Anti-capitalist Critiques
"Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy" – Michael Hudson (2015) [Leftist]
>>'Finance capitalism does not lend for production; it lends for extraction. Banks and bondholders lend to buy existing assets, not to create new means of production. The result is asset-price inflation and rising rents, which are counted as GDP growth even though they do not produce goods or services. The economy becomes a rent-extraction machine, where finance attaches itself to real estate, natural resources, and infrastructure to siphon off income without contributing to productivity.'
"How FDR Saved Capitalism" – Amity Shlaes (Hoover Institution, 2009) [Libertarian-Republican]
>>'Roosevelt's New Deal, for all its excesses, was ultimately a rescue operation for capitalism. By absorbing the radical energy of the left and channeling it into reforms that preserved private property and markets, FDR prevented the kind of socialist or fascist takeover that befell other nations in the same era.'
>>'Creating growth requires that we preserve democratic capitalism’s core strengths — freedom, efficient markets, transparency, and correctly constructed incentives — and reform its weaknesses. Capitalism is the best system we have for generating prosperity, but it needs guardrails to avoid cronyism and ensure inclusive growth.'
"Dig Deep: Beyond Lean In" (excerpt) – bell hooks (2013) [Left-Radical Feminist]
>>'Sandberg’s brand of feminism is the neoliberal feminism that dominates in the corporate world. It is a feminism that is compatible with capitalism, with individualism, with the pursuit of personal success. It is a feminism that does not challenge the structures of domination; it simply asks for a bigger piece of the pie. This is not a vision of feminism that will bring about justice for all women. It is a vision that benefits privileged women at the expense of others. It is a feminism that can be easily incorporated into the neoliberal project without ever critiquing neoliberalism itself.'
"The Death of the West" – Patrick J. Buchanan (2001, updated editions) [Right-Paleoconservative]
>>'Global capitalism has no loyalty to the nation, the family, or the faith of the people. It treats workers as disposable units of labor, ships jobs overseas, floods countries with cheap immigrant labor to suppress wages, and dissolves borders in pursuit of profit. This is not freedom; it is the betrayal of the West by its own elites.'
"Black Reconstruction in America" – W.E.B. Du Bois (1935) [Black Radical / Left-Marxist]
>>'Capitalism in America was built on the backs of enslaved Black labor and continues to thrive on racial division. The white working class was bought off with the psychological wage of whiteness, allowing capital to exploit both Black and white labor. This racial capitalism is not a bug; it is the system's feature, ensuring profits flow upward while the masses remain divided and dispossessed.'
"Art of Fiction Interview" – William Gaddis interviewed by the Paris Review (1986) [Right-Anti-Modernist]
>>'I'd always been intrigued by the charade of the so-called free market, so-called free enterprise system, the stock market conceived of as what was called a "people's capitalism" where you "owned a part of the company" and so forth. All of which is true; you own shares in a company, so you literally do own part of the assets. But if you own a hundred shares out of six or sixty or six hundred million, you're not going to influence things very much. Also, the fact that people buy securities—the very word in this context is comic—not because they are excited by the product—often you don't know what the company makes—but simply for profit: The stock looks good and you buy it. The moment it looks bad you sell it. What had actually happened in the company is not your concern. In many ways I thought . . . the childishness of all this.'
"Black Reconstruction in America" – W.E.B. Du Bois (1935) [Black Radical / Left-Marxist]
>>'Capitalism in America was built on the backs of enslaved Black labor and continues to thrive on racial division. The white working class was bought off with the psychological wage of whiteness, allowing capital to exploit both Black and white labor. This racial capitalism is not a bug; it is the system's feature, ensuring profits flow upward while the masses remain divided and dispossessed.'
>>'[Capitalism] born in the blood of the slave trade and colonial exploitation. The wealth of Europe and America was accumulated through the unpaid labor of enslaved Africans and the stolen land of Indigenous peoples. Capitalism is not a neutral economic system — it is a racialized, colonial enterprise that continues to reproduce inequality under new guises.'