
Crack-Up Capitalism
Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy
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Narrated by:
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Keith Sellon-Wright
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By:
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Quinn Slobodian
About this listen
In a revelatory dispatch from the frontier of capitalist extremism, an acclaimed historian of ideas shows how free marketeers are realizing their ultimate goal: an end to nation-states and the constraints of democracy.
Look at a map of the world and you’ll see a colorful checkerboard of nation-states. But this is not where power actually resides. Over the last decade, globalization has shattered the map into different legal spaces: free ports, tax havens, special economic zones. With the new spaces, ultracapitalists have started to believe that it is possible to escape the bonds of democratic government and oversight altogether.
Crack-Up Capitalism follows the most notorious radical libertarians—from Milton Friedman to Peter Thiel—around the globe as they search for the perfect space for capitalism. Historian Quinn Slobodian leads us from Hong Kong in the 1970s to South Africa in the late days of apartheid, from the neo-Confederate South to the former frontier of the American West, from the medieval City of London to the gold vaults of right-wing billionaires, and finally into the world’s oceans and war zones, charting the relentless quest for a blank slate where market competition is unfettered by democracy.
A masterful work of economic and intellectual history, Crack-Up Capitalism offers both a new way of looking at the world and a new vision of coming threats. Full of rich details and provocative analysis, Crack-Up Capitalism offers an alarming view of a possible future.
A Macmillan Audio production from Metropolitan Books.
©2023 Quinn Slobodian (P)2023 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Ranging from Liechtenstein to Somalia, and from Hong Kong to Silicon Valley, Quinn Slobodian's Crack-Up Capitalism exposes how zones of exception promise capitalism an escape from the confines of the modern state and the constraints of democracy. Revelatory reading. A worthy successor to Slobodian’s brilliant Globalists.”—Adam Tooze, author of Crashed
“In Crack-Up Capitalism, Quinn Slobodian takes us on a wild ride through the fenced-in compounds and failed states of today’s capitalist world, and invites us to imagine a future where the rich have privatized safety, turned working people into a disposable servant class, and bought entire countries outright. This sharp and wickedly entertaining book is a necessary field guide to the LARPers, bloggers, and grifters of the libertarian and anarcho-capitalist world, a warning that they are closer to fulfilling their fantasies than we might think, and a clarion call for collective action to preserve—and greatly expand—democracy as we know it.”—Sarah Jaffe, author of Work Won’t Love You Back
“Revelatory. In this head-spinner of a book, Quinn Slobodian shows how zones, islands, micronations, gated communities, and cyber realms are remaking our planet. The capitalist future they portend isn’t a borderless utopia but a jurisdictional shatter belt, where democracy is a distant dream.”—Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire
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Story
For more than a century, governments facing financial crisis have resorted to the economic policies of austerity—cuts to wages, fiscal spending, and public benefits—as a path to solvency. Today, an important question remains: What if solvency was never the goal? In The Capital Order, political economist Clara E. Mattei explores the intellectual origins of austerity to uncover its originating motives: the protection of capital—and indeed capitalism—in times of social upheaval from below.
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Must listen to. Essential.
- By Gus More on 01-03-25
By: Clara E. Mattei
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The Chile Project
- The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism
- By: Sebastian Edwards
- Narrated by: Andrew Joseph Perez
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Chile Project, Sebastian Edwards tells the story of how the neoliberal economic model came to an end in 2021, when Gabriel Boric was elected president, vowing that "If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave." More than a story about one Latin American country, The Chile Project is a behind-the-scenes history of the spread and consequences of the free-market thinking that dominated economic policymaking around the world in the second half of the twentieth century—but is now on the retreat.
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Combining history, ethnography, politic
- By John Murphy on 06-05-23
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Inventing the Future
- Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
- By: Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams
- Narrated by: Liam Gerrard
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Inventing the Future is a bold new manifesto for life after capitalism. Against the confused understanding of our high-tech world by both the right and the left, this book claims that the emancipatory and future-oriented possibilities of our society can be reclaimed. Instead of running from a complex future, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams demand a postcapitalist economy capable of advancing standards, liberating humanity from work and developing technologies that expand our freedoms.
By: Nick Srnicek, and others
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Invisible Doctrine
- The Secret History of Neoliberalism
- By: George Monbiot, Peter Hutchison
- Narrated by: George Monbiot
- Length: 4 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In Invisible Doctrine, journalist George Monbiot and filmmaker Peter Hutchison shatter this myth. They show how a fringe philosophy in the 1930s—championing competition as the defining feature of humankind—was systematically hijacked by a group of wealthy elites, determined to guard their fortunes and power.
