re: #98 Dopamine Fish

On my reading list. Reviewers say it’s a fairly dense academic sociology work, but I’m gonna check it out.

How all great powers decline—including the United States

The extent and irreversibility of US decline is ever more obvious as America loses one war after another and its industries slip behind the competition. Richard Lachmann explains why the United States will find it impossible to retain global dominance. He contrasts America’s relatively brief period of hegemony with the Netherlands’ similarly short primacy and Britain’s far longer era of leadership.

Decline in those cases was not inevitable and did not respond to global capitalist cycles. It was the product of the success elites had in grabbing control of resources and governmental powers. In this process, not only are ordinary people harmed, but capitalists become increasingly unable to coordinate their interests as a class. They fail to adopt policies and make the investments necessary to counter economic and geopolitical competitors elsewhere in the world.

Following this model, Lachmann traces the transformation of US politics from an era of elite consensus to its present-day condition of paralysis and plunder, explaining the paradox of an American military with an unprecedented technological edge unable to subdue even the weakest enemies, and the consequences of finance’s cannibalization of the economy.

versobooks.com