Dr Chris Wyatt, lecturer in sociology and politics in the School of Applied Social Science, will shortly publish a new book entitled The Defetishized Society: New Economic Democracy as a Libertarian Alternative to Capitalism.
The book will be published by Continuum, winner of the academic publisher of the year 2010.
The book recognises the accuracy and continuing relevance of Marx's critique of the fetishism of commodities. Yet in proposing an alternative, a pluralist democracy called New Economic Democracy, it moves beyond Marx's work.
New Economic Democracy establishes a self-governing civil society, unifying the private sphere of production and the public sphere of citizenship within a non-statist scheme of communal ownership. It provides the premises to seeking a solution to commodity fetishism and associated problems. Only a thorough restructuring of the economic and political institutions can provide the social climate in which the phenomenon of fetishism can be transcended. Defetishizing the commodity implies reversing the concealment of the social relations through which commodities are produced and preventing the tendency to bestow magical characteristics to commodities. The key imperative to the defetishized society is a system of genuinely democratic institutions. The New Economic Democracy provides this necessary corrective and also challenges the prediction that politico-economic organizations, like worker cooperatives, are destined to be dominated by the dictates of oligarchs.
The explanatory approach of Marx's concepts combined with an original argument will make The Defetishized Society a valuable research tool to students and researchers in political theory, democratic theory, and political economy.
For further details see the publisher's website
