Book reviews – Ebner, Rogers, Sutton
Awakened, not Woke
Going Mainstream: Why Extreme Ideas are Spreading, and What We Can Do About It. By Julia Ebner. Ithaka £10.99.
The basis for this book is that far-right ideas have become mainstream and so more widely accepted. The author investigated a variety of movements, on-line and in person, to find out what made people accept the views in question. She also spoke to opponents of such positions and, for instance, presents arguments for the reality of climate change. She also says that trans rights and feminism are not mutually exclusive.
The groups dealt with here are incels (involuntary celibate women-hating men), climate change deniers, transphobics, white nationalists, anti-vaxxers and sympathisers with Putin’s Russia (among other things, Russia’s state propaganda machine fuels conspiracy myths). The internet is a fruitful recruiting ground for such groups, especially messaging apps such as Telegram. Online harassment of people they disagree with is common, and some Extinction Rebellion supporters have received death threats.
One point made is that adopting one conspiracy theory makes a person more likely to accept others too, and there are plenty of people who belong to more than one group. For instance, there is a sizeable overlap between white nationalists and climate change deniers, and also with anti-vaxxers. Many of those who support conspiracy theories see themselves as ‘awakened’, having seen through the lies of the establishment and the traditional media. Online groups in particular foster a feeling of belonging among people who are alienated and perhaps lack social skills. Vested interests and right-wing organisations provide sizeable funding for those who attempt to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change.
One of the nastiest organisations examined here is in the UK, Patriotic Alternative, where practically everything is seen as ‘white genocide’. By 2066, supposedly, ‘indigenous people’ will be a minority in Britain (the date is presumably not a coincidence). White Lives Matter sees white people as being victimised, while All Lives Matter fails to acknowledge discrimination against black people, and has only evolved as a movement since the rise of Black Lives Matter.
The final chapter deals with what can be done to fight against the spread of extreme ideas. It includes such suggestions as dealing with the sources of discontent, not just symptoms, and ‘prebunking’ disinformation (empowering people to spot factual distortions before they occur). The interesting part of the book, though, is the exploration of extremist views and why people are attracted to them.
PB
Polycrisis
The Insecurity Trap. A Short Guide to Transformation. By Paul Rogers, with Judith Large. Hawthorn Press, 2024. 92pp.
The main author of this book, Paul Rogers, Professor Emeritus of Peace Studies, sees the world as being in a ‘polycrisis’, whose principal features are wars, right-wing populism, poverty and environmental breakdown. He refers to it as an ‘insecurity trap’, in that the disruption caused by these factors makes everyone’s life prone to uncertainty and instability. Viewing the factors in question as planetary and often interdependent, his declared purpose is to suggest ways in which we can set about ‘navigating’ them on that same planetary level. In her Foreword, the book’s co-author sees humanity as having the technology and productive capacity to achieve world-wide security for all as long as these are not perverted in the service of, for example, fomenting hatred between peoples or producing increasingly sophisticated weapons of war.
One of the major obstacles to this, according to this book, is the free market, or ‘neoliberalism’ as it is referred to, which it sees as beginning seriously in the 1980s, in the era of Thatcher and Reagan, and having intensified since (though it is also recognised as a way of running capitalism that dates back to the 19th century). It is a way of organising things, the authors tell us, that focuses on ‘the prioritisation of private enterprise in place of state ownership’. It also, they go on, eschews ‘cooperative intergovernmental action’ and turns its back on the environmental and military drivers of migration, pushing ‘the richer states to close the castle gates and concentrate even more than at present on looking after themselves’. This in turn makes them ‘terribly ill-suited to responding to global challenges’, such as pandemics and climate breakdown and much more suited to encouraging the arms industry to supply weapons for use in the wars easily prone to breaking out. ‘Now thrive the armourers’, as they put it.
So, what is the solution Professor Rogers and his co-author have to offer to these ongoing and interlocking problems which affect the whole of humanity? First and foremost, they see ‘the need for cooperation at every level from neighbourhoods right through to intergovernmental level’, especially in view of increasing climate breakdown which ‘an economic model rooted in competition cannot cope with’. In support of this they provide a long list of ‘small steps’ people could take to ‘cooperate’ with one another on a daily basis (eg, use of cloth or paper bags rather than plastic ones, conserving water, using chemical-free products, car sharing, volunteering to help in food banks). They also suggest involvement in support of production of local food, sustainable energy, ‘ethical’ banking and campaigns such as against the arms trade and against fossil fuels, and in favour of, for example, Amnesty International. They advocate all of this, and much more – and this is where the problems arise – within the framework of the existing system of buying and selling and dependence on money and the market. In addition, they want to skew the system as it currently exists by having a much larger degree of state ownership of industry and services, arguing that, if governments have more control, they can control ‘market fundamentalism’, introduce more regulation and reform that will make things less unequal, and can also, for example, tax the wealthy, bring in carbon reduction programmes, invest in electrification, and adopt ‘green’ policies generally.
