We need to call our movement “post capitalist” to express transformational intent.
I am sharing two articles, one a book review, the other an opinion piece on the state of capitalism. The title of the NY Times book review reads: “How Capitalism Took over the world”, and the opinion piece in the Washington Post reads: “ A reckoning over capitalism; people aren’t respecting capitalism. The twist is that this isn’t necessarily capitalism’s fault.” The headlines capture the message.
Alarmingly, to the pro-capitalist crowd, young people are turning away from a pro-capitalism ethos, evidenced by the rise of socialists getting elected in Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; and most famously, New York City. This is a crisis for the right wing.
They are scrambling to manage the narrative, and argue for capitalism against socialism, and deflect attention from the growing animus against the billionaire class.
As a radical egalitarian, I support society building a cooperative economics based on a vast commons that consists of a public economy founded on mutual aid that produces education, healthcare, food, housing, and general well being for all. This is accomplished through the coordination of city / county jurisdictions, and the hard work of all.
However, to get a better society, from my green liberty perspective, we need to build a movement against technocracy; to inspire that movement, we should explain that the future society will necessarily be post-capitalist, that is, organized around a cooperative economics that would be largely communal, based on a shared commons dedicated to restoring nature and ensuring human survival.
So, the article, “How Capitalism took over the world” got my interest. The article points out that much of what we call capitalism, the history of it, was the machinations of men in pursuit of money and power; and wasn’t necessarily inevitable; it happened as a result of immense greed and desire to build power; other things like the desire for novelty and spice and luxury goods, and innovations, drove capitalist enterprise.
While capitalism is characterized as a wonderful means to produce wealth and abundance, there is a grow or die imperative, and the drive to commodify every known thing, that has produced problems. Furthermore, “capitalism” has produced extreme class divide, and wealth inequality, between the rich and the average people.
Within capitalist development is a history of resistance from the grass roots, with demands for democratic and economic rights. The capitalist class has prevailed against these demands because it has control of agencies of state, especially the military and national security operations.
Today, we are facing a juggernaut of power: the billionaire / ruling class.
I advocate calling out the power elite for their complicity in the major state crimes ranging from JFK to 9/11 and the Covid lockdown; interestingly, there is a left / right consensus that the authorities have lied to the American people about these events.
As a political truther, I meet many people who hold libertarian viewpoints. They are often well versed in the Ayn Rand mythology of self interest, individual against the power collective.
Meanwhile, all political truthers stand at the edge of the abyss of human depravity, the pit of evil, and bear witness to what Thomas Merton coined the “unspeakable,” the horrors that challenge speech because they are so horrible.
My libertarian friends recognize the problem of an oligarchic cabal, a plutocratic deep state, that does evil deeds, but they can’t bring themselves to accept that their best hope for freedom from this thing they hate (the cabal) is to join with the left in a mass movement of workers, and all others, to build a better society based on egalitarian values, free from the billionaire class.
Only a collective mobilization of the masses, of we the people, energized by a shared vision for change, for the end of plutocracy, and the development of real democracy, can we counteract this Goliath of a problem.
We need to emphasize that the current order (corrupt) and condition of society (profoundly deteriorated) is the result of choices made by the power elite over the past generations. They bear responsibility for all the toxins, wars, and ill health of the country. Even the recent mass migration from Central America arise out of an imperial capitalism advanced by American corporate interests.
They, the “cabal,” owe us, we the people. We need to demand they remove themselves from politics, culture, influence on state, and world affairs.
History is determined by those in power, so unless we the people can organize, we are doomed to a technocratic fate.
We need to agree on basic egalitarianism, ideas for real democracy, and go organize in our cities and counties with the stated intention to remove the rich from power.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/26/books/review/capitalism-sven-beckert.html
Nonfiction
How Capitalism Took Over the World
In a bold new history, Sven Beckert traces the origins of our modern economy, from global port cities to the halls of power.
By Marcus Rediker
Marcus Rediker is a historian at the University of Pittsburgh and the author, most recently, of “Freedom Ship: The Uncharted History of Escaping Slavery by Sea.”
Any book about capitalism that begins almost 900 years ago in the port city of Aden, in what is now Yemen, promises a new story. In “Capitalism,” the Harvard historian Sven Beckert delivers on that promise with an epic 1,300-page account of the global leviathan that created the world in which we live.
During the Cold War, capitalism was the global force that dared not speak its name. It seemed the “natural” state of affairs, as mainstream American historians scribbled endlessly about “the economy” without specifying what kind of economy it was. Worse, they disparaged and marginalized those who used the concept “capitalism.” To this day, most of Beckert’s fellow historians rarely link their local, regional or even national histories to the larger system of which they are a part. Beckert has now proved once and for all the necessity of naming the global beast in order to reveal its vast power, past and present.
