Books
Arundhati Roy

Capitalism

The “courageous and clarion” Booker Prize–winner “continues her analysis and documentation of the disastrous consequences of unchecked global capitalism” (Booklist).
From the poisoned rivers, barren wells, and clear-cut forests, to the hundreds of thousands of farmers who have committed suicide to escape punishing debt, to the hundreds of millions of people who live on less than two dollars a day, there are ghosts nearly everywhere you look in India. India is a nation of 1.2 billion, but the country’s one hundred richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of India’s gross domestic product.
Capitalism: A Ghost Story examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India and shows how the demands of globalized capitalism have subjugated billions of people to the highest and most intense forms of racism and exploitation.
“A highly readable and characteristically trenchant mapping of early-twenty-first-century India’s impassioned love affair with money, technology, weaponry and the ‘privatization of everything,’ and—because these must not be impeded no matter what—generous doses of state violence.” —The Nation
“A vehement broadside against capitalism in general and American cultural imperialism in particular . . . an impassioned manifesto.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Roy’s central concern is the effect on her own country, and she shows how Indian politics have taken on the same model, leading to the ghosts of her book’s title: 250,000 farmers have committed suicide, 800 million impoverished and dispossessed Indians, environmental destruction, colonial-like rule in Kashmir, and brutal treatment of activists and journalists. In this dark tale, Roy gives rays of hope that illuminate cracks in the nightmare she evokes.” —Publishers Weekly
106 printed pages
Original publication
2014
Publication year
2014
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Quotes

  • Shadiya Ahmedhas quoted4 years ago
    Do we need weapons to fight wars? Or do we need wars to create a market for weapons? After all, the economies of Europe, the United States, and Israel depend hugely on their weapons industry. It’s the one thing they haven’t outsourced to China
  • Shadiya Ahmedhas quoted4 years ago
    Having worked out how to manage governments, political parties, elections, courts, the media, and liberal opinion, the neo­liberal establishment faced one more challenge: how to deal with growing unrest, the threat of “peoples’ power.” How do you domesticate it? How do you turn protesters into pets? How do you vacuum up people’s fury and redirect it into blind alleys
  • Shadiya Ahmedhas quoted4 years ago
    In the NGO universe, which has evolved a strange anodyne language of its own, everything has become a “subject,” a separate, professionalized, special-interest issue. Community development, leadership development, human rights, health, education, reproductive rights, AIDS, orphans with AIDS—have all been hermetically sealed into their own silos, each with its own elaborate and precise funding brief. Funding has fragmented solidarity in ways that repression never could
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