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.
