The best books on capitalism’s iniquities

Proponents of capitalism assert that human nature is constant, propelled by an unquenchable pursuit of self-interest. Historians suggest that rampant individualism that undergirds the entrepreneurial spirit is a product of the Enlightenment’s quest to displace communal values associated with religion and tradition.

In this brilliant novel, which shared the 1992 Booker Prize with The English Patient, Unsworth traces the historical emergence of the profit motive, “which justifies everything, sanctifies all purposes” including multiple modes of dehumanization such as involuntary servitude and slavery. 

The searing depictions of the conditions of labor on a slave ship and the brutal commodification of flesh in the African slave trade eviscerate capitalism’s benign self-image and raise powerful questions about the morality of an economic system in which the wealth of the few impoverishes the vast majority.

In my youth, the “Age of Discovery” launched by Columbus’s 1492 arrival in the “New World” and perpetuated by European imperialism through the mid-20th century, was characterized as a “civilizing mission.”

McClintock’s superb interdisciplinary scholarship provides a markedly different assessment of settler colonialism, a global order that legitimates white, male control of colonized women and men. Attained by violence, these stratified systems are sustained through capitalist economic relations secured by “voluntary” contract.

The book illuminates how the invention of race not only enabled European men to own and manage 85% of the earth’s surface by the end of the 19th century but also police the “dangerous classes,” the working class, the Irish, Jews, prostitutes, feminists, gays and lesbians, criminals, and anti-imperialists within their own nations.

The United States typically describes itself as the world’s most advanced capitalist economy and as a nation characterized by equal opportunity, fair play, and the rule of law that acknowledges no privilege or advantage related to race, gender, class, ethnicity, or sexuality. 

Zinn’s meticulous research offers a radically different view of the nation from founding through the “War on Terror.”  He demonstrates how white supremacy was built into state and federal constitutions and how the law was used to benefit the wealthy and marginalize and oppress the majority of the population. 

Placing the excluded at the center of his analysis, he traces the sustained struggle for universal suffrage, minimum wage and maximum hour legislation, health and safety standards in the workplace, racial equality, and women’s rights and shows how easily these gains can be eroded.

Americans are reared on the myth that we are all created equal.

But this myth can have negative effects in a highly stratified society, where the richest 5% of families have 248 times as much wealth as the second richest 20% of the population and where racial discrimination permeates every aspect of life.

In this classic work, Lewis shows how the myth of equal opportunity “individualizes” success and failure. The belief that each individual earns success or is responsible for failure contributes to a public ethos in which the poor are blamed for their plight and the rich lack compassion for the worst off. 

The book illuminates the profound policy consequences of these beliefs for public education, crime, race relations, and poverty reduction.

As economic inequality has grown exponentially over the past five decades, some of the dispossessed have rebelled. 

Focusing on mobilizations in Brazil, Mexico, and Salvador, Gledhill demonstrates how struggles for social justice are transformed into “threats” to national security, which require “securitization” measures. Through intricate ethnographies, the book documents the deployment of the police, military, and paramilitary to quell domestic disputes.

Protests by students, laborers, migrants, Indigenous, the poor, environmentalists, and human rights activists are subjected to police “pacification” involving state violence, criminalization, incarceration, and sometimes death.

Situating securitization in the context of transnational and global relations generated by capitalist uneven development, Gledhill argues that the logic of capitalist accumulation in the current era is inseparable from repressive violence against “inconvenient” populations.