The cancer stage of capitalism Book

The Cancer Stage of Capitalism is an interesting book. The writing style is a little opaque - some convoluted sentences and the use of idiosyncratic terms (money-sequence, life-capacities, life-capital, etc.). But once you get the hang of his personal language, the author has some interesting things to say.

Not exactly Marxist in analysis, the author explores the 'cancerous' effect of capitalism on society.

This kind of summarizes his thesis:
"Yet if the pathways of metastasis are seen at all, it is in isolation without connective diagnosis - trillions of dollars of tax-cut giveaways to the corporate rich, privatization frenzies moving to corporate-government 'partnerships' to get more public money without responsibility for outcomes, ever-growing looting of publically and indigenously owned lands and waters for oil and gas, minerals, forests, fish and crustaceans, endless public subsidies, infrastructures, services, policing mechanisms, state propaganda and foreign wars to attack oppositions, and debt-entrapping governments and citizens at deeper record levels backed by endless 'austerity programmes' liquidating social life-capacities and supports to pay more the less they have to do so. The globalizing malignant money sequences eat away at public life-capital bases as their very value-system meaning" (p.18).

I liked his analysis on government debt as a tool to enact austerity on the hoi polloi to 'hollow out life-systems'. And he is rightly critical of money-making-money in modern financial capitalism. In essence, McMurtry makes a good case of economics 'for life' as opposed to economics 'for accumulation'.

His solution is a little wanting, focusing more on reform than revolution: he suggests creating a "medium of exchange for enacting system cure by progressive taxation, reclamation of publicly owned resources as societies' life-capital assets, and non-profit banking and credit for public investment in natural and social life-support systems". In essence, it is about refocussing investment for the development of people within the limits of a balanced ecosystem.