Capitalism Buries Its Undertakers

Left-wing critiques of capitalism, like pure capitalism itself, are missing something.

Review of Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI by John Cassidy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Some years ago, while interning at a think tank to preach the gospel of free markets, I heard a colleague make an argument against capitalism more devastating than all the Thomas Piketty charts in the world. He told me he had just seen the latest Transformers film: “Pretty good!” It stopped me in my tracks. America’s great economic freedom was the freedom to do … this? Under our free enterprise system, her citizens chose to give their leisure hours and hard-earned pay to melting their brains as CGI robots bash each other’s circuits in? 

All my Milton Friedman quotations, all my battle-tested counterattacks to the campus DSA chapter, were so much straw against the terrible truth that someone would pay to watch Transformers: The Last Knight. Faced with the cursed fruit of capitalism, I found myself caught in the vise of Anton Chigurh’s question in No Country for Old Men: If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

The burying of all noble things in a mound of slop, and the narrowing of man’s vision to nothing but pecuniary frivolities, have always lurked as risks for commercial societies; but as John Cassidy’s Capitalism and Its Critics shows, thinkers and activists have found plenty of other reasons to oppose it besides. Cassidy writes in the opening pages, “Capitalism by its very nature is a process of change, and over the centuries the critiques of it have moved with the times.” Perhaps, then, it only makes sense that capitalism has exhibited a stubborn survival even as so much around it has shifted or faded away, depending as it does on what Marx and Engels called the “constant revolutionizing of production” and the “uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions.” Cassidy has written a useful, if incomplete, survey of the enemies of the system that refuses to die.

Though the critiques have evolved through the years, the major objections are as old as capitalism itself. “The central indictment of capitalism has remained remarkably consistent: that it is soulless, exploitative, inequitable, unstable, and destructive, yet also all-conquering and overwhelming.” Such a summary of capitalism’s supposed flaws sets up well the sort of critics we are in store for, largely thinkers ranging from the left to the far left, whose opposition to capitalism rests on its inegalitarianism and power imbalances. 

In fact, for all of capitalism’s proteanity, one of the strengths of Cassidy’s history is how it shows the recurrence of certain arguments against capitalism. The British Luddites of the early nineteenth century felt the same precarity of employment and impotence before the machine that many white-collar workers feel today in the face of artificial intelligence. Henry George’s wildly popular Progress and Poverty, published in 1879, railed against unearned wealth, monopolies, and corporate rent extraction in language that would have the Bernie bros and whatever we’re calling Zohran Mamdani’s supporters nodding along. And the link between capitalism’s demand for new markets and the growth of imperialism perceived by John Hobson and Rosa Luxemburg in the early twentieth century anticipated the next century’s worries that globalization is little more than a scheme for getting third-world illiterates to do our dirty work for us. 

But so many echoes between past and contemporary sentiments might also suggest that Cassidy has picked out the au courant arguments most likely to flatter his readers with the impression that the great minds of history have all led up to us. He is a staff writer at the New Yorker, after all. There are indeed a good deal of 2025-isms in the book, including much discussion of environmentalism, imperialism, and fascism and the flagging of various thinkers as racists, antisemites, and so on.

Nevertheless, to Cassidy’s credit, he takes his cast of critics seriously, explicating their arguments in depth, letting them speak for themselves through generous quotations, and assessing each writer on the merits. Or the demerits, as the case may be, as Cassidy doesn’t accept anyone’s arguments unthinkingly and often brings into the conversation the critics of the critics. Cassidy keeps things interesting by interspersing the requisite heavy hitters with more obscure thinkers. We have Marx and Engels, Thorstein Veblen, and John Maynard Keynes; but we also get William Bolts, foe of the East India Company; 19^th-century feminist and proto-Christian socialist Flora Tristan; and Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev, whose theory of the business cycle challenged party predictions of capitalism’s inevitable demise.

Another throughline in Cassidy’s history is how capitalism’s foes have gawked at its awesome power, in something like the industrial equivalent of the Romantic sublime. Even as he castigated the “Mechanical Age,” Thomas Carlyle wondered at how “men have crossed oceans by steam; the Birmingham Fire-king has visited the fabulous East.” Henry George marveled at “the forest tree transformed into finished lumber … the diamond drill cutting through the heart of the rocks.” The Communist Manifesto conceded that capitalism “has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.” Such might is surely a major factor behind capitalism’s survival. Like the universal solvent sought by the Renaissance alchemists, it persists precisely by virtue of its ability to transform or dissolve everything around it while remaining intact itself.

But to appreciate the full meaning of that “everything”—the institutions, customs, and ways of life that capitalism obsolesces—one must perforce have an eye to that which transcends mere dollars and cents. And it is here that Capitalism and Its Critics proves blind. There is a big hole in the book, the same hole that many critics have perceived at the heart of capitalism itself. In his focus on inequality, unfairness, and exploitation, Cassidy largely ignores the objection to capitalism accidentally made by my colleague, perhaps the deepest objection of all: that it is meaningless, and therefore makes the lives of those living under it meaningless as well. 

