Current Events & Public Affairs · Excerpts · News & Opinion ·

An Excerpt from Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI

by John Cassidy

An excerpt from Capitalism and Its Critics by John Cassidy, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and longlisted for the 2025 Porchlight Business Book Awards in the Current Events & Public Affairs category

At a time when artificial intelligence, climate change, and inequality are raising fundamental questions about the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism, from the East India Company and Industrial Revolution to the digital revolution. But here John Cassidy, a staff writer at The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, adopts a bold new approach: he tells the story through the eyes of the system’s critics. From the English Luddites who rebelled against early factory automation, to communists in Germany and Russia in the early twentieth century, to the Latin American dependistas, the international Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s, and the modern degrowth movement, the absorbing narrative traverses the globe. It visits with familiar names—Smith, Marx, Luxemburg, Keynes, Polanyi—but also focuses on many less familiar figures, including William Thompson, the Irish proto-socialist whose work influenced Marx; Flora Tristan, the French proponent of a universal labor union; John Hobson, the original theorist of imperialism; J. C. Kumarappa, the Indian exponent of Ghandian economics; Eric Williams, the Trinidadian author of a famous thesis on slavery and capitalism; Joan Robinson, the Cambridge economist and critic of the Cold War; and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the founding father of degrowth.

Blending rich biography, panoramic history, and lively exploration of economic theories, Capitalism and Its Critics is true big history that illuminates the deep roots of many of the most urgent issues of our time.

Capitalism and Its Critics has been longlisted in the Current Events & Public Affairs category of Porchlight Book Company's 2025 Business Books Awards. The excerpt below comes from the book's Introduction.

◊◊◊◊◊

All history books are products of their own time, this one included. The original idea for it came to me in 2016, during the insurgent presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders, and I made the final edits to the text shortly after Donald Trump was elected to a second term. Sanders, you may recall, claimed that the US economy was “rigged” and promised to make it work for “working families and not just for the billionaire class.”1 Trump was a billionaire himself, of course, but that didn’t prevent him from positioning himself as the tribune of a forgotten working class and parlaying the grievances and discontents of many non-rich Americans all the way to the White House, twice.  

The rising disaffection with American capitalism that Sanders (and, indeed, Trump) drew upon in 2016 proved to be a lasting phenomenon. In 2018 the polling firm Gallup found that fewer than half of Americans ages eighteen to twenty-nine had a positive view of capitalism, compared to slightly more than half who had a positive view of socialism.2 Rising antipathy toward capitalism wasn’t confined to the United States. In 2017 the British polling firm Populus asked people to list the traits that they associated with socialism, capitalism, and various other “isms.” For capitalism, the most commonly chosen phrases were “innovative,” “greedy,” and “selfish.” For socialism, the three most popular choices were “fair,” “for the greater good,” and “delivers most for most people.” The survey was commissioned by the pro–free market Legatum Institute. “I believe that free enterprise policies are a key driver of prosperity,” Matthew Elliott, a senior fellow at the institute, said when the poll was released. “Sadly though, it appears that a large proportion of British voters do not share this view.”3 

Originally, I conceived of the book as a shortish history of contemporary capitalism and the economic debates it has engendered, from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present. However, I was quickly forced to confront the fact that many of the criticisms of modern capitalism—from complaints about rapacious platform monopolies and self-dealing bankers to laments about the impact of technology on working conditions and inequality—have roots in economic developments and debates that took place during the rise of industrial capitalism in Britain and even before that. Writing in the late eighteenth century, Adam Smith, no enemy of the profit motive, railed against colonial monopolies like the East India Company, whose privileged position and egregious self-dealing marked them out as preindustrial analogues of the too-big-to-fail banks that taxpayers bailed out during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2009. (Like the banks, the East India Company, which effectively ruled great swaths of the subcontinent, received a massive government bailout.) 