But what all of this fails to reckon with is that, with all such change – if it were possible – we would still be left with capitalism with its market and its money system. Nor would anything of what is proposed change the profit imperative that drives it. At best it would amount to a tinkering at the edges of that system and would certainly not have the effect of mending the inequality that characterises it. Above all, it would do nothing to create the more ‘sharing’ system the authors wish for, nor to remove the ‘insecurity trap’ which the authors’ well-meaning aim is to do away with. Above all, whatever individuals or individual governments may do to attempt to ease the burden on the most deprived, what cannot happen in a world of competing national economic interests is the ‘intergovernmental cooperation’ that this book advocates for. That is an illusion, because all governments are an expression of the interests of the owners or controllers of wealth in their country – whether that wealth is state managed or privately owned – and will only cooperate with other governments to the extent that those interests are not unduly affected. They cannot act against the profit motive and they do not possess the power to regulate the profit system as they wish. That is the bleak truth of the world we live in and the kind of ‘small steps’ advocated by these authors are destined to remain just that and not to lead to any larger change or a different kind of society.
It is in fact a failure of the imagination not to look beyond ‘small steps’ and to a completely different kind of world (a moneyless, stateless, leaderless one with free access for all to all goods and services) – one which is eminently realisable once majority consciousness of the need for it spreads and leads to democratic political action to bring it about. It will be a society of planned cooperation which takes advantage of existing technologies in a sustainable way and in which everyone can develop their interests and abilities with full social support and live without the ever-present threat of the pervasive material insecurity the authors of this book rightly perceive and are so keen to see removed.
HKM

Left currency crankism
Time to Get Rid of Money. It’s just not worth it. By Phillip Sutton. Old Moles Collective. 60 pages.
This booklet is a classic example of being right for the wrong reason. It starts off well enough by saying that ‘it has been said that money is the root of all evil but this is wrong; it is class society’ and that ‘getting rid of money can only happen when the working class takes power and gets rid of capitalism’. After that, it’s downhill all the way as the author, strangely from someone who has emerged from the Left Communist milieu, embraces a currency crank theory of banking and money.
We are told that:
‘It is a total myth that banks need or use savings in order to lend out money. This monetary system is what Aaron Sahr has called “Keystroke Capitalism” ie, money is quite simply a product of using a keyboard as the banks create money by making and recording loans on their computer!!’ (his emphasis).
and that:
‘… the whole financial system is based on creating money out of thin air … The whole financial industry really is just based on creating electronic assets (ie, virtual money) that are loans on which interest can be charged. What a system — an electronic data entry costs virtually nothing but earns interest for the bank!’
To back up this incredible view Sutton cites a 2014 article from the Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin. Although this does state that banks create money when they make a loan, this is just a definition and does not imply that they do this from thin air. This said, the article’s authors have only themselves to blame when ignorant or naive people take their words literally.
Sutton writes that:
‘In modern capitalism it appears that in the money creation process, it is the borrowers that determine the money supply, and the only restriction on this credit is the ability, or perhaps the willingness, of borrowers to put forward existing assets as collateral against a loan’.
If you think that banks can simply create money to lend at interest by a few keyboard strokes, this is a logical deduction — the only limit to what banks could lend would be the amount requested by credit-worthy borrowers.
In an appendix Sutton reproduces a long section from that Bank of England article which includes this passage which contradicts his claim above:
‘Although commercial banks create money through lending, they cannot do so freely without limit. Banks are limited in how much they can lend if they are to remain profitable in a competitive banking system’.
If he read, beyond the introductory summary, the part where the authors expand on this he would find it is not ‘a total myth’ that banks need funds to back up a loan. The article explains what happens after a bank has used its keyboard to record a loan when the borrower then begins to spend the money.
When the borrower does this, most of it is likely to go to people who bank with other banks; so the lending bank will have to transfer money to another bank (if some of the recipients bank with the same bank that will go towards reducing its outgoings). What happens is that at the end of the day (literally) banks clear what they owe each other. If a bank has more money going out than coming in it covers this by drawing on its reserves. But this cannot continue indefinitely as at some point its reserves would be exhausted. The article goes on:
‘Banks therefore try to attract or retain additional liabilities to accompany their new loans. In practice other banks would also be making new loans and creating new deposits, so one way they can do this is to try and attract some of these newly created deposits. In a competitive banking sector, that may involve increasing the rate they offer to households on their savings accounts. By attracting new deposits, the bank can increase its lending without running down its reserves. Alternatively, a bank can borrow from other banks or attract other forms of liabilities, at least temporarily. But whether through deposits or other liabilities, the bank would need to make sure it was attracting and retaining some kind of funds in order to keep expanding lending’ (their emphasis ).
So much, then, for the idea that banks don’t need to fund the loans they make. The article then explains what does limit bank lending:
‘And the cost of that [attracting funds] needs to be measured against the interest the bank expects to earn on the loans it is making, which in turn depends on the level of Bank Rate set by the Bank of England. For example, if a bank continued to attract new borrowers and increase lending by reducing mortgage rates, and sought to attract some new deposits by increasing the rates it was paying its customers on their deposits, it might soon find it unprofitable to keep expanding its lending. Competition for loans and deposits, and the desire to make a profit, therefore limit money creation by banks’.
Sutton’s misunderstanding of the nature of money and banking leads him down the same road as other adherents of the Thin Air School of Banking — that debt is the problem.
‘… it is the super-rich which owns the majority of debt in the world whereas the working class, which suffers most from the burden of debt, actually owns very little of that debt … Given the level of debt today, it would have to be one of the first tasks of the working class to cancel all debts even if it cannot completely eliminate money quite so easily’.
This makes the booklet a curious combination of Left Communism and currency crankism. But, to be fair, the author does want to see the working class eventually establish ‘a society of abundance in which people are rewarded for their contributions by the free provision of their personal needs’.
ALB
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The titles of those 3 books should be:
1. How to Fight the Far-Right
2. Reformism on Steroids
3. Magic Money Tree