About

Welcome to my blog, my name is Jim O’Reilly. I started this site in 2010 to help think through the sad state of our social world. My working experience has been in the banking and mortgage banking industries and I have an MA in Global Political Economy from the University of Sussex. My political philosophy is egalitarian and I consider the massive poverty and insecurity that’s endemic in both ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ countries to be a gross affront to any just moral code.

Beginning in 2013, I took what turned out to be a three year hiatus from the blog to devote full time to writing a book—Capitalism as Oligarchy—and I’m happy to announce it has finally been released. The book has helped me solidify and tie together many themes that have been addressed in the blog and I believe it offers a highly fruitful way to understand our system. It rejects the notion that the system is well-described by capitalism and proposes instead to think of it as simple inequality. Capitalism is a confused concept that’s indelibly tied to a paradoxical logic which hides the core reality of concentrated minority power that has spanned all of recorded history. Inequality, considered as a system rather than a mere side-effect, has a self-evident set of motives, risks, and dynamics that differs significantly from what we find in so-called capitalism. Most importantly, it presents us with the unambiguous picture of a system that’s existentially hostile to the majority. If interested, you can find the Table of Contents, Preface, and Introduction under the Capitalism as Oligarchy tab. A brief overview post is presented here.

I plan to use the blog going forward as a platform to express thoughts on our social system through this lens of oligarchy.

To a better world.