A generation ago, General Electric’s CEO, Jack Welch (1935 – 2020) was the most admired business manager in the world. And General Electric purportedly the most admired corporation. Among his well-known attributes, Welch “would fire the bottom 10% of his managers, regardless of absolute performance.” And this, alongside his more general fondness for downsizing, was one of the reasons why Welch was known as ‘Neutron Jack.’ (The buildings would remain standing, but empty of workers.)

I had to think of that while reading Vivek Chibber’s (2022) Confronting Capitalism: How the World Works and How to Change it (Verso). I am not the implied audience for it. The book intends to “contribute to the development of the incipient Left.” (p. 2) It understands itself as advancing a “project of renewal” for the “Socialist Left.” (p.4) It does so by using fairly simple language, by being admirably free from jargon, and by keeping scholarly trappings to the bare minimum. There are airport bestsellers aiming to improve leadership that have more endnotes. Chibber is a professor of sociology at NYU, but I bet that the vocabulary of Confronting Capitalism is pitched at high school level. (I mean that as a compliment.)

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