Why, after all, ultimately put any stock in a society built around capitalism? What is the point of it? Capitalism’s most profound adversaries have always been those who feared that there is none—that it not only lacks any higher purpose, but blinds us to the very possibility of any such purpose, enervating the human spirit in the process. Although Cassidy notes capitalism’s soullessness as one of its enduring criticisms, there is very little of the soul in these pages. 

Its absence is apparent in both the writers Cassidy includes and those he leaves out. He shows, for example, that Adam Smith was not the unqualified cheerleader for free markets he is sometimes made out to be, with his objections to mercantile imperialism, corporate collusion, and trade monopolies. True enough, but Smith also saw a dark side to the very division of labor that he celebrated as the secret to rising living standards. “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations,” he observed, “generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment.” For all its wonders, capitalism for Smith also reduces us to what Max Weber (who is not covered) in the same vein called “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”

Cassidy similarly gives much greater attention to Marx and Engels’s attacks on harsh working conditions and employer abuse than to their discussion of workers’ alienation from their labor and the sapping of their “species-being.” The problem with capitalism wasn’t just that workers were getting screwed over by the boss, but that their very humanity was being warped.

It is a notable absence in a work of such breadth and erudition, and one that speaks, not just to the limitations of one book, but to the limited horizons of the contemporary left, which can talk about oppression and enjoin people to fight the power but struggles to offer anything worthier of our commitment. Is the existence of billionaires all that makes people question capitalism today? Or is it also the dull horror of realizing that for all our cherished economic freedom, there doesn’t seem to be anything worth doing with that freedom besides ordering Uber Eats and watching porn? (Don’t take it from me; it’s the message one advocacy group used to support Democrats in last year’s elections.)

It may be no coincidence that Carlyle, who gives the closest we get here to a defense of man’s greatness against the nullity of the “cash nexus,” is also one of the very few right-wingers in the book. As Cassidy notes, Carlyle was “deeply skeptical of laissez-faire economics, utilitarianism, and any dogma of social improvement”; he would have despised those Panglossian schoolmarms on both left and right who tell those fed up with the system to shut up and enjoy their on-demand junk. Similarly, though Cassidy provides helpful discussions of the economics behind various attacks on capitalism, he rarely goes a level deeper to interrogate the liberal premises underlying such attacks, or to discuss leftist critics’ search for something better in its place. Why exactly is wealth inequality so bad, and what good thing would result from its elimination?

An understandable, but mistaken, conclusion would be that leftist opposition to capitalism is ultimately rather superficial and that any serious criticism must come from elsewhere. On the contrary, the left has often argued that ending capitalism would finally allow us to live lives of value—that there was something worth aspiring to higher than markets’ meme coin arbitrage and OnlyFans fame. You just wouldn’t know it from Cassidy’s telling. 

Leon Trotsky, for example, dreamed that after capitalism, the “average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.” The Frankfurt School, which goes unmentioned, gave great attention to capitalism’s deadening of the senses and the drowning of our more honorable sensibilities in a sea of mass-produced swill. Marx himself, for all his notorious reticence to say what communist utopia would look like, promised that it would allow us to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.”

But all these claims require some philosophy of life—a staking out of the ways that it is good to live, which capitalism renders unattainable (or so one claims). And this positive, “elitist” argument, that some ways of living your life are better than others, is one that today’s left finds it difficult to make. It is much easier—less “judgy”—to stick to negative arguments against capitalism’s systemic instability, or its facilitation of bosses’ greed, or its demeaning of women’s unpaid housework. Each sidesteps the fundamental question of what, if we shouldn’t be laboring for pittances, we ought to be doing instead.

One needn’t even be an enemy of capitalism to think that man craves something to give himself to, something that capitalism denies. The economist Joseph Schumpeter, who is mentioned only in passing and was hardly a seething foe of capitalism, put it most succinctly: “The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail.” Nor need one be a high-brow intellectual: just watch Office Space or Fight Club, with Tyler Durden’s speech about “slaves with white collars … working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.” Ironically, by sidestepping the fears of spiritual emptiness and the efforts to articulate a better life, and sticking to debates over getting nickeled and dimed by the Man, Cassidy suggests by omission what the Thatcherites had to say explicitly—that there is no alternative.

And that is perhaps the message that finally comes through most naggingly in Capitalism and Its Critics: for all the centuries of criticism, and hundreds of pages of opposition, capitalism is still here. As the very length and scope of the book suggest, what Étienne Gilson said of philosophy could also be said of capitalism, that it always buries its undertakers. Cassidy writes, “It is barely hyperbole to say that capitalism is always in crisis, recovering from crisis, or heading toward the next crisis.” And yet it has managed to pull through, battered perhaps but still there. How terrible, then, will the final crisis need to be for the whole system to finally go kaputt?