Book Review / Compte rendu

Abstract

The Cancer Stage of Capitalism is an ambitious, committed and powerful work by John McMurtry that attempts to reveal and analyze both the inner logic and the structural consequences of contemporary market theory. McMurtry's approach to it is not among the most sympathetic. In his view, contemporary market theory is responsible for a degenerate global market, whose development is the economic equivalent of a carcinogenic pathology in medical science. He criticizes its process of worldwide affirmation environmentally, socially and culturally as destructive, and he explains that its allegedly necessary conquest of the planet is the avoidable result of the institutionalization of an economic and ethical paradigm characteristic of modern Western history but not recognized by philosophers. He claims: