Pun Salad

This fat tome was on the New Non-Fiction table at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library. I could tell it would be out of my ideological comfort zone, but I promised myself that I'd venture there every so often. It's very long, 518 pages of main text. And it turned out to be packed with dull-but-earnest prose with plenty of details in which I can't imagine anyone would be interested. [Page 240, picked at random, about the early USSR: "NKFin [the People's Commissariat of Finance] was headed by Grigory Sokolnikov, a veteran Bolshevik who had been an early associate of Nikolai Bukharin, a Marxist theorist who was a prominent party figure." If you made it to the end of that sentence without wishing you were doing something else, good for you.]

But I worked my way through it, admittedly in "looked at every page" mode at some points.

To be fair, the author, John Cassidy, demonstrates a wide range of meticulous research into economic and social history, spanning centuries, across the globe. Although his sympathies are clearly with capitalism's critics, his basic theme can't help but admit that various flavors of "capitalism" have been the dominant force pulling billions of people out of poverty in a historical eye-blink. (He doesn't do a lot of graphs, but he provides a "hockey stick" one early on that's simple but revealing.

The book cover lists many of the "critics" he discusses: William Bolts, the Luddites, Adam Smith, William Thompson, Anna Wheeler, Flora Tristan, Karl Marx, Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Engels, Henry George, John Hobson, Thorstein Veblen, Rosa Luxemburg, Nikolai Kondratiev, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Polanyi, John Maynard Keynes, Michal Kalecki, Joan Robinson, J.C. Kumarappa, Eric Williams, Raul Frebisch, Milton Friedman, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Silvia Frederici, Stuart Hall, Samir Amin, and Thomas Piketty.

You may have not heard of all those people.

So, you'll note: Cassidy discusses a few capitalist champions (Adam Smith and Milton Friedman) not just critics. (Hayek gets some discussion as well, mostly as an inspiration to Maggie Thatcher.)

That's not to say that Cassidy is even-handed. He refers (p. 392) to the "cult of [Milton] Friedman", and it's hard to avoid detecting a note of disparagement there. I didn't notice (for example) any reference to the "cult of Marx", and I think that's probably more apt.

Some of the "critics" launched movements that sputtered out pretty quickly. Chapter 24 is titled "Silvia Frederici and Wages for Housework". A movement "demanding payment from the government for domestic labor." Presumably this wouldn't involve periodic surprise inspections to ensure that dishes were being washed promptly, laundry carefully dried and folded, and mantels being diligently dusted.

Later in that chapter, "Italian leftist" Mariarosa Della Costa is quoted: "In the same way as women are robbed of the possibility of developing their creative capacity, they are robbed of their sexual life which has been transformed into a function for reproducing labour power. […] Either the vagina is primarily the passage to the reproduction of labour power sold as a commodity, the capitalist function of the uterus, or it is part of our natural powers, our social equipment."

It was the 70s, man.

I tend to be attuned to University of New Hampshire connections when reading. I found three: (1) Marxist Paul Sweezy gets an extended discussion, but not his SCOTUS case, Sweezy v. New Hampshire, which turned on his refusal to answer the NH Attorney General's questions about a lecture he gave at UNH in 1954. (2) UNH Econ prof Dennis Meadows gets some ink as one of the contributors to the predictions of ecological doom in the book The Limits to Growth. And (3) "wages-for-housework" activist Margaret Prescod gets a brief mention; for some reason I knew that she is the mother of UNH Physics prof Chanda Prescod-Weinstein.

So, even though there's lots of capitalism-criticism here, what shines through is a mutation of that old oft-mangled Churchill quote: capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others.