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history of capitalism



  • Quinn Slobodian: Can Democracy be Safe from the Market?

    A new history of capitalist policy initiatives focuses on the "zone," a territory of radical deregulation where capital is free from constraint by democracy. A reviewer asks whether there can be a zone where democracy is insulated against the market. 



  • Can Capitalism Exist Without Excess?

    by Trevor Jackson

    The pandemic supply chain disruptions have focused attention on shortages, but the problem of gluts—of food being destroyed when it can't be profitably sold–reflects a deeper problem with global capitalism. 



  • Clara Mattei on the History of Austerity Politics

    A decade before the Great Depression, capital responded to a serious crisis of legitimacy by adopting measures that punished a restive working class through scarcity, argues a new economic history; maintaining hierarchy, not growing the economy, is the objective.



  • The Dark Underside of the "Family-Like" Business

    by Erik Baker

    The history of businesses cloaking their labor practices in paternalism is long; the most recent chapter dates back to the spiritual explorations of the 1960s counterculture and the surveillance practices of Henry Ford. 



  • The Rent is Too Damn High(ly Central to Modern Economies)

    by Trevor Jackson

    Historian Trevor Jackson reviews Brett Christophers's book on rent, which places the power of the rentier class at the center of the inequality and dysfunction of modern capital and brings Marx's original investigations into the 21st century.



  • Public Thinker: Destin Jenkins on Breaking Bonds

    by Hannah Appel

    "As your work so powerfully shows, the municipal bond market structures racial privilege, entrenches spatial neglect, and distributes wealth and power. American cities are dependent on financiers, rating agencies, and bond markets for nearly everything."



  • Land of Capital: Jonathan Levy's "Ages of American Capital" Reviewed

    by Steven Hahn

    "Ages of Capitalism" is one of the first synthetic accounts of the relationship of capitalism and American politics and society, and provides an important vocabulary for a developing field of inquiry. It also, oddly, resonates with the older consensus history that assumed capitalism as a core part of American life.



  • Our Insurance Dystopia

    by Caley Horan

    America's health insurance morass is a result of the replacement of the ideal of mutual, universal risk sharing with the privatization of risk in pursuit of profit. 



  • The Men Who Turned Slavery Into Big Business

    by Joshua D. Rothman

    "We still live in the world that Franklin and Armfield’s profits helped build, and with the enduring inequalities that they and their industry entrenched."



  • The End of Development

    by Tim Barker

    "Capitalism’s publicists are experiencing something of what Marxists went through after 1989, with one important difference: capitalism may be increasingly discredited, but it has not disappeared the way state socialism did."