CAPITALISM AND ITS CRITICS

A sweeping economic history of the to-some-sacrosanct doctrine of capitalism and those arrayed against it over the years.

Cassidy, a staff writer at the New Yorker and author of the excellent How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities, sounds a subtle theme in his characterization of capitalism as it has developed over the past four centuries or so: It has always relied on compulsion. “Left to himself he cannot survive a single day,” wrote Friedrich Engels, a justly important figure in this account, of the industrial worker. “The bourgeoisie has gained a monopoly of all means of existence in the broadest sense of the word.” Karl Marx would join with Engels to dissect the employer-worker nexus, which “is disguised by a seemingly voluntary market transaction.” Sometimes that transaction is not even as voluntary as all that; as Cassidy writes, industrial capitalism was built on colonial capitalism, which in turn rested on the foundation of slavery. The resulting economy of commodities such as sugar and cotton created a global system entwined with empire. And, Cassidy writes, sometimes unwaged labor took a different form, as with the domestic work that “typically has been unpaid and carried out by women,” and without which, he adds, echoing the Italian immigrant activist Silvia Federici, capitalism “couldn’t operate.” Cassidy’s narrative takes the British East India Company as its opening case study, with its practice of monopsony (in which “a single large buyer can exploit its leverage over many small sellers who have no alternative to dealing with it”). With many stops along the way to take in Luddism, the theories of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the formation of labor unions, dependency theory, and the like, he concludes with modern critics such as Thomas Piketty, who notes that the unequal accumulation of mega-wealth can be fixed: “Social democracy is not a finished product.”

Dense with information, free of jargon, and a powerful argument against an increasingly unsustainable economic system.