There, on the cover of The Silent Takeover, sits a young woman. She sprawls in an armchair, with a booted leg draped nonchalantly over one arm. The chair is placed, incongruously, on muddy ground by a small river. Our prophetess looks at the reader, mouth slightly parted. Thus do we meet the pundit as poseuse. Infantile leftism takes on a new and attractive form.
What is Noreena Hertz-an academic at the Judge Institute, Cambridge University-trying to tell us? The “silent takeover” began, she writes, with Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Global corporations were apparently, invisible and uninfluential before then. But capitalism has now taken over the world. In the process it has destroyed democratic politics. “Governments’ hands are tied and we are increasingly dependent on corporations.” The result is an eroding tax base and crumbling public services, as “our elected representatives kowtow to business.”
Hertz says she is not anti-capitalist, since “capitalism is clearly the best system for generating wealth.” She is “unashamedly pro-people, pro-democracy and pro-justice.” This, naturally, differentiates her from opponents who are unashamedly anti-people, anti-democracy and anti-justice. Her core worry is this: “as business has extended its role, it has come to define the public realm? Governments, by not even acknowledging the takeover, risk shattering the implicit contract between state and citizen that lies at the heart of a democratic society, making the rejection of the ballot box and support for non-traditional forms of political expression increasingly attractive.”
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