Its collection of field reporting, good content but the fonts are too small and paper seems poor quality.