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Timely
- By Joshua on 05-15-25
By: George Monbiot, and others
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A Brief History of Neoliberalism
- By: David Harvey
- Narrated by: Clive Chafer
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Neoliberalism - the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action - has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage.
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Monotone reader
- By Elizabeth on 09-28-17
By: David Harvey
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Nixonland
- The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
- By: Rick Perlstein
- Narrated by: Stephen R. Thorne
- Length: 36 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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From one of America's most talented historians and winner of a LA Times Book Prize comes a brilliant new account of Richard Nixon that reveals the riveting backstory to the red state/blue state resentments that divide our nation today. Told with urgency and sharp political insight, Nixonland recaptures America's turbulent 1960s and early 1970s and reveals how Richard Nixon rose from the political grave to seize and hold the presidency.
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A 5-Star Book Injured by the Narrator
- By Frank on 08-12-09
By: Rick Perlstein
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Technofeudalism
- What Killed Capitalism
- By: Yanis Varoufakis
- Narrated by: Yanis Varoufakis
- Length: 7 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Technofeudalism says Yanis Varoufakis, is the new power that is reshaping our lives and the world, and is the greatest current threat to the liberal individual, to our efforts to avert climate catastrophe—and to democracy itself. It also lies behind the new geopolitical tensions, especially the New Cold War between the United States and China. Drawing on stories from Greek myth and pop culture, from Homer to Mad Men, Varoufakis explains this revolutionary transformation: how it enslaves our minds, how it rewrites the rules of global power, and, ultimately, what it will take overthrow it.
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The narration is literally the worst.
- By Shakeiad on 09-24-24
By: Yanis Varoufakis
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The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order
- America and the World in the Free Market Era
- By: Gary Gerstle
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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To be sure, neoliberalism has contributed to a number of alarming trends, not least of which has been a massive growth in income inequality. Yet as the eminent historian Gary Gerstle argues in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, these indictments fail to reckon with the full contours of what neoliberalism was and why its worldview had such persuasive hold on both the right and the left for three decades.
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Cursory, unoriginal, class-blind
- By A Reviewer on 10-24-22
By: Gary Gerstle
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Offshore
- Stealth Wealth and the New Colonialism
- By: Brooke Harrington
- Narrated by: Jennifer Walden
- Length: 4 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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How do the rich keep getting richer, while dodging the long arm of the law? The ultra-rich seem to live in a different world from the rest of us. That world is called offshore. Hidden from view, the world's ultra-rich can use offshore finance to escape tax obligations, labor and environmental safety regulations, campaign finance rules, and other laws that get in their way.
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Informative
- By Seattle mom on 03-02-25
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The System
- Who Rigged It, How We Fix It
- By: Robert B. Reich
- Narrated by: Robert B. Reich
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Millions of Americans have lost confidence in our political and economic system. After years of stagnant wages, volatile job markets, and an unwillingness by those in power to deal with profound threats such as climate change, there is a mounting sense that the system is fixed, serving only those select few with enough money to secure a controlling stake. With the characteristic clarity and passion that has made him a central civil voice, Robert B. Reich shows how wealth and power have interacted to install an elite oligarchy, eviscerate the middle class, and undermine democracy.
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Turn Off Your TV. Wake Up and Listen Now!
- By Benchmark on 03-25-20
By: Robert B. Reich
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Reaganland
- America's Right Turn 1976-1980
- By: Rick Perlstein
- Narrated by: Samantha Desz, Jonathan Todd Ross, Jacques Roy, and others
- Length: 45 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Over two decades, Rick Perlstein has published three definitive works about the emerging dominance of conservatism in modern American politics. With the saga's final installment, he has delivered yet another stunning literary and historical achievement. In late 1976, Ronald Reagan was dismissed as a man without a political future: defeated in his nomination bid against a sitting president of his own party, blamed for President Gerald Ford's defeat, too old to make another run.
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This Book is Censored by Audible
- By Nathan D. Backlund on 09-07-20
By: Rick Perlstein
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The Great Transformation
- The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time
- By: Karl Polanyi
- Narrated by: David Pickering
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In this classic work of economic history and social theory, Karl Polanyi analyzes the economic and social changes brought about by the great transformation of the Industrial Revolution. His analysis explains not only the deficiencies of the self-regulating market, but the potentially dire social consequences of untempered market capitalism. New introductory material reveals the renewed importance of Polanyi's seminal analysis in an era of globalization and free trade.
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Self regulating markets eventually fail
- By Robert Ziegler on 02-15-25
By: Karl Polanyi
Solid look at what our future might be like
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Central to modern debates
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Everyone Needs To Read This Book
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Insightful read/listening
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