- by FK
- The Guardian
- Issue #2145
This review is a public service. If you’re at all left-wing, it’s likely someone will see this book in a bookshop, note the cute cover and ‘provocative’ title and give it to you for Christmas or your next birthday. There’s also the danger you’ll give it to your friends or rellos when you’re stuck for inspiration.
If this review stops even one such purchase, my sacrifice will have been worthwhile.
Short review: It’s terrible, don’t bother reading it.
Longer review: This book is a lot like the 1995 bestseller Emotional Intelligence. Hordes of people looked at the cover, thought ‘fair enough’ and bought it on the strength of that.
It’s easy to agree with the cover of The end of Capitalism. The capitalist system has had a long time to fix the climate crisis. Instead, capital has made things worse, and shows no signs of stopping. Capitalism is innately committed to non-stop growth at the cost of the environment. It’d be good to have some sort of plan for what comes next. So what’s the problem?
Firstly, the book is aimed exclusively at Germans. It’s so intensely parochial, the cover should come with a warning for non-Germans; ‘Not relatable’.
Still, Germany is an industrial country, we should be able to get something out of it. Well, yes, we should –if the author understood capitalism. Instead, we’re served up such masterful understatements as “the rich North is not completely blameless in the fact that the Global South remains so poor.”
Not that the book is fact-free. The reader is barraged with facts about how many calories British workers ate during the Industrial Revolution, who invented what when, as well as irrelevant facts like what right-wing opinion-mongers Stephen Pinker, or Bjorn Lomborg think about anything. Solar and wind power are discussed, but batteries are dismissed because Bill Gates doesn’t like them. On renewables, we are told that wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. Batteries are discussed as though the wind never blows and it’s always dark. The expense of renewables is given the scare treatment as though other sources of energy are free. In another doomist moment, we are told that BMW, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, and VolksWagen “would be a mere shadow of their former selves if most passengers and goods transportation were to move to the railways.” Yes, they would. So what? So we need a just transition.
The climax of this wave of doomism and irrelevant fact-citing is that there is hope in the form of … Britain 1939. No, I’m not kidding. There was an emergency, Britain was facing Hitler, which is a lot like humanity facing climate catastrophe, kind of. The British shrank parts of their economy so they could keep fighting. Umpteen pages of gush about the British war effort (Churchill good, Chamberlain bad – you know the drill) – lead to this point: we need rationing and de-growth.
That’s it really. Save your money, just look at the cover and nod, then read something else.
