Capitalism: A Ghost Story - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1784780316 ISBN 13: 9781784780319

Publisher: Verso Books

Synopsis

India is a nation of 1.2 billion, but the country's 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of India's gross domestic product. The rest of the population are ghosts within a system beyond their control. This includes the millions that live on less than $2 a day; or the hundreds of thousands of farmers who commit suicide, unable to escape ruinous debts; where dalits are driven from their villages because the owners want to turn the land to agribusiness. These are examples of a 'gush up' economy that has corrupted contemporary India. Capitalism: A Ghost Story examines the dark side of democracy, and shows how the demands of globalized capitalism has subjugated billions of people to racism and exploitation. It is a ferocious attack on the mega corporations that treat India's natural resources like robber barons, and how they have been able to influence every part of the nation from the government to the army in the rush for profit. But, as Arundhati Roy passionately argues, capitalism is in crisis. The cracks are starting to show in its facade.

About this title

About the Author

Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 in Shillong, India. She studied architecture in New Delhi, where she now lives. She is the author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she received the 1997 Booker Prize and has written several non-fiction books including Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, and Walking with the Comrades. She is a contributor to the Verso anthology Kashmir: The Case for Freedom. Roy is the recipient of the 2002 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Prize.

From Booklist

Courageous and clarion Roy (Walking with the Comrades, 2011) continues her analysis and documentation of the disastrous consequences of unchecked global capitalism. She investigates India’s “Gush Up” capitalism and how it is reinforcing a caste system that benefits the elite while wreaking cruel havoc on the greater population and the country’s invaluable natural resources. Roy reports on collusion between New Delhi and multinational corporations that results in the corruption and dysfunction of local governments and brutal initiatives, disguised as security measures, in which people are forced off their land to make way for highways, airports, dams, mines, and factories. While violence is used against the poor, the middle class is covertly coerced by way of what Roy calls the “exquisite art of Corporate Philanthropy.” She cites eye-opening examples of how the support by well-established international foundations of admirable cultural projects and NGOs also insidiously engenders privatization and the infiltration of grass-roots movements against corporate pillaging. As Roy observes, “The algebra of infinite injustice works in mysterious ways.” Precise and revelatory, Roy gives us an awful lot to think about. --Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: Verso Books
• ISBN 10: 1784780316
• ISBN 13: 9781784780319
• Binding: Hardcover