At a time when artificial intelligence, climate change, inequality, trade wars, and a right-wing populist backlash to globalization are raising fundamental questions about the economic system, Capitalism and Its Critics provides a history of global capitalism, from the East India Company and Industrial Revolution to the digital revolution. But here John Cassidy 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 narrative traverses the globe. It visits with familiar names - Smith, Marx, Luxemburg, Keynes, Polanyi - but also focuses on many less familiar figures, including Flora Tristan, the French proponent of a universal labor union; Thomas Carlyle, the conservative prophet of the moral depredations of the market; John Hobson, the original theorist of imperialism; J. C. Kumarappa, the Indian exponent of Gandhian economics; Eric Williams, the Trinidadian author of a famous thesis on slavery and capitalism; Joan Robinson, the Cambridge economist and critic of Keynes; and Samir Amin, the leftist French-Egyptian economist and analyst of globalization.
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