From one of the linked papers, by Mike Cole, the guy who seems to be cited the most: >> My argument is not that capitalism cannot in theory be made more democr

From one of the linked papers, by Mike Cole, the guy who seems to be cited the most: >> My argument is not that capitalism cannot in theory be made more democratic or humane. This is an incredibly revealing statement. I'm a big fan of Steve Keen, an Australian economist who won some award for predicting the GFC (http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/ http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/). He's a huge critic of mainstream neo-liberal economists, claiming they use bad mathematics to prove theorems that don't work in theory (once you correct the mathematical errors) or practice (if you look at the data). He also has a chapter in his book on why Marx was wrong, but I'm not up to it yet. While agree with some of the points of Transmodernism, it seems to be more of a destination than a way of travelling. The only concrete methodology seems to be a deep suspicion against The Man (or neo-liberal agenda, as it's called now). The IMF, World Bank, Federal Reserve, and so on aren't bad because they want to be. They are bad because they are following theoretically and empirically flawed theories. They aren't propped up by governments because doing so helps keep the elite in power, governments actually believe that there's no real alternative. The problem is, academic economists (and worse, government onces) like to be safe and conservative. Non-mainstream economists are simply frozen out of the dialogue, like positivists are in post-modern academic societies. Which is quite a problem, when economists are dealing with billions of dollars, and millions of lives.