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# Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the

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In 2020, Nicholas Crafts, the late English economic historian known for his foundational research on the British industrial revolution and his quantification of the productivity gains from Thatcherism, gave a presentation to the Bank of England about “AI as a General Purpose Technology.”19 Industrial revolutions are often associated with particular inventions, such as steam engines and electricity, but they really center on inventing new methods of invention, Crafts said in his talk, which he subsequently turned into a paper. During the first industrial revolution, he explained, the new methodology involved “systematic empiricism and experimentation,” relying on basic mechanical principles.20 In the second industrial revolution, during the late nineteenth century, many firms created product development laboratories that applied scientific research to the creation of marketable items. This was a more effective method of invention, Crafts said, and he identified another one associated with the spread of computers from the 1960s to the 2000s, which greatly reduced the cost of accessing knowledge and led to a third industrial revolution. The diffusion of AI, with its incredible capacity for scouring data and recognizing patterns, may amount to another new method of invention, Crafts argued, in which case it could be “the basis for a Fourth Industrial Revolution.” As examples of AI’s potential to facilitate the creation of new things, he cited halicin, the antibiotic discovered by MIT scientists in February 2020, and the solution of the “protein-folding problem” by Google’s DeepMind model in November 2020.21

In November 2022, OpenAI, a Silicon Valley company that started out as a not-for-profit research laboratory, startled the world with its release of ChatGPT, a chatbot that could write essays, jokes (not necessarily funny ones), and computer code. Essentially a statistical prediction model that had been trained on massive amounts of data scraped from the internet, the chatbot had an astonishing ability to understand and generate natural language. Within two months of ChatGPT’s launch, 100 million people were using it, making it the fastest-growing computer application ever, according to analysts at the Swiss bank UBS.22

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By the fall of 2024, OpenAI was generating more than a billion dollars in revenue, according to media reports, and in the private markets, where venture capitalists and other investors buy securities that aren’t publicly traded, it achieved a valuation of \$157 billion.23 Many prominent pioneers of AI had expressed concerns about the rapid commercialization of a potentially dangerous technology, but the profit motive had won out. Microsoft had invested \$13 billion for a stake in OpenAI. Google had started including AI summaries in its search results. Meta and Amazon had released their own AI tools, as had the Chinese internet companies Baidu, SenseTime, and Alibaba. On Wall Street, the mania for AI-related stocks, particularly the semiconductor manufacturer Nvidia, had generated comparisons to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.

Amidst all this activity, it was hard to distinguish hype from reality, but the capabilities of chatbots impressed many of their users, Brynjolfsson included. “On a recent Friday morning, one of us sat down in his favorite coffee shop to work on a new research paper regarding how AI will affect the labor market,” he and two colleagues, Martin Baily and Anton Korinek, wrote in a May 2023 article. “After entering a few plain-English prompts, the system was able to provide a suitable economic model, draft code to run the model, and produce potential titles for the work. By the end of the morning, he had achieved a week’s worth of progress on his research.” Raising the productivity of economists wouldn’t necessarily do much for the economy. But what about researchers in mechanical engineering, materials sciences, chemistry, robotics? “If cognitive workers are more efficient, they will accelerate technical progress and thereby boost the rate of productivity growth—in perpetuity,” the three economists wrote, echoing the argument of the economic historian Crafts. Their article included a chart showing how, in an optimistic scenario, the diffusion and further development of AI could lead to GDP and productivity nearly doubling in twenty years.24

In this scenario, Western capitalism would be resurgent, and the pessimists would be routed. Or would they? Toward the end of their article, Baily, Brynjolfsson, and Korinek acknowledged that a “bigger pie does not automatically mean everyone benefits evenly, or at all.” They pointed to studies indicating that up to half of all US workers could eventually see many of their job tasks performed by AI. Many of these people could suffer wage cuts or lose their jobs entirely, Brynjolfsson, Baily, and Korinek conceded. But they also argued that history suggested the job losers would find new employment, writing: “Job destruction has always been offset by job creation.”25

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History does show that fears of the “end of work” have turned out to be exaggerated. It also demonstrates that the deployment of new technologies can have a devastating impact on the wages and livelihoods of certain groups of workers, handloom weavers in Lancashire and India being two famous examples. Given the speed at which digital technologies can be disseminated, it seems perfectly possible that the AI revolution will be even more disruptive than previous ones. After James Watt developed his steam engine in 1776, it took half a century for it to be widely deployed in factories across Britain. The spread of chatbots took a matter of months, and it was only one of the emerging technologies that could have a big impact on work patterns.

