Review of The Master’s Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy (And a Radical Plan to Rebuild It) by Michael A. McCarthy (Verso Books, 2025)
Michael McCarthy’s The Master’s Tools opens with an evocative description of life under a new social order.
“It’s a sunny Friday morning in 2045, and you’re running late for a meeting to deliberate over and agree on the priorities of the city.” You ride to the meeting on a public railway network and step off into the Public Finance District, “where the streets were converted into pedestrian zones after huge investments in transportation eliminated the need for cars.” When you arrive at the People’s Bank of Los Angeles, you join an assembly made up of your fellow workers, and together you set about deciding how to spend the city’s budget.
This vignette works because it is based on democratic innovations that already exist. McCarthy’s vision is not some unrealistic socialist utopia; it’s based on proposals — from community wealth building to participatory budgeting — that exist right now, if you know where to look.
All over the world, citizens are developing new models of local democracy to facilitate public involvement in decision-making. The democratic revival is visible everywhere from Reykjavik, where Icelanders used a participatory budgeting process to allocate more funding to tackling homelessness, to Rosario, where local Argentinians came together to resist gentrification and build a network of cooperatives that could serve the needs of their community.
But up to now, these powerful initiatives have remained localized islands of public power in a sea of oligarchic control. Why? The Master’s Tools provides one answer: if we want to…
Auteur: Grace Blakeley
