Another Now

Dispatches from an Alternative Present

No cover

Yanis Varoufakis: Another Now (2020, Random House Children's Books)

224 pages

English language

Published Jan. 6, 2020 by Random House Children's Books.

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4 stars (2 reviews)

Imagine a world with no banks. No stock market. No tech giants. No billionaires.

Imagine if Occupy and Extinction Rebellion actually won.

In Another Now world-famous economist Yanis Varoufakis shows us what such a world would look like. Far from being a fantasy, he describes how it could have come about - and might yet. But would we really want it?

Varoufakis's boundary-breaking new book confounds expectations of what the good society would look like and reveals the uncomfortable truth about our desire for a better world...

3 editions

Need to understand post-capitalism? Start here

5 stars

Grateful of this authors dedication to making accessible political and economic theories that are post capitalist. This is a sci-fi that has been clearly written by someone who does not write fiction. But it does an excellent job of creating dialogue and painting an extremely viable and alternate world that doesn’t not include capitalism. We’ve all been brainwashed to believe that capitalism is the only viable economic system. Read this book to shatter that belief and begin to understand just how real and viable alternative are. It took me a long time to read cause it’s quite heavy, but I cared enough about what the author wrote to not just skim over it, even when things got a little over explained. I would love to read this as a graphic novel, but until then, this will do. I give it 5 stars because I really appreciate what Yanis has done …

Unnecessary Fiction

2 stars

Another Now compares the structure of the economy and the public sphere as it was when this book was released (just before the pandemic) with an alternative reality where broadly leftist policies were put in place in response to the financial crash of 2008.

I think the fictional framing here actually detracts from Varoufakis' ability to make his argument. Writing fictional characters is clearly not his area of expertise. I would have much preferred this to be another non-fiction book, without the unnecessary fictional elements.