Capitalism and its critics A history : from the Industrial Revolution to AI

In this sweeping account, Pulitzer finalist Cassidy (How Markets Fail) profiles figures who have opposed capitalism over the past two centuries. Since "the rise of factory production," Cassidy notes, "critics from the right as well as the left" have made moral arguments against capitalism's "dehumanizing effect" and its "upending of... social norms." He begins with the hardscrabble Luddites--early 19th-century English weavers who attacked the mechanical looms that had eradicated their communal way of life--and traces how they were succeeded by more genteel political organizers who advocated for socialism, a system of communal work and shared responsibilities. Cassidy offers a deft, thorough reading of Marx and his "scientific" approach, which identified the mechanics by which capitalism exploited and alienated workers. But he revels most in spotlighting figures with less well-known critiques, like "arch-conservative" Thomas Carlyle--who objected to capitalism for having replaced traditional social bonds with a "cash nexus"--and Trinidadian economist Eric Williams, who in 1942 was the first to argue that colonialism and the slave trade had created the social conditions for capitalism's economic success. Cassidy's masterful synthesis of history and biography serves to demonstrate that capitalism is in a permanent state of change not just because of its fundamental nature, but because of how it's continuously being subjected to pushback. The result is a unique and invigorating view of capitalism's history. (May)

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 theNew Yorker and author of the excellentHow 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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.