Oppressive and well-documented book about the scenarios of social, economic, and ecological horror toward which the world seems to be moving in the 21st century.

The Lugano Report is one of those books friends lend you and whose audience grows thanks to word of mouth, recommendations of critics, respected blogs and other sources of more underground information.

The narrative force of this satire is perhaps derived from Susan George’s ability to present her novel as a report, created by experts recruited by world leaders: to create a report that identifies the threats against 21st century capitalism and to study the possible solutions.

The book, The Lugano Report: On Preserving Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, includes praise from Noam Chomsky on its back cover: “With acid wit and somber truths, The Lugano Report brilliantly portrays, through the eyes of its imagined but all too realistic planners, a world that may be heading for deep trouble.”

Many potential readers, more than being pleased, would be terrified by this credential, thinking they’ve stumbled upon one of those lengthy tomes that are normally read by -or used to elevate the desktop monitors of- high ranking politicians and other technocrats.

This couldn’t be further than reality: the harshness of the solutions described by the right-wing-liberal experts invented by the author keeps the reader wide awake, once they’ve overcome the logical fear of having fallen upon a “work for intellectuals”.

The promoters of the Lugano Report -Susan George invents them as those who also create the economic guidelines and politics of the planet-, as well as the group that elaborates and presents it, the working group- nine experts qualified in different topics-, both appear only at the beginning of the book, which is dedicated from then on to the Report.

The goal of the report is “to identify the threats to the free-market capitalist system and… to recommend strategies (…) maximizing the probability that the free-market, globalised capitalist system will prevail.”

Under this mandate, the author, as the working group, describes in a solemn tone the strategies employed by the companies that dominate the planet who, by means of international economic agencies, try to preserve the world just enough so that capitalism can continue to dominate it.

As literature, the Lugano Report functions as conspiracy theory, from its argumentative basis to the predicted consequences for the world in the 21st Century.

About the author

Susan George, an American living in France, is a polyglot and president of the Globalisation Observatory, associate director of the Transnational Institute and vice president of ATTAC-France (founded by Spanish journalist Ignacio Ramonet, director of Le Monde Diplomatique).

George has publicly shown her disagreement against the politics of international economic agencies, especially those related to the WTO (World Trade Organization). 

Brief

• Title: The Lugano Report: On Preserving Capitalism in theTwenty-First Century

• Author: Susan George

• Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)

• Genre: Essay

• Pages: 208

• Year: 1999