Red Emma’s

Why is democracy so broken and how might it be fixed? In The Master's Tools, award-winning author Michael A. McCarthy argues the answer can be found in the flows of credit and investment bound up with finance capital.

Today, finance guides and constrains our politics, but there is no reason why this must be so. In this groundbreaking work, McCarthy develops a political and social theory of institutional transformation rooted in the interconnectedness of finance and democracy.

Inspired by ancient Athens, where small groups chosen by lottery were used to ensure democratic participation, he shows how democracy and working-class power can be strengthened by introducing new forms of financial governance, focusing on the inclusion of historically excluded groups.

His proposals for democratic financial institutions point the way to imbuing finance with a socio-environmental purpose and the funding of a just green transition, social housing, and other necessary public goods. And these financial institutions might be the first step toward a whole new kind of economy.

"Given the vast inequalities and debilitating crises to which the capitalist financial system plainly gives rise, criticizing that system is easy. Considerably harder is the work of thinking carefully and creatively about the possible form of alternative financial institutions designed to serve the many rather than the few. Making a full-blooded case for a genuine democratization of control of financial investment, The Master’s Tools represents an original, welcome and extremely interesting intervention." —Brett Christophers, author of The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet

Michael A. McCarthy is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of Community Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His book Dismantling Solidarity: Capitalist Politics and American Pensions since the New Deal was awarded the Paul Sweezy Book Award as well as an honorable mention for the Labor and Labor Movements Book Award. He has written for the Boston Review, Jacobin, Noema, and the Washington Post.

Ho-fung Hung is the Henry M. and Elizabeth P. Wiesenfeld Professor in Political Economy at the Sociology Department and the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University. His scholarly interest includes global political economy, protest, nation-state formation, social theory, and East Asian Development.