What I've read this week

W/c 24th March

Apologies for the lateness of this week’s WIRTW - I’ve spent this week travelling around Europe, which has been both exhausting and eye opening!

I spent a few days in Copenhagen promoting the Danish edition of Vulture Capitalism (see pic below). You can listen to the talk I gave here (it’s in English even though the website is in Danish). Then I went to Germany for the Leipzig Book Fair, and found out that the German edition of Vulture Capitalism translates to something like ‘The Birth of Freedom from the Spirit of Socialism’, which I love!

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I was joined by the brilliant Clara Mattei for an event at Leipzig University, before heading to the book fair to do interviews with the German press (I’ll link to these next week). I hadn’t met Clara before and I was totally bowled over both by her acute analysis of modern capitalism, and by her kindness and charisma! I’m really looking forward to reading her book The Capital Order.

Everywhere I travel at the moment, one point of consensus between all the progressives I speak to is total solidarity with Palestine. This unflinching solidarity seemed absent in Germany. While in some senses understandable, I still found this lacuna deeply concerning.

I also came away with the impression that rearmament has become an all-encompassing issue in Europe, much to the delight of arms companies and right-wing politicians. I was reminded of Orwell’s famous line “the war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous”. The left needs an answer to the security question (and no, military Keynesianism is not a solution) - I’m working on an article right now…