Never before has so much qualitative and quantitative evidence been brought to bear on so broad a reinterpretation of this story. Previous histories have usually treated capitalism as a European invention, but Beckert, as ambitious as he is erudite, shows how capitalism arose as a global phenomenon, the peculiar behavior of a few merchants in places as far apart as Cairo and Changzhou.
By mapping the diverse origins of capitalism, Beckert reveals its protean and resilient character. Over hundreds of years, merchants created small enclaves of capital within port cities and elaborate networks of trust that stretched over long distances. Such connections, Beckert observes, helped them outflank and survive resistance from above, by landed aristocrats who thought “making money from money seemed closer to sin, sorcery or plain theft,” and from below, by “cultivators and craftspeople” who were loath to give up their local conceptions of prices set by “a shared sense of morality.”
In the 17th century, the sugar-producing island of Barbados became one of the first capitalist societies, and silver-producing Potosí (in present-day Bolivia) became one of the first capitalist cities. As many as a quarter of the people who descended into Potosí’s mines died in them, Beckert writes, but “wealthy Potosíans could buy Ceylonese diamonds, Neapolitan stockings, Venetian crystal and Chinese porcelain.”
In these remote corners of the world European investors conducted a kind of civil experiment, extending the logic of the market to all aspects of life. Everything, especially human labor, was commodified and could be bought and sold for money.
Many histories of capitalism are abstract, structural and narrowly economic, but Beckert enriches his story by recreating for the reader the places where his subjects made their fortunes — the medieval merchant hubs of Central Asia, the sugar plantations of the Indian Ocean and the “production floors of 20th-century industrial behemoths” that pumped out cars in Detroit. He travels to the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, where he interviews a textile worker at the factory gate and then weaves her experiences into his epilogue.
Beckert also humanizes his history by anchoring it in the lives of specific capitalists like the Godrej family in British India. Committed nationalists, the Godrejs began manufacturing everyday goods like locks and safes at the turn of the 20th century and helped to finance the Indian independence movement. They turned a big profit on the decline of the British Empire in the late 1940s, when their early support for the future prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru helped them win a contract to make typewriters for the post-colonial bureaucracy.
Beckert’s book arrives on a crowded and bloody battlefield, where intellectual, cultural and geopolitical war has been waged for more than two centuries about what capitalism is and what the story of its rise might tell us. He offers an especially devastating critique of earlier mythologies of capitalism, showing how the “invisible hand” of the market does not peacefully guide world affairs, and how the development of capitalism was in no sense “natural.”
Like many books before it, “Capitalism” is not only a history but a moral indictment. The metaphor of monstrosity runs throughout Beckert’s pages. In his telling, the hand of capital is visible, cold, hard and vicious, and capitalism is a promiscuous creature, drawing on different kinds of labor, from enslaved to free and many in between, within various political frameworks, from democracy to dictatorship.
Two leading thinkers of the 18th century, the French philosopher Montesquieu and the Scottish political economist Adam Smith, argued that world trade promoted peace and harmony because it advanced mutual interest and interdependency.
What actually happened, and indeed was happening during the lifetimes of both men, was that trade was often militarized and violent. Armed fleets pointed their cannons at harbors to open markets for trade, and kings relied on bankers, when they weren’t trying to rein them in, to raise silver to outfit soldiers with guns and swords. Montesquieu was born in 1689. As Beckert points out, “between 1689 and 1815, Britain and France were at war for 64 years.”
Beckert emphasizes how capitalism has depended at every stage of its development on the military power of the modern state and frequently on practices of extreme violence, such as the outright terror required to build the Atlantic system of slavery. Incorporating a major theme from his prizewinning 2014 book, “Empire of Cotton,” he shows how Atlantic slavery, and the market logic that fed it, powered the Industrial Revolution.
Even though Beckert pays close attention to technological developments like the steam engine and the railroad, he says remarkably little about the European tall ship, the machine that powered the conquest of the world from the 15th through the 18th centuries, and even less about the sailors whose labor made possible the creation of the world market. Across years and oceans, commodities and people often seem to move themselves around the world as if by magic. The book is fundamentally terracentric.
Workers and labor history in general do, however, play a central role in “Capitalism.” Laborers on plantations and in factories exert a collective force, often through acts of rebellion and resistance, especially during the Haitian Revolution and the many phases of the Industrial Revolution.
Their main impact was to slow down the advance of capital and to create more humane features, such as the welfare state, within it. Yet these movements against capital do not get the same human face as the actors who advanced its cause around the globe. The book is more a study in political economy than a history from below.