In a separate piece for Daedalus, a journal published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Brynjolfsson acknowledged that managing the transition to AI represented a great challenge. The essential task, he said, was to persuade technology companies to turn away from developing products that replace human workers, and toward developing products that augment human skills and make workers more productive. “When AI augments human capabilities, enabling people to do things they never could before, then humans and machines are complements,” Brynjolfsson wrote. “Complementarity implies that people remain indispensable for value creation and retain bargaining power in labor markets and in political decision-making.”26 Under these circumstances, human labor still has a productive and well-compensated role. But “when AI replicates and automates existing human capabilities,” Brynjolfsson went on, “machines become better substitutes for human labor, workers lose economic and political bargaining power and become increasingly dependent on those who control the technology.”27 In more emotive language, a capitalist technological dystopia emerges.

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Worries about the impact of AI merged with other concerns about the direction capitalism was taking, including its role in promoting climate change. “We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!” Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish activist, said at a UN climate change summit in 2019.28 For years a figurehead of the environmental movement, Thunberg was now associating herself with “degrowth,” the idea that had its origins in turn-of-the-millennium France and the works of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen.

The degrowth movement encompassed a number of different viewpoints, but they all shared the rejection of maximizing GDP growth as the primary goal of economic policy. “The faster we produce and consume goods, the more we damage the environment,” Giorgos Kallis, an ecological economist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, wrote in his 2018 book Degrowth.29 “If humanity is not to destroy the planet’s life support systems, the global economy should slow down.” In a widely read manifesto, Prosperity Without Growth, that was originally published in 2009 and republished in 2017, Tim Jackson, a professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey in England, wrote: “The myth of growth has failed us. It has failed the 1 billion people who still attempt to live on half the price of a cup of coffee each day. It has failed the fragile ecological systems on which we depend for survival. It has failed, spectacularly, in its own terms, to provide economic stability and secure people’s livelihoods.”30

As the debate about economic growth and sustainability intensified, one strand of discussion took up where the Limits to Growth debate of the 1970s left off, addressing the question of what rate of economic growth, if any, is consistent with very low, or even zero, carbon emissions. At the encouragement of member governments, the World Bank, the OECD, and the UN Development Program had endorsed “green growth,” in which the rapid development of renewable energy sources and the spread of electronic vehicles, heat pumps, and other clean technologies would allow rising GDP to “decouple” from higher emissions. “This approach can deliver growth that is strong, sustainable, balanced, and inclusive,” the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, an international group of economists, former government officials, and business leaders, declared in a 2018 report.31 Supporters of green growth pointed to the United Kingdom, which cut its carbon emissions in half between 1990 and 2022,32 even as its inflationadjusted GDP rose by about 80 percent.33 This decoupling was achieved largely by eliminating coal-fired power stations and replacing them with a combination of renewable energy sources and natural gas. In April 2024, 59 percent of Britain’s electricity came from renewables.34

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Skeptics of green growth pointed out that most rich countries hadn’t matched the UK’s performance and that the developed world, taken as a whole, had failed to meet the commitments it made in the 2015 Paris Accords, which was designed to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5˚C above preindustrial levels. “At the achieved rates, these countries would on average take more than 220 years to reduce their emissions by 95%, emitting 27 times their remaining 1.5C fair-shares in the process,” Jason Hickel, an anthropologist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and Jefim Vogel, a PhD student at the University of Leeds, wrote in a study published in The Lancet Planetary Health in 2023. If the rich countries were to meet their Paris targets, Hickel and Vogel concluded, they “will need to pursue post-growth demand-reduction strategies, reorienting the economy toward sufficiency, equity, and human wellbeing, while also accelerating technological change and efficiency improvements.”35

The emphasis on well-being and equity has long been a part of the degrowth movement. Although it is closely associated with the environmental movement, its intellectual roots also go back to the skepticism about capitalism and mass production that was voiced by thinkers like Carlyle, Ruskin, Veblen, J. C. Kumarappa, and E. F. Schumacher. Echoing some of these heretics, Jackson, in Prosperity Without Growth, called on advanced countries to shift their economies to the provision of local services, such as nursing and teaching, and to the development of more rewarding and less resource-intensive professions like handicrafts. “People can flourish without endlessly accumulating more stuff,” he wrote. “Another world is possible.”36

That may well be true. But abandoning economic growth as an objective rather than reformulating it as “green growth” would create huge challenges. As the Oxford economist Wilfred Beckerman pointed out in the 1970s, the strong growth of the postwar era helped keep distributional conflicts in check. The subsequent slowdown in growth coincided with rising political polarization and extremism. Another vital issue is whether shifting to degrowth would impose intolerable burdens on the world’s poorest countries, many of which would dearly like to follow the growth path that China and India have trodden in recent decades. Even in low- to middle-income countries, the pursuit of GDP growth is widely seen as an imperative, and that’s hardly surprising. On a global basis, according to the World Bank, the median household income in 2022 was just \$7.75 a day.37

