Overview

Why is democracy so broken and how might it be fixed? Most political commentators point to heads of state, such as the Presidency, and other formal institutions of the state. But in The Master’s Tools, award-winning author Michael A. McCarthy argues the answer lays elsewhere, in the flows of credit and investment bound up with finance capital. In this groundbreaking work, McCarthy develops a political and social theory of democratic ruptures that argues that democracy is deeply intertwined with the economy itself. He shows how democracy can be deepened and working-class power strengthened by creating new sortition-based institutions of deliberative finance. His radical proposal, the first of its kind, offers practical steps toward a comprehensive design to create the investment mandates that are needed to fund a just green transition, social housing, and other socially necessary, but privately underfunded, public goods.

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9781788730662

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Reviews

False prophets of democratizing finance are everywhere. Michael A. McCarthy is a real one. He pitches democracy as a system of minipublics and nested spaces of distributed ownership and decision-making drawing on our collective intelligence. This is not just critique. It's a cookbook. -- Quinn Slobodian, author of <i>Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy</i> This book is an original intellectual contribution to the timely debates about democratizing finance. It offers a new framework featuring governance processes that center deliberation and sortition (the random selection of decision makers). Michael A. McCarthy makes a compelling case for shifting who has decision-making power, and how decisions are taken in financial institutions. An essential read. -- Claudia Chwalisz, founder and CEO, DemocracyNext The lead weight of fictitious capital deprives us of our future. Mike A. McCarthy has a plan to regain it: democratize finance. -- Cédric Durand, author of <i>How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy</i> Given the vast inequalities and debilitating crises to which the capitalist financial system plainly gives rise, criticizing that system is easy. Considerably harder is the work of thinking carefully and creatively about the possible form of alternative financial institutions designed to serve the many rather than the few. Making a full-blooded case for a genuine democratization of control of financial investment, The Master's Tools represents an original, welcome and extremely interesting intervention. -- Brett Christophers, author of <i>The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet</i>

Author Information

Michael A. McCarthy is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Marquette University and former Berggruen Research Fellow at the University of Southern California. His research is on capitalism and democracy. His book Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions was published in 2017 with Cornell University Press. The book was awarded with the Paul Sweezy Book Award as well as an honorable mention for the Labor and Labor Movements Book Award. He has written extensively for public audiences as outlets such as Boston Review, Jacobin Magazine, Noema Magazine, and The Washington Post.

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