
Capitalism and Its Critics
A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI
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Narrated by:
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Nathaniel Priestly
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By:
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John Cassidy
About this listen
A Financial Times Most Anticipated Book of 2025
A sweeping, dramatic history of capitalism as seen through the eyes of its fiercest critics.
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.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
©2024 John Cassidy (P)2024 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Cassidy’s masterful synthesis of history and biography serves to demonstrate that capitalism is in a permanent state of change not just because of its fundamental nature, but because of how it’s continuously being subjected to pushback. The result is a unique and invigorating view of capitalism’s history."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A sweeping economic history of the to-some-sacrosanct doctrine of capitalism and those arrayed against it over the years . . . dense with information, free of jargon, and a powerful argument against an increasingly unsustainable economic system."—Kirkus (starred review)
"Capitalism and its Critics is everything that we’ve come to expect from John Cassidy. He weaves an engaging and trenchant discussion of key critics of capitalism over its more than 200 years into a history of capitalism itself. The battle is not only about economic ideas, but about the VERY nature of our society. Especially now, when some see the failures of capitalism as more than a little responsible for the Trumpian oligarchy, while others see its successes as ushering in a new era of AI-led prosperity, this is an illuminating and essential read.”—Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and author of The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society
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Story
Inflation is back, and its impact can be felt everywhere, from the grocery store to the mortgage market to the results of elections around the world. Yet the conventional wisdom about inflation is stuck in the past. Since the 1970s, there has only really been one playbook for fighting inflation: raise interest rates, thereby creating unemployment and a recession, which will lower prices. But this simple story hides a multitude of beliefs about why prices go up and how policymakers can wrestle them back down, beliefs that are often wrong, damaging, and have little empirical basis.
By: Nicolò Fraccaroli, and others
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Comemadre
- By: Roque Larraquy
- Narrated by: Rick Perez
- Length: 4 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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On the outskirts of Buenos Aires in 1907, Doctor Quintana pines for head nurse Menéndez while he and his colleagues embark on a grisly series of experiments to investigate the line between life and death. One hundred years later, a celebrated artist goes to extremes in search of aesthetic transformation, turning himself into an art object. How far are we willing to go, Larraquy asks, in pursuit of transcendence?
By: Roque Larraquy
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Apple in China
- The Capture of the World's Greatest Company
- By: Patrick McGee
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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For listeners of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs and Chris Miller’s Chip War, a riveting look at how Apple helped build China’s dominance in electronics assembly and manufacturing only to find itself trapped in a relationship with an authoritarian state making ever-increasing demands.
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Disturbing and Equally Important
- By Old Man River on 05-20-25
By: Patrick McGee
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The Measure of Progress
- Counting What Really Matters
- By: Diane Coyle
- Narrated by: Harrie Dobby
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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The ways that statisticians and governments measure the economy were developed in the 1940s, when the urgent economic problems were entirely different from those of today. In The Measure of Progress, Diane Coyle argues that the framework underpinning today's economic statistics is so outdated that it functions as a distorting lens, or even a set of blinkers. When policymakers rely on such an antiquated conceptual tool, how can they measure, understand, and respond with any precision to what is happening in today's digital economy?
By: Diane Coyle
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Empire of AI
- Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
- By: Karen Hao
- Narrated by: Karen Hao
- Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?
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Well-researched. Timely. Informative. Karen is brilliant and kind!
- By Kahlil Andrews on 05-25-25
By: Karen Hao
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The Third Reich of Dreams
- The Nightmares of a Nation
- By: Charlotte Beradt, Damion Searls - translator, Dunya Mikhail - foreword
- Narrated by: Olivia Vinall
- Length: 3 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Charlotte Beradt began having unsettling dreams after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. She envisioned herself being shot at, tortured and scalped, surrounded by Nazis in disguise, and breathlessly fleeing across fields with storm troopers at her heels. Shaken by these nightmares and banned as a Jew from working, she began secretly collecting dreams from her friends and neighbors, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Disguising these "diaries of the night" in code and concealing them in the spines of books from her extensive library, she smuggled them out of the country one by one.
By: Charlotte Beradt, and others
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Goodbye Globalization
- The Return of a Divided World
- By: Elisabeth Braw
- Narrated by: Brigid Lohrey
- Length: 13 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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In this groundbreaking account, Elisabeth Braw explores the collapse of globalization and the profound challenges it will bring to the West. Drawing on interviews with prominent executives and policymakers from around the world, Braw poses the difficult questions all businesses and economies will face-and traces the intricate story of globalization from the exuberant 90s to the embattled present.
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Excellent Overview of Global Economic Trends
- By Ted Lapis on 05-04-25
By: Elisabeth Braw
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Empty Vessel
- The Story of the Global Economy in One Barge
- By: Ian Kumekawa
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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What do a barracks for British troops in the Falklands War, a floating jail off the Bronx, and temporary housing for VW factory workers in Germany have in common? The Balder Scapa: a single barge that served all three roles. Though the name would eventually change to Finnboda 12. And then to Safe Esperia. And later on, to the Bibby Resolution. And after that . . . in short, a vessel with so many names, and so many fates, that to keep it in our sights—as the protagonist of this fascinating economic parable—Ian Kumekawa has no choice but to call it, simply, the Vessel.
By: Ian Kumekawa
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The AI Con
- How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want
- By: Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna
- Narrated by: Jade Wheeler
- Length: 7 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out of business? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything? The answer to these questions, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna make clear, is “no,” “they wish,” “LOL,” and “definitely not.” This kind of thinking is a symptom of a phenomenon known as “AI hype.”
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A must read, even if you're an AI optimist
- By Malcolm Gomez on 05-15-25
By: Emily M. Bender, and others
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Zbig
- The Life and Times of Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet
- By: Edward Luce
- Narrated by: Michael David Axtell
- Length: 23 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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An intimate and masterful biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski—President Carter’s national security advisor and one of America’s leading geopolitical thinkers—from one of the finest columnists and political writers at work today.
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The writing was impeccable
- By Nathan King on 05-22-25
By: Edward Luce
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Capitalism
- A Global History
- By: Sven Beckert
- Length: 40 hrs
- Unabridged
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A landmark event eight years in the making, a brilliant global narrative that unravels the defining story of the past thousand years of human history.
By: Sven Beckert