LIVE AT DEMOCRACY JOURNAL: Reviewing John Cassidy's "Capitalism & Its Critics"
Always great fun to write for! Entitled “Capitalism’s Next Act”, although I would have preferred something like “Capitalism as a Hydra” as a title: critics abound, but there points do not add up and coherence eludes, while protean capitalism keeps reinventing itself from Chartists to gig workers faster than its wannabe gravediggers can keep up…
Capitalism’s Next Act
In moments of crisis, it’s easy to think that capitalism is finished. But don’t forget the system’s formidable ability to mutate.
from Summer 2025, No. 77 – 12 MIN READ
Prominent critics of capitalism, clockwise from top left: Flora Tristan, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Joan Robinson, Karl Polanyi, J. C. Kumarappa, Eric Williams, Thorstein Veblen.
Capitalism & Its Critics by John Cassidy • Farrar, Straus and Giroux • 2025 • 624 pages • $36
Let me cut to the chase:
Where does the book that is John Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics travel to and arrive at, in the end? To mix metaphors, Capitalism and Its Critics is a polyphony. It is without a single dominant note, chord, or phrase. It, rather, has repeated themes—themes sounded again and again as Cassidy traverses 250 years and 30-odd observers and critics of capitalism. For, in Cassidy’s words, “
[T]he central indictment of capitalism has remained remarkably consistent: that it is soulless, exploitative, inequitable, unstable, and destructive, yet also all-conquering and overwhelming…
(1) Of Cassidy’s repeatedly sounded themes, the principal one to my ear is that of capitalism’s critics not making up any sort of coherent whole but still being very much worth listening to. And indeed they are, at best, truly strange bedfellows. As Thomas Carlyle put it, the critics of capitalism (including himself) were not a coherent group with a plan for a better world than this, but rather were expressing “popular commotions and maddest bellowings.” These commotions and bellowings, “from Peterloo to the Place-de-Grève,” were “inarticulate cries as of a dumb creature in rage and pain” and “to the ear of wisdom…[are] prayers: ‘Guide me, govern me! I am mad, and miserable, and cannot guide myself!’”
Put much more charitably than Carlyle’s ventriloquism of Chartist activists he perhaps never talked to, the system violates what my friend Dan Davies sees as a sine qua non principle of human organizations: that “big corporations and states need to have information channels”—he calls them “red-handle signals”—to “bypass the normal hierarchy and get information to the decision making centre, in time.” The lack of such channels, Davies writes, “has caused so many schemes to fail,” and their “continued presence, albeit in highly unsatisfactory and attenuated form…accounts for the fact that the democratic industrialised world still does kind of work, a bit.”
But in capitalism there is only one information channel: the price. And no matter what the Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde genius-idiot Friedrich von Hayek may have claimed, that is not enough to keep any large-scale societal network-system from going off the rails…