All You Can Eat: Greed, Lust and the New Capitalism.

Linda McQuaig takes another well-reasoned side-swipe at the current political and economic reality of Canada and, by extension, much of the rest of the western post-industrial world. As with her two previous books - Shooting the Hippo and The Cult of Impotence, McQuaig employs an easily accessible, journalistic style of writing to attempt to come to grips with some of the main issues, challenging those who are in any way interested in creating a reasonably equitable society or, at least, hanging on to the post World War Two vestiges of a society where there was an overall sense of responsibility for the quality of life of all its citizens.

The basic thesis in this book is that material greed is more rampant than ever before and that `making it' materially is all that really matters. She argues that those lucky enough to get rich are encouraged by the normalizing of greed in their single-minded and selfish pursuit of material self-aggrandizement to see them selves and their `hard work' as the only reasons for their material success and that those who are materially challenged only have themselves to blame. McQuaig points out that the `self-made' rich individual is extremely rare and that nobody `makes it' on their own. Successful grocery chain store developers are able to do it because their trucks bring the goods to market on roads paid for by all of us.

Throughout the book, the author refers over and over to the work of Karl Polyani, particularly his The Great Transformation, published in 1944. McQuaig believes that within Polyani's book lie the answers to many current political and economic problems. In the book, states McQuaig, Polyani makes the point that unbridled greed and the `endless pursuit of material gain' is a phenomenon that has only recently been seen as a central characteristic of the human personality. She is talking here of the rise of homo economicus. For McQuaig, this is essentially a one-dimensional caricature of humans and the human condition. It misses the point that we are indeed multi-faceted creatures, driven by myriad goals, desires and values. Under modern capitalism, however, according to McQuaig, it is only the ho,to economicus side of us that is taken into account, witness the emphasis on economic growth and GNP as a measure of all that really counts.

Polyani's approach is seen as an answer both to the Marxist and the capitalist approach. Both these perspectives are primarily focused on the economic. By contrast, Polyani rejected the notion that we are victims of the economic forces beyond our control and that we are capable of moral vision that can move us towards building a better society.

A key theme of the book is an anti-globalization slant that sees the policies and practices of such international trade and banking organizations as the IMF, World Bank and WTO inimical to the development of socially just societies, since they are largely driven by the narrow homo economicus view of the world. McQuaig, along with most anti-free trade people, sees the opening of nation-state boundaries to unbridled (or unfairly privileged) competition from the more powerful nation-states as being disastrous, particularly for the relatively poor and powerless members of the weaker nation-states.

As in McQuaig's previous books, the content moves back and forth between socioeconomic analysis and anecdote. This helps to place `big thoughts' in the context of `little people' and it gives the book that tradition a; McQuaig feel.

One disquieting aspect of the book is the notion that there was some kind of `Golden Era' in the world prior to the rise of capitalism, in which communities did really care about their fellow members, as in the period prior to the enclosure movement in England. Some of this material seems dangerously close to a `good old days' perspective on the world which never bears up under scrutiny. Although life under capitalism in modern Canada is somewhat brutish for many, I have my doubts that it is even remotely as brutish as pre-enclosure Britain was, not simply in terms of material standards but also in terms of human freedoms. And a lot of those freedoms go way beyond an understanding of people as homo economicus.

McQuaig gave a presentation based on this book at the University of Toronto in November, 2002. She read from ads in The Globe and Mail that exhorted readers to buy items of jewelry for fabulous amounts of money: amounts that would keep the average Canadian family in comfort for a year or two. This, she argued, was an example of the `All you can eat' mentality. You can't, of course, eat jewelry, it gives you indigestion, or it could even kill you. The point being that, if people have that kind of money to spend on jewelry, perhaps they also have the kind of money that would help to make Canada a fairer place through paying reasonable taxes and ensuring governments come to power that see people as more than a dollar sign - a cost, or a benefit.