Capitalism has fucked itself, and fucked democracy in the process, but there's no new system poised to replace it. At supranational level, the EU is a wholly undemocratic power struggle between northern creditors and southern debtors; at national level, governments are forced into austerity policies in order to appear 'credit worthy' and service their debts, prioritising the market over the electorate; but the rotting away of these democratic institutions has actually screwed capitalism itself, which is reliant on a countervailing force to rein in its destructive (and ultimately self-destructive) tendencies.

I feel like this book has finally wiped away the last remnants of my belief (which I held quite strongly in my early 20s) of the political value of EU, and in the idea that democracy and capitalism were naturally allied.