Criticizing capitalism

The words that mainstream book reviewers reach for when describing “Capitalism and its critics: A battle of ideas in the modern world” are ones like ‘magisterial’, ‘sweeping’ or ‘expansive’. Apart from suggesting a big book, there is the sense of an authoritative overview of its subject matter.

Sean Sheehan

John Cassidy’s book is indeed big – over 600 pages – and while a lot of ground is covered there are nagging doubts about its overall impact and a lingering suspicion that something is missing.

As an introduction to important voices questioning the virtues of free market economics and the mentality behind neoliberalism, this book provides useful synopses for readers wanting to start learning what Engels, Marx, Rosa Luxemburg were saying. Similarly, this is a place to begin knowing about crucially important post-World War II economists like Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman. There is a chapter on Thomas Piketty and another one devoted to dependency theory in Latin America. Where the book excels is in bringing into the light a number of lesser known figures but sometimes, as with the chapter on William Thompson, the coverage is skimpy.

Lacan, the psychoanalytic teacher, draws a difference between what is enunciated – the content (sujet de l’énonciation) – and the subject making the enunciation (sujet de l’énoncé). The positions that locate the subject of the enunciation and the content being enunciated are not married in ways that might be expected. The fluidity pertaining to any particular position of enunciation can change the dynamic between the two: Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost provide an example from the field of politics. His intention, the position of the enunciation, was to strengthen Soviet communism but the system could not contain the enunciated content and his reforms led to the system’s collapse. The content of Cassidy’s enunciation is that the globally prevailing economic system does not deliver what it promises, it is fatally flawed, but his position of enunciation, as his book’s final paragraph states, is that capitalism can be ‘reformed’. After 600 pages largely devoted to what is wrong with the economic order, concluding that it can be reformed is a limp and gravely insufficient response.

Cassidy’s self-imposed remit restricts his outlook to looking at deficiencies and defects in the economic sphere and it is only his chapter on the Luddites that confronts a radical attack on the system in terms of class struggle. What Marx had to say about class struggle and its inseparability from his economic analyses is effaced. The voice of Lukács and his idea ^[ of a subject’s conscious class allegiance effecting a change in perspective that alters reality has no presence in the book.

The enunciated content of Cassidy’s book does not call for changing reality – hence its lack of bite – but for with tinkling with it to ameliorate the problems that critics have for so long and so cogently exposed and excoriated.