A review by s_books
The New Human Rights Movement: Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression by Peter Joseph

4.0

"[R]acism, bigotry, and xenophobia, including resulting consequences such as minority-targeted police brutality, are ultimately linked to mechanisms of economic inequality and its consequences. Until economic inequality and its causes are reduced or stopped, bigotry and social justice on many levels will continue as a systemic result". Peter Joseph himself admits that just removing economic inequality is "not a complete solution" but it is the main focus of this book, which should be pretty obvious, given that the subtitle is Reinventing the Economy to End Oppression. "In other words, if there were no scarcity pressure, no core survival stress or status-shaming inequality, crime would drop drastically compared with what we endure today." Frankly, a fully economically equal society is quite hard to imagine since that wasn't even the case in communistic societies but, considering the reverse, I don't think it would be possible to get a society where people were equal in all other aspects but still very much unequal economically.

"[I]t is estimated that the annual income of the richest 100 people is enough to end extreme global poverty four times over". Oh. My. GOD. It is things like that that really call into question the societal assumption that there are poor and suffering people because there just aren't enough resources in the world. Just 100 people is enough to end extreme global poverty FOUR TIMES OVER; I feel a bit sick to my stomach reading that. Thousands of people die everyday due to lack of resources that people in more fortunate situations take for granted: adequate food, water, clean air, shelter and health care -- in the 1970s, it was estimated to be 18 million a year; the number is most likely higher now. And yet we (as a planet) evidently have enough resources to end all poverty and then some, it's just being stocked away out of reach due to selfishness and greed and the general shittiness that can be human beings. "In less than six years, capitalism's inequality arguably kills as many people as communism is claimed to have killed during the entire twentieth century". Yet it is interesting that Joseph states that he does not "see the rise of modern capitalism and neoliberalism as some evil that could have been prevented. Rather, we are dealing with a natural progression of social evolution and at a certain point in time market capitalism was indeed the best method we had. Yet, as can occur with any socially perpetuated phenomenon, we are now stuck in a feedback loop that perversely restricts our ability to take the next evolutionary stop as an intelligent species".

Joseph is pretty clear and very thoroughly researched throughout most of the book, however it was a bit confusing reading the sections on Social Dominance Theory and Social Dominance Orientation; Joseph talks so much about it, at length and with quotes by notable authors of the theory, that at times it seems that he agrees with it. I THINK, though, that he actually finds the theory to be incorrect and, given how egalitarian and giving hunter-gatherer societies supposedly are, the Adam Smithian belief that human beings are naturally selfish also seems to be incorrect. I think.

Furthermore, I feel that Joseph's beliefs and conclusions about how to change the current socioeconomic system are flawed, in some cases too idealistic, in others they don't go far enough, seeming more like a tweaking of the current system that a true change (the Universal Basic Income and the wage/wealth caps are two such "tweaks"). Hence why this is a four, not five, star review: there are five chapters in this book, the first four of which detail the situation, how we got here and why things are currently sustained as they are -- these chapters are all quite well done. The fifth chapter, the one that details how change might actually be implanted, is not as well done but of course, that would be the real problem, to figure out how to successfully and in the best manner possible change a bad situation. Joseph doesn't quite manage it so I can't give him a star for that, but overall, a good exploration of the problems of the current socioeconomic system.

"When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered" -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.