Still, “Capitalism” is a learned, formidable and vivid story. Its grand synthesis will engage not only general readers, but thousands of specialists, many of whom will object to this or that interpretation or omission. That is as it should be. Readers around the world will study and ponder this monumental work of history, agreeing and arguing with it, all the while affirming its generational importance, for decades to come.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/12/15/reckoning-over-capitalism
A Reckoning over Capitalism
People aren’t respecting capitalism. The twist is that this isn’t necessarily capitalism’s fault.
Column by Bethany McLean
In the late 1800s, when the word “capitalism” began to be used to describe an economic system, it wasn’t meant as a compliment. One of the earliest uses was by the French socialist Louis Blanc, who called it “the appropriation of capital by some to the exclusion of others.”
Since that time, the pendulum has oscillated wildly as to whether capitalism is the best or the worst way to order an economy. By some measures both qualitative — the election of the socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York — and quantitative — a recent Gallup poll showing that socialism is increasingly popular, particularly among the young — right now, capitalists should be worried.
There are theories as to why this is, most of which have to do with people feeling caught in the pincer movement created by the rise in costs like housing and food and the stagnation in incomes.
In an email from 2020 that began making the social media rounds after Mamdani’s victory, Peter Thiel, the techno-libertarian founder of PayPal, wrote: “When one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable … one will have negative capital for a long time.
And if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.”
“The kids aren’t alright” is the headline of a recent piece in Oxford Economics, which argues that today’s economy could have a “long term scarring impact” on younger generations.
The disenchantment might also be because of the way capitalism seems to be functioning in some of our most visible and important industries. In the beautiful theoretical version of capitalism, people pursue profits and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” works its magic. Or as Smith, who is sometimes regarded as the founding father of capitalism wrote in his famous opus “Wealth of Nations,” “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
In that version, we get fed. But today’s capitalism can look more like a nasty claw taking dinner off the table than it does a hand bringing bounty.
The twist is that this isn’t necessarily capitalism’s fault.
The most painfully visible example of an industry where capitalism seems to be malfunctioning is health care. The headline numbers say it all. The U.S.’s spending on health care is by far the highest among wealthy countries, but life expectancy in the U.S. is below the average of other rich peers, and the U.S. ranks last overall among 10 high income countries on health system performance, according to the Commonwealth Fund.
It’s easy to point a finger at the profit motive gone wrong. “The function of a rational health care system is to guarantee quality health care to all, not huge payouts for stockholders and executives,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) in early 2025 in response to a study about the rich profits made by top U.S. health care companies.
For sure, there is plenty of corporate greed in health care. But that’s too simple an explanation for why health care doesn’t deliver the outcomes we want. Even if that beautiful theoretical version of capitalism in which greed translates into societal good could work, the necessary mechanisms aren’t there. “In health care, none of the seven requirements of a competitive free market are remotely satisfied, nor can they be,” says Alan Sager, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, who lists those seven essential elements, like a lack of artificial restrictions on supply, demand and price, in his book, “The Easiest.”
Our health care industry is actually a riddle of private market profit incentives mixed with government money wrapped in an enigma of confusion. For instance: The government decides on reimbursement levels for Medicare and Medicaid, so it effectively decides which hospitals will thrive, and which will fail. Lack of transparency and hospitals cutting deals with insurers mean that the cost for the same MRI in the same region could vary by a factor of as much as 10 — but there isn’t any way for consumers to comparison shop.
If you have insurance, you might not even care. Roughly a third of spending goes to administrative costs, in part to satisfy government regulations, Sager says. And so on. “Reliance on failed markets to make most of the big decisions in US healthcare—combined with government incompetence—results in anarchy,” Sager says. “That’s clinical, financial, caregiving and legal anarchy.”
It’s hard to find Smith’s butcher and baker in the American health care system.
It’s hard to find Smith’s butcher and baker in the American health care system.
Big Tech — in some ways the hero of the American economy due to the wealth and innovation coming out of Silicon Valley — might also be an antihero. Social media has made Mark Zuckerberg into a centi-billionaire while there are complaints that it has damaged kids and fractured society. Platforms started out as good for consumers and businesses. But there are complaints about the declining quality of huge platforms for consumers, from Google search to Amazon’s store rankings, where what you see is often based on who paid the most. The author and technology activist Cory Doctorow has an explanation for it, which he calls “enshittification.” The key idea is that as these platforms have become increasingly powerful, they have become “chokepoints” that squeeze more value than they deserve out of both buyers and sellers. Doctorow’s view has clearly resonated. Both the American Dialect Society and the Macquarie Dictionary have called enshittification the word of the year.
Part of the problem, argue some observers, is the sheer size and scale of today’s tech platforms. Tim Wu, who was former president Joe Biden’s adviser on technology and competition, and whose new book is called “Age of Extraction,” argues that their monopoly-ish status has allowed them to sacrifice innovation for short term profits.
