Beyond the Profits System

Possibilities for the Post-Capitalist Era

Harry Shutt

While many have claimed that no one could have foreseen the financial crisis, Harry Shutt was predicting just such a collapse as far back as 1998 in his book, The Trouble With Capitalism. In Beyond the Profits System, Shutt offers a radically different analysis to the mainstream, establishment commentators who have struggled to come to terms with the crisis. Arguing that we need to move away from a system based on compulsive addiction to growth and obsession with the profit motive, towards a collectivist, more humane economic mode, the book provides not merely a comprehensive background to the flawed ideologies of that precipitated the collapse, but also a radical, though realistic, way forward in light of the catastrophe.

Contents

 Anatomy of a Crisis • The Bankruptcy of Official Policy • A Compulsive Addiction to Growth • The Need for and Alternative Model • Other Drawbacks of the Profit Motive • The Tyranny of Production: How Ricardian Economics has Distorted Capitalist Ideology • Features of a Demand-driven Global Economy • Income Distribution in a Demand-led Economy • Short-term Remedies and the Transition

About the Author

 Harrry Shutt was educated at Oxford and Warwick universities. He worked for six years in the Development and Planning Division of the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). He then moved to the Research Department of the General and Municipal Workers’ Union (1973-76) and subsequently became Chief Economist at the Fund for Research and Investment for the Development of Africa (1977-79). Since then he has been an independent economic consultant. His most recent book is The Trouble with Capitalism: An Inquiry into the Causes of Global Economic Failure (Zed Books, 1999). He is also the author of The Myth of Free Trade: Patterns of Protectionism since 1945 (Basil Blackwell/The Economist, 1985).