As factory capitalism developed in northern England, some preindustrial craft workers broke into textile mills and smashed new machinery that was threatening their livelihoods. For a long time, the Luddites, as they came to be known, were dismissed as antediluvian enemies of modernity. In a world where artificial intelligence is now threatening to eliminate countless jobs, their concerns about new technology look more reasonable. Criticisms of the growing gap between rich and poor were another feature of early industrial capitalism. In 1829 the Romantic poet Robert Southey wrote: “Great capitalists become like pikes in a fishpond, who devour the weaker fish; and it is but too certain that the poverty of one part of the people seems to increase in the same ratio as the riches of another.”4 

Eventually I decided to expand the project into a broader history of capitalism and its critics. To be sure, I couldn’t hope to cover everything, or nearly everything. Back in the 1950s, the English historian G. D. H. Cole wrote a history of socialist thought that took up seven volumes. The first volume alone, which was devoted to “The Forerunners,” contained fifty principal characters.5 In whittling things down, I was greatly helped by the fact that, over the centuries, the central indictment of capitalism has remained remarkably consistent: that it is soulless, exploitative, inequitable, unstable, and destructive, yet also all-conquering and overwhelming. “Our true monarch is not Victoria but Victor Mammon,” John Ruskin, the English art critic and philosopher, wrote in 1866.6 A hundred and fifty-five years later the NPR journalist and podcaster Rund Abdelfatah commented: “Capitalism is an economic system, but it’s also so much more than that. It’s become a sort of ideology, this all-encompassing force that rules over our lives and our minds.”7 

In tracing efforts to critique capitalism and resist its onward march, I have tried to explain the various iterations that the system has gone through, from the rise of factory production, to the switch from sole proprietors, to large corporations as the dominant form of capitalist enterprise, all the way up to the digital revolution and its latest offshoot, the commercialization of artificial intelligence. But this is not a standard economic history. Although it contains discussions of GDP figures and wage trends and technological developments, as well as some political history, it concentrates mainly on the lives and works of individual writers and critics. By engaging with the theories and commentaries of my subjects, I have sought to illuminate how the world appeared to them in their time and their environment. If there is a conceit to the book, it lies in trying to tell the history of capitalism through the eyes of its critics. 

 

Excerpted from Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI by John Cassidy, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2025 by John Cassidy. All rights reserved.

 

About the Author

John Cassidy is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Dot.con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold and How Markets Fail, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction. He lives in New York City.

 

Endnotes
1. Jeff Stein, “Here’s the Full Text of Bernie Sanders’s Iowa Speech,” Vox, February 2, 2016.
2. Frank Newport, “Democrats More Positive About Socialism Than Capitalism,” Gallup, August 13, 2018.
3. “Public Opinion in the Post-Brexit Era,” Legatum Institute, October 2017, 13.  
4. William Haller, “Southey’s Later Radicalism,” PMLA 37, no. 2 (June 1922), 286.
5. G.D.H. Cole, Socialist Thought: The Forerunners 1789–1850 (London: Macmillan, 1953).
6. John Ruskin to Lily Armstrong, November 19, 1866, in The Letters of John Ruskin, Volume 1: 1827–1869 (London: George Allen, 1909), 520.  
7. “Capitalism: What Is It?,” Throughline, NPR, June 24, 2021. 
Back to News & Opinion

Buy the Book

Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI

Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI

Click to See Price
A Financial Times Most Anticipated Book of 2025A Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of 2025A sweeping, dramatic history of capitalism as seen through th...
Porchlight Book Company
Article by

Porchlight Book Company

Born out of a local independent bookshop founded in 1927 and perfecting an expertise in moving books in bulk since 1984, the team at Porchlight Book Company has a deep knowledge of industry history and publishing trends.

We are not governed by any algorithm, but by our collective experience and wisdom attained over four decades as a bulk book service company. We sell what serves our customers, and we promote what engages our staff. Our humanity is what keeps us Porchlight.

Other Posts You May Like