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Book Review Commodity by Photis Lysandrou

The crisis in the global economy comes under scrutiny, with the focus on the financialised world market

Commodity: The Global Commodity System in the 21st Century
by Photis Lysandrou
(Routledge, £45)

THIS short book adds materially to our understanding of the developments which have shaped today’s world economy, pushed it into crisis and which have inhibited the addressing of its most destructive and odious features —  inequality above all.

In it, Photis Lysandrou, a Marxist for many years, sets out to explain in a well-written text the parameters of today’s crisis starting, as Marx did, from the fact of the commodity.

Though rooted in Marxism, Lysandrou is not bounded by its orthodoxies. In grappling with the fact of globalisation or the universalisation of commodity exchange as the operative principle of the world economy, he distinguishes between the “physical space” of peoples, nation states and factories and the “commodity space” of a financialised world market.

I’m uncertain as to whether this perspective adds significantly to general Marxist analysis of the consequences of globalisation and insistence on it sometimes obscures his argument. But he is right to identify what is new — the complete prevalence of commodity economy for the first time in human history and arising in the last three decades.

The chapter analysing the crisis of 2008 onwards is particularly useful, focusing not just on the spread of Collateralised Debt Obligations, the ubiquity of which triggered the crash, but on that spread being rooted in the inequalities of the world economy, or “the deeper structural imbalances of the global commodity system,” as he puts it.

“The fault-lines at the root of the crisis had more to do with structural flaws in the contemporary economic system than with the behavioural failures on the part of particular groups,” he writes. An obvious point but one that so many forget or neglect.

Moving beyond analysis, Lysandrou makes a strong case for a global tax authority putting “order into the world’s tax affairs” and imposing a global wealth tax targeted at the hyper-rich He does not neglect to discuss the evident obstacles that will be placed in the way of such a development but makes a convincing case that it is worth trying.

There are points along the route of his argument which will be controversial among socialists. In my view, he is wrong to assert that the suppression of the commodity principle was complete in the Soviet Union, and also in his view that what he calls the “communist systems” represented a “throwback” to a pre-capitalist era.

Likewise, Lysandrou’s argument that once the commodity principle penetrates the interior of any one society its domination of the whole world economy is “inevitable” seems pessimistic. We have, at any event, learned the hard way to be sceptical about any claims to inevitability, except in terms of the most general tendencies.

Such caveats aside, this is a very welcome addition to the literature on the contemporary economy. While the book is perhaps pitched and priced at the academic market, I would commend it to the general reader too and in particular endorse its conclusion, which speaks to Lysandrou’s enduring socialist commitment.

“There are no reasons why this modern world of ours should be one of stark contrasts, with a few thousands of individuals at one end of the spectrum disposing of vast amounts of wealth while billions of people at the other end must survive on scraps and remnants,” he declares.  “No reasons at all. None.”

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