“The real threat is that monopoly power becomes self-perpetuating — insulating itself from competition and warping capitalism into something else entirely,” he writes.
Just as no one has been able to fix health care, no one has stood in Big Tech’s way either. “A signal feature of the last decade has been a political failure to in any way— even the most modest— to restrict the extractive models of the Big Tech platforms,” Wu says today.
Cases that have been brought, like the Federal Trade Commission’s case against Meta, have failed. Proponents like Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) argue that’s because “our laws are not keeping pace with advances in technology.”
In Smith’s terms, it’s as if there were only one combined butcher/baker where everyone had to shop, and it could charge farmers whatever it wanted for the ingredients and consumers whatever it wanted for their food.
Then there’s private equity — an industry that might be the purest manifestation of what makes people uneasy. It’s been called capitalism on steroids, and in its early years, maybe it was that. But now, the investors can win even when everyone else loses. That gives critics plenty of ammunition. “It is a wealth extraction business model period full stop,” said Dennis Kelleher, the CEO of Better Markets, a nonpartisan organization that advocates for financial reform.
“The reliable and robust returns private equity provides for investors are dependent upon — not divorced from — the value that private equity-backed companies create for consumers, families, and workers,” said Will Dunham, the CEO of the American Investment Council, which lobbies on behalf of private equity.
“Private equity-backed companies consistently show stronger revenue growth, job creation, capital expenditure, and higher wages than their non-PE backed competitors. And private equity’s commitment to supporting businesses over the long haul is one of the reasons why public pensions rely on it to bolster retirement benefits for teachers, firefighters, and other public servants.”
One problem is that low interest rates enabled financial engineering such as the euphemistically named dividend recapitalizations, in which the private equity owner adds fresh debt to the company — thereby “recapitalizing” it — but strips the money out of the company to pay investors a dividend. In a new paper, Abhishek Bhardwaj, an economist at Tulane University, and colleagues found that a dividend recapitalization “dramatically increases the chances of financial distress” and “reduce employee wages,” among other not good things.
Another problem is that the legal system effectively insulates private equity firms from responsibility. “The original sin of private equity, the basic reason it has so many bad consequences, is that the PE firm typically has operational control, but it’s legally very hard to find them responsible,” says Brendan Ballou, a former special counsel at the Department of Justice and the author of “Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America.”
He points out that even when a company owned by a private equity firm does something terrible, and both the company and the PE firm get sued, the case against the PE firm is often dismissed — because the courts say that the company is owned by funds managed by the PE firm, not the PE firm itself. “There’s this perception that PE is an extreme form of capitalism, a heat seeking missile for profits, but I try to put pressure on that analogy,” Ballou says. “Instead, it’s a perversion of capitalism created by our legal system.”
It’s as if Smith’s butcher and baker could poison you, but escape any punishment by arguing they weren’t responsible— oh, and still get rich.
A free market absolutist might try to argue that in all these industries, the invisible hand would work its magic if the government just got out of the way. Smith himself didn’t believe that. The “invisible hand” was a metaphor he used sparingly, not a justification for unregulated capitalism. He believed that one key element in turning self interest into a social good was … competition. He also believed that government regulation was necessary, particularly in certain areas. “People have a misperception of Smith,” says Luigi Zingales, who is an economist at the University of Chicago and my co-host on the podcast “Capitalisn’t.” “He was a big believer in the benefit of competition, and was very aware that in some situations we need regulation. He was also very concerned about the concentration of power.”
Even beyond Smith, there’s a deep historical rationale for the role of the government in shaping markets. In his new book “Capitalism: A Global History,” Sven Beckert, who directs Harvard’s Study on Capitalism, argues that “the free market … was nothing more than a figment from the very inception … it was the state that made the market.”
What we see in these industries isn’t so much capitalism run amok as it is a larger failure of the state to set the right rules.
The problem is different in every industry, and each one might require different rules. We might need less of the profit motive in health care, at least in the actual provisioning of care. We might need more of Smith’s capitalism — more competition — in Big Tech. We might need better laws for private equity.
The answer isn’t to throw out capitalism. It’s to make markets function so that to the extent possible, the profit motive can also serve the greater good.
It’s not at all clear that our government is capable of changing any of this, especially given the amount of money pouring into the coffers of elected officials from businesses trying to write the rules so they can make more money. Which might prove to be a short-term win, because if it leads to more and more cynicism about capitalism, it could eventually rebound to hurt those who most want capitalism to survive.
So those who want capitalism to keep winning should actually take Smith to heart, and make sure that the modern equivalents of the butcher and the baker are helping the rest of us eat too.