The Silent Takeover: global capitalism and the death of democracy Noreena Hertz Heinemann, 242pp, £12.99 ISBN 0434009334

The most recent addition to the canon of capitalism's discontents is Noreena Hertz's book, its cover resplendent with an image of a copyrighted earth, and an ominous subtitle to boot. This subtitle implies that "global capitalism" is, at least in part, responsible for the ignominious "death" of democracy, and Hertz spends the first half of the book arguing just how powerful and self-interested corporations can be. From their exploitation of maquiladora workers on the US-Mexican border to their relentless pursuit of the "bottom line", big business provides the villains for Hertz's tale of political woe. See how companies downsize plants with gleeful abandon. Witness their shameless attempts to use their formidable financial clout to co-opt governments. One can almost hear the exclamation marks screaming from the pages where Hertz recapitulates examples of corporate wretchedness. For anybody who has read anything about corporations beyond their annual reports, however, the examples in this book are nothing new.

The story becomes interesting when Hertz argues that consumer activism has eclipsed political involvement as a force for social change. Disaffected and disenchanted, citizens have turned away from the ballot box in favour of protest movements and product boycotts. Hertz contends that the primary reasons for this development are twofold: the first lies with a sclerotic political bureaucracy that is slow to respond to public demands; the second lies with the sensitivity and responsiveness of corporations to their consumer base. The ascendancy of corporations to their current positions of political power has, in other words, made them more vulnerable to public pressure than ever before: increased power confers increased responsibility. The old corporate refrain of "we can't" can now be interpreted as "we won't".

Although this element of consumer pressure adds a refreshing perspective to Hertz's critique of capitalism, the argument is not as convincing as it could be. Perhaps most unfortunately, the problems with the argument lie less with its content than with its form. Hertz may have extraordinary analytical insight, but her writing indicates an idle dependence on those well-worn phrases of first resort. Hertz relies on cliche to such an extent that nearly all of her metaphors are either dead ("the price we will have to pay") or dying ("at the dawn of the new millennium"). Consequently, in Hertz's hands, the line of argument becomes a listless string of tired phrases, exposing her apparent ambivalence on the subject.

Instead of concluding the book with a forceful condemnation of the corporate co-optation of the political process, she suggests that corporations might actually be better suited than government to addressing issues of the public good. But then she also tries to squeeze in the insistence that her book is "unashamedly pro-people", and that global capitalism is anti-democratic.

A management professor who taught capitalist tricks to Russian businessmen while sailing along the Volga, Hertz is undoubtedly clever enough to realise that the subject of her book demands some sort of equivocation in order to capture the intricacies of the issue; but her credibility as a critic of global capitalism immediately suffers when one opens the book to a full-page photograph displaying a sartorially conscious Hertz draped languorously across a leather chair in a wooded landscape. Her prescriptions for consumer activism (qualified as a stopgap measure during times of political apathy) fail even to question the notion of consumerism itself, or to confront how voracious materialism has contributed to the decline of the public sphere.

Instead, Hertz chooses to provide a detailed record of her righteous activities as a consumer (efforts that include, we are told, "a 'not tested on animals' Lush bubble bath") and to reveal that her book was the result of a businesswoman's angst-ridden "feelings that things were going awry". The culmination of all this is, at best, an anaemic objection to global capitalism.

Jennifer Szalai is an editor of Harpers magazine

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