On the cover of The Establishment, Russell Brand describes Owen Jones as "our generation's Orwell." The comparison isn't wholly fanciful. Unlike almost everyone else on the left (including me), Owen writes beautifully well. Orwell said that good prose should be like a pane of glass, and Owen has given us a very clear window onto the nexus of business, politicians and the media that has greatly strengthened the wealth and power of the 1% since the 1970s.

Moreover, the very fact that he has chosen to attack the Establishment, at a time when more journalists turn their fire upon the poor, makes Owen - like Orwell - a heroic maverick.

It would be curmudgeonly to pick fault with what is in many ways a superb assault upon such an important target. But I am a curmudgeon, so here goes. One of my gripes is that I don't think he quite follows through on his early observation:

The Establishment is a system and a set of mentalities that cannot be reduced to a politician here or a media magnate there...Personal decency can happily coexist with the most inimical of systems.

This is deeply true. However, whilst Owen is great at describing "socialism for the rich" and the revolving doors that link politicians, journalists and the media, I fear he underplays the extent to which the power of the Establishment is systemic. For example, the problem with the media isn't that just that its owned by right-wing bastards or that journalists are drawn from rich backgrounds and are close to politicians. It is instead that the media have systematically created a hyperreal economy from which the interests of working people are largely excluded. And the BBC is perhaps as guilty of this as the Murdoch press.

Similarly, companies have power over government not just because of lobbying but because they control business "confidence" and therefore the fate of the economy.

These are not the only structural forces Owen underplays. He doesn't say that corporate welfare is needed because of the weakness of capitalism; a falling profit rate and dearth of monetizable investment opportunities means that capitalism cannot stand on its own two feet.

Indeed, I fear that Owen might be too optimistic about what even reformed capitalism can achieve. In an otherwise mostly reasonable list of policy suggestions (other than the call for capital controls), he claims that an active industrial policy could create "a new wave of green industries". But can it really?

My second gripe is that I fear Owen is missing a trick in not sufficiently emhpasizing the sheer incompetence of the Establishment in its own terms; it was, remember, bad management that brought down the banks. Bosses' claim that they deserve huge salaries because of their managerial talent is mostly plain wrong.

This matters. Owen says the left should buid "a compelling intellectual case that can resonate with people's experience". Surely a challenge to managerialism must be part of this. If there's one thing that's true and resonant with people's day-to-day experience, it's that bosses aren't as smart as they think.

So much for gripes. Owen also raises three questions which I'm not sure he (or I!) have an answer to.

First, how much power do the media have? Owen invites us to believe: a lot. But he also notes that threre's huge support for public ownership, suggesting the media's control isn't that great. So which is it?

Secondly, what's the link between ideas and systems? Owen devotes a chapter to right-wing think tanks - what he calls "outriders" for the Establishment. But it is odd to credit them with much influence these days, given that - as he rightly says - the idea that we have a free market is a "con" and a "fantasy." As Owen notes, the more intelligent and sincere right-libertarian is disquieted by our crony capitalism. Does this mean the think tanks were useful idiots for the rich? Or that their project failed eventually?

Thirdly, how do we achieve meaningful social change? It took free market think tanks decades to acquire influence: the Mont Pelerin Society was formed in 1947, 40 years before the UK began privatization. This suggests that social change is a long game. Could it be that a shift away from crony capitalism will be achieved not merely by formal political agitating but also by what Erik Olin Wright calls interstitial tranformations (pdf) - small but cumulative moves in the direction of decorporatization and decommodification?