Scan barcode
cemoses's review against another edition
2.0
I wish I could give this book a higher rating because I agree with many of the ideas in the book. I give kudos to the idea of the series the Forbidden Bookshelf because sometimes I do feel that corporate America is controlling the information we receive.
However, I found huge sections of the book unreadable and outdated. Large sections of the book deal with stagflation and the cold war which are no longer problems. The book appears to be written for academics which always are hard reading for lay people. It is also largely about political theory which does not interest me.
The books does have some good points, which I thought would be better served as a selection from the book in an anthology of some kind. Mr., Gross predicts f what many people call now "crony capitalism" and the "one percent". Furthermore Mr. Gross is an interesting person in that he appears to have worked in the Truman administration as an advocate of "full employment”; the book describes how the public is being manipulated to accept an increasingly higher unemployment rate by a Democratic administration. I for one thought the public was receiving propaganda from the US government and academics hoping for government appointment when in 2009 I started to hear the terms "jobless recovery" and the "new normal" of high unemployment
I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for a honest review.
However, I found huge sections of the book unreadable and outdated. Large sections of the book deal with stagflation and the cold war which are no longer problems. The book appears to be written for academics which always are hard reading for lay people. It is also largely about political theory which does not interest me.
The books does have some good points, which I thought would be better served as a selection from the book in an anthology of some kind. Mr., Gross predicts f what many people call now "crony capitalism" and the "one percent". Furthermore Mr. Gross is an interesting person in that he appears to have worked in the Truman administration as an advocate of "full employment”; the book describes how the public is being manipulated to accept an increasingly higher unemployment rate by a Democratic administration. I for one thought the public was receiving propaganda from the US government and academics hoping for government appointment when in 2009 I started to hear the terms "jobless recovery" and the "new normal" of high unemployment
I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for a honest review.
redbecca's review against another edition
2.0
You won't learn anything about fascism if you read this book, but you will learn about a very popular analysis of emerging neoliberalism from 1979. What the author is really explaining is the reduction of democracy as a result of corporate-friendly govt. policies and increasing economic inequality at the end of the 70s. The process he's describing also fits what some political scientists in later years aptly describe as a "hollowing out" of democratic institutions. The general drive of the book is toward increased democracy, and many of the predictions he makes about things like surveillance and media seem prescient when read in retrospect. However, the book also redefines both fascism and corporatism in ways that are not helpful for anyone who seriously wants to understand what either of these things mean. "Corporatism" in the sense that Mussolini meant is not simply corporate friendly govt. friendly policy, which is how it is often colloquially used by Americans today. It means the actual replacement of existing govt. bodies, independent labor unions and political parties, with industrial councils. In other words, corporatism in the fascist sense is a kind of ultra-nationalist syndicalism. This matters because fascism is a form of right wing populism, and while this book argues that this "classic' version of fascism will never return, we can see around the world today that fascist movements can indeed spring up to oppose what they call "corporatism" by which they often mean 'big business"which they perceive in conspiratorial terms. In libertarian lingo today "corporatism" often means "govt. regulation of business, and in this case, they are simply repeating incorrect arguments associating welfare-state policies and social democracy with fascism in the way that many right-wing activists did in the 1930s during the New Deal. In order to effectively combat fascism it is important to be able to address how and why right wing ultra-nationalists are able to effectively win people over with what often seem like left wing and anti-establishment sentiments against capitalism, that simultaneously turn these arguments toward authoritarian, radically anti-regulatory capitalism, and/or even genocidal remedies.
octavia_cade's review against another edition
3.0
Interesting if sometimes over-thorough explanation of one possible future of fascism. Instead of the jackbooted versions of WW2, for example, Gross argues that future iterations of fascism will be more palatable, more friendly in their presentation, and that they will come about due to an unholy alliance between Big Business and Big Politics. Well, we can see today how often business seems to pay off government in order to get their own way, and how some businesses have grown to have an economic power greater than some countries, so this isn't off-base on Gross' part.
However this book does, I think, suffer somewhat though from being a product of its time. It was written, I believe, in the late 1970s, and is is extremely America-focused. Which is not in itself a flaw, but what Gross hasn't foreseen, for example, is the growth in technology and how this affects his thesis. There are sections of the book dealing with technology, and how it can (and will) be used in surveillance, and in this as with the often corrosive influence of Big Business Media (thank you Mr. Murdoch, you climate-denying anti-science hack) Gross is certainly prophetic. Nonetheless, a lot of the media consumed nowadays, especially by the younger sections of the population, is social. This has an effect on news coverage. When a current event catches my attention, for example, I get a lot of information on that event from the internet, which frequently has real-time responses and videos from those living through the event. There's a growing trend in the democratisation of media, is what I'm saying, that will eventually, I trust, counter the Murdochs of the world. Now Gross can't have been expected to predict this sort of thing, but it does affect his argument... even though a lot of that argument remains valid and concerning.
However this book does, I think, suffer somewhat though from being a product of its time. It was written, I believe, in the late 1970s, and is is extremely America-focused. Which is not in itself a flaw, but what Gross hasn't foreseen, for example, is the growth in technology and how this affects his thesis. There are sections of the book dealing with technology, and how it can (and will) be used in surveillance, and in this as with the often corrosive influence of Big Business Media (thank you Mr. Murdoch, you climate-denying anti-science hack) Gross is certainly prophetic. Nonetheless, a lot of the media consumed nowadays, especially by the younger sections of the population, is social. This has an effect on news coverage. When a current event catches my attention, for example, I get a lot of information on that event from the internet, which frequently has real-time responses and videos from those living through the event. There's a growing trend in the democratisation of media, is what I'm saying, that will eventually, I trust, counter the Murdochs of the world. Now Gross can't have been expected to predict this sort of thing, but it does affect his argument... even though a lot of that argument remains valid and concerning.
More...