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Can degrowth policies be reconciled with allowing poor countries to raise the living standards of their populations toward Western levels? In a 2021 blog post, Branko Milanović, the CUNY economist and expert on global inequality, explored two possible options for keeping global GDP constant, which is the most literal definition of degrowth. The first one involved freezing the world income distribution, so that everybody kept their current incomes. Under this option, Milanović pointed out, half of the world’s population would have to live permanently on seven dollars a day or less, which surely wouldn’t be acceptable to developing countries or proponents of degrowth. The second option involved reducing the living standards of people with incomes above the global average and raising the living standards of those below the average. According to Milanović’s calculations, anybody living on more than sixteen dollars a day, which in Western countries is about 86 percent of the population, would be affected. The degrowthers “cannot condemn to perpetual poverty people in developing countries who are just seeing the glimpses of a better life, nor can they reasonably argue that incomes of 9 out of 10 Westerners ought to be reduced,” he wrote. “The way out of the impasse is to engage in semimagical and then outright magical thinking.”38

In a blog post responding to Milanović, Jason Hickel, the author of the 2020 book Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, argued that in rich countries zero growth in GDP, or even declines, would be consistent with increases in human well-being if these countries reorganized their economies to eliminate wasteful consumption and meet genuine needs, such as healthcare, education, and a clean environment. “When it comes to human well-being, counting GDP is irrelevant,” Hickel said. The real issue was that “capitalism is highly inefficient when it comes to meeting human needs; it produces so much, and yet leaves 60% of the human population without access to even the most basic goods.”39 What was ultimately needed, he insisted in Less Is More, was an “alternative, post-capitalist economy.”40

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The backlash against globalization that Dani Rodrik predicted during the 1990s didn’t end with Brexit and the 2016 election of Donald Trump; neither did the rise of right-wing populism and the attacks on liberal democracy associated with it. “Half of democratic governments around the world are in decline, undermined by problems ranging from restrictions on freedom of expression to distrust in the legitimacy of elections,” the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance said on the occasion of releasing its annual review for 2022.41 In the 2024 elections for the European Parliament, populist right-wing parties made big gains in many countries. And, of course, later in the year Trump won reelection. To be sure, many noneconomic factors contributed to the rise of the right; anti-immigrant sentiment, opposition to liberal cultural values, outright racism, and the propagation of conspiracy theories over social media all played a role. But demagogues like Trump, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, and Marine Le Pen in France were certainly exploiting a widespread feeling that globalization wasn’t delivering the rewards its proponents had promised.

In response to the rightward shift, many centrist politicians, including President Joe Biden, reexamined their parties’ commitment to free trade and ever-closer international integration. The Biden administration kept some of Trump’s tariffs in place. It also embarked on an ambitious industrial policy, which provided generous subsidies for makers of semiconductors, solar panels, and electric vehicles that located production plants in the United States. In the first half of 2024, the administration raised import levies on steel and a range of Chinese goods, including semiconductors and electric vehicles. Although White House officials described these measures as limited and targeted, they provided a stark demonstration of how attitudes toward trade and globalization had shifted in the quarter of a century since the US government had championed China’s entry to the World Trade Organization.42

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In this changed environment, some economists argued that globalization was in wholesale retreat; others said the reversal had been exaggerated. Despite Brexit, the rising popularity of protectionist measures, and the coronavirus shutdowns in many countries, the volume of world trade and international capital flows, two standard metrics of globalization, had continued to rise. In 2022, according to the World Trade Organization, the overall value of merchandise trade (imports and exports of all goods) reached a new record of \$25.3 trillion,43 before falling back slightly in 2023 as the global rebound from the pandemic slowed.44 Data on capital flows is incomplete, but cross-border lending by banks and other financial intermediaries had also continued to expand. In the first quarter of 2023, according to the Bank for International Settlements, banks’ total crossborder claims reached \$37 trillion.45

But proponents of the “deglobalization” thesis could also point to figures that supported their case. If you looked at the volume of trade in goods relative to the size of the world economy as a whole, rather than in dollar terms, it peaked in 2008, at about 50 percent, then fell back to about 42 percent in 2020.46 According to the OECD, the level of foreign direct investment—cross-border purchases of ownership stakes in companies or projects—relative to world GDP was lower in 2023 than it was in 2013.47 During the same period, rising threats of protectionism and the coronavirus pandemic’s exposure of the fragility of international supply chains had led to a wave of “onshoring,” in which multinational companies moved production or input sourcing closer to home. According to Barclays investment bank, the number of companies mentioning onshoring in their communications quadrupled between 2020 and 2022.48

The political pressures that were driving this turnaround showed no signs of relenting. In a November 2023 survey that the pollster YouGov carried out for the conservative think tank American Compass, 47 percent of respondents said the United States had suffered from globalization, compared to 33 percent who said it had benefited.49 Attitudes were split along class and regional lines. Just 26 percent of “working class” respondents said the United States had benefited, whereas 44 of “upper class” respondents gave this answer. A similar division was evident between residents of US coastal cities and Americans living inland. As Rodrik predicted, the winners and losers from globalization had sorted themselves into rival camps.

