Customer Reviews

After Capitalism: From Managerialism to Workplace Democracy

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Melman like no other sees how the short term orientation of so-called capitalism is killing us, by de-humanizing society in general and labor relations in particular. He offers a true vision, and one can only hope that in the upcoming new era of collaborative problem solving, in which considerations beyond the balance sheet will become increasingly predominant (reducing carbon footprints, etc.) He needs to be appreciated in the context of other global developments, such as the Mondragon cooperative in Spain, and the Dutch system of Consent management, which goes back to educator Kees Boeke, and the Quaker tradition, which offers powerful new tools which have been successful in many places when they have been seriously tried. Today there are new voices speaking of Spiritual Capitalism - to a degree all of it boils down to the same: shifting from a short term rip-off mentality towards a long term and cooperative mentality, to create a future that's worth a damn, in lieu of the après-nous la déluge of stock market capitalism. One can only hope that this book will see the revival which it deserves. Other relevant connections are Jack Stack with his great game of business, and Marvin Weisbord.

Although After Capitalism examines the inherent flaws in modern state capitalism with exhaustive thoroughness, the book is exceedingly boring; the crushing machine of our hierarchical society is described with the sort of prose you'd find in an instruction manual for assembling a desk. This might be excusable (it is, after all, an economic treatise) if Melman managed to turn his critique into a map for a society after capitalism but the book never quite seems to get there. There are vague and repetitive references to attempts by workers to "disalienate" themselves but Melman never explores the workers' efforts with the sort of detail he reserves for outlining the architecture of the Military-Industrial Complex. In all, the book was informative but I'm certain there are tomes out there that manage to portray a more evocative vision of a postcapitalist world.