Change Everything is the outcome of a heroically ambitious project initiated by the Attac movement in Austria in 2010, aiming at nothing less than the formulation of a new, sustainable and just economic model.

This, in Felber’s words, is an economy “operating on the premise that the purpose of all business is not to increase capital, but rather to promote the common good.”

The proposed means for achieving this “Economy for the Common Good” are, in essence, fiendishly simple. Every enterprise would be rated according to various social and environmental criteria and their overall rating would determine their level of government support or “intervention” — a high rating, for example, would be exempt from paying tax, gain access to zero or lowinterest loans, be entitled to research co-operation with public universities and gain preferential access to public contracts. Low ratings would gain none of this, and would be penalised with high taxes, customs tariffs and interest rates.

The overall result would be to incentivise businesses to create the type of society we want to see, rather than, as at present, incentivising them to sacrifice every conceivable human value in the pursuit of profit.

This advocacy of what is, ultimately, a market-based solution may not sit well with many readers, yet anti-capitalists need to clearly distinguish between capitalism — a very specific and historically recent economic system of compulsions to profit and growth — and markets, which existed for millennia before capitalism and could perfectly well exist after it.

And, frankly, the Hayekian critique of socialism — that economic and political power concentrated in the same hands breeds endemic corruption — deserves an answer. Corruption did indeed infect the Soviet Union for the very reason Hayek identified — the fact that this corruption became a thousand times worse under the capitalist regime that followed is not the point — it had systemic causes, and it played the major role in alienating people from socialism.

It is incumbent on socialists to seriously address how they would guard against this development. Although not necessarily conceived of as such, this book is one such attempt to do so, worthy of serious study by any communist.

However, the model, as currently proposed, is not without its dangers. The major one being not the reliance on markets, but the failure to address the coloniality of the existing system — and through this omission, paving the grounds for its continuation.

In particular, the book explicitly advocates a return of protectionism, which could easily become a new weapon against Third World development.

Bound as so many countries are into a pre-existing colonial export-oriented economy, punishing the use of low-wage labour could very easily be devastating for countries for whom low wage labour — whether we like it or not — is their major commodity and whom are utterly dependent on the markets of the Western world.

This need not be an unfixable problem. It should be possible to “tweak” the system to incentivise Western companies to pay higher wages to their Third World workforce, rather than simply cutting out Third World imports altogether — but this requires first accepting that there is indeed a problem to be addressed.

A deeper problem stems from the book’s implicit ideas about “national wealth” and how this can be “democratically controlled.”

Restricting democratic control to those actually residing in any particular Western country actually excludes the vast majority of those who contributed to creating that wealth and who suffer most from its current maldistribution — that is the formerly colonised peoples.

Any talk of colonial reparations, for example, is notable by its absence.

None of this is to rubbish the project — but it is to suggest that without putting colonialism at the heart of the analysis and decolonialisation at the heart of the solution, any programme to tackle injustice is ultimately doomed simply to perpetuate it.

Review by Dan Glazebrook