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This process wasn’t necessarily complete. The trade theorist Richard Baldwin of the IMD Business School in Lausanne predicted that the next wave of offshoring would come in “intermediate services,” such as running the numbers for accounting firms, analyzing medical data for insurance companies, and drawing up plans for architecture firms. Developing countries, Baldwin pointed out, still had a huge supply of workers who could do these jobs at lower cost than their equivalents in developed countries, especially if they utilized new AI tools. “What we will see therefore in the emerging markets is hundreds of millions of people getting richer,” he wrote. “And in developed countries, your virtual offices will be filled with ‘telemigrants.’ The bad news, of course, is that this will likely foster a backlash against globalization in high-wage nations.”50 That backlash was already well advanced. The question was how far AI would accentuate it.

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When Antonio Gramsci was languishing in Mussolini’s prisons during the 1920s and ’30s, he had all too much time to think about the relationship between economic forces and economic ideologies. One of the key insights in the notebooks he kept was that in certain circumstances, the two came together in a “historical bloc” that could exercise political power through consent rather than force, a phenomenon he referred to as “hegemony.” Much ink has been spilled on the relative importance that Gramsci attributed to the forces and the ideologies, but he stated clearly that it was the combination that mattered. He distinguished between “willed” ideologies, which were arbitrary and rationalistic human creations, and “historically organic ideologies,” which arose from definite material circumstances and were “necessary to a given structure.” The former had little practical influence, Gramsci argued, but the latter could move mountains.51

The managed capitalism of the postwar era was based on a hegemonic bloc consisting of manual workers, educated liberals, domestically focused businesses, long-term capital, the continued exclusion of many parts of the world, and Keynesian/social democratic policy ideas. The globalized hypercapitalism that followed the end of the Cold War was based on a bloc consisting of educated workers, internationally minded businesses, shortterm capital, the entry of previously excluded parts of the world, and free market policy ideas. The question, going into the second quarter of the twenty-first century, was what sort of historical bloc, if any, could exercise power in a world shrunken by digital technology but also increasingly splintered.

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Chinese state capitalism arguably represented a potentially hegemonic force. But its undemocratic nature blunted its appeal in other countries, and so did the dramatic slowdown in the Chinese economy after Xi Jinping took over as China’s leader in 2012. In many countries, including the United States and Germany, right-wing parties supported by disgruntled and nativist voters were still making progress. Trump’s return to the White House on a platform of tariffs and mass deportation of undocumented immigrants was the most dramatic manifestation of this trend. The presence in his circle of Elon Musk and various Wall Street tycoons who had benefitted enormously from globalization and financialization highlighted some of the glaring inconsistencies in the right-wing populist movement, but that didn’t trouble Trump or his vice president, J. D. Vance, who had once worked for a venture capital firm and defended globalization, but now positioned himself as an ersatz philosopher of the new right. At the 2024 Republican National Convention, Vance stated blithely, “We’re done  … catering to Wall Street. We’ll commit to the working man.”52

On the far left, replacing capitalism remained the ultimate goal. But with what? In some places, such as East Germany, there was still some nostalgia for the old communist model of state ownership and central planning. Elsewhere, though, many people on the left were more enthusiastic about creating new institutions and spaces that operated independently of the state and of the monolithic capitalist economy: protest encampments, worker cooperatives, bartering and recycling networks, communal farms, and small-scale artisanal enterprises.

Even though names like Owen and Thompson and Fourier no longer figured prominently on the left, the goal of creating institutions, communities, and entire subeconomies that operate beyond the cash nexus and the profit motive was one that went back to the early nineteenth century. Two centuries on, its modern proponents hadn’t really demonstrated how they would overcome the practical problems that plagued their predecessors, especially if their ideas were to be applied at the national or global level. But the lure of what Silvia Federici, in her 2019 book, Re-enchanting the World, described as a “new commons” is a timeless one. “For what the commons in essence stands for,” Federici wrote, “is the recognition that life in a Hobbesian world, where one competes against all and prosperity is gained at the expense of others, is not worth living and is a sure recipe for